“Welcome to the number series”;

Friday, March 30, 2007

Sorry I haven’t been writing. Life has been somewhat hectic lately. During the week, most of my waking hours are spent at work and commuting to and from work. The time at work is anything but leisurely. At my old job, I’d always catch up on my favorite blogs on Google Reader…no more. And it’s getting even more busy now that I’ve been assigned my “number series.” Organization and time management are the biggest challenges at my job, and those skills become super-crucial now.

The “number series” cases are those that need work between court hearings – need a brief written, an issue researched, etc. The files arrive every day in my Inbox (actually a crate) and create a constant influx of work. Our system is horizontal prosecution (cases don’t stay with the same attorney from beginning to end), not vertical. As a new attorney, I’m worried about my reputation in court and being prepared for scheduled hearings. But now that I have a number series, the attorney that actually goes to court with those files will be relying on my work and resulting notes. It’s more pressure and emphasis on the between-court prep and less time for the cases I actually appear on.

I think my reputation-establishing is going OK. The senior attorneys who have been shadowing me at court think I’m doing fine and ready or almost ready to go in by myself. Thankfully, I’m not going in by myself just yet. Looks like it’ll be one more pay period, making it a round 3 months before I go by myself. That will be another moment of truth, but more on that later.

As for life outside of work, there’s a lot going on. First, Dave is working frenetically on his thesis so he can graduate this quarter. It’s not fun. Being forced to work on something he isn’t interested in makes him sullen and depressed. In contrast, I really like my job, so our moods are often mismatched.

Second, we’re trying to get our finances in order. I go through these mini-obsessions with different things. For a while it was scrapbooking, then XBox and XBox 360, digital photography, James Kim, political blogs and vlogs, photobooks, podcasts, Gears of War, financial planning and Bogleheads, and now I’m reading a book on cross-examination… My temporary fascination with mutual funds has ended and now it’s really hard to motivate myself to look at the Vanguard website and decide which funds to buy. Major procrastination.

Third, we’re moving. By the end of April, latest mid-May, we’re bidding goodbye to Irvine, probably for good. We’re sad because we love Irvine – the safety, the planned development, the genetically-engineered glory of conformed homeowners associations and matching strip mall themes. We started our apartment search last Friday in Glendale, and it was quite disappointing. Next we’ll look at Pasadena and any other options that may crop up. Though I’ve been moving every year for the last 9 years, so you could say I’m used to packing and moving and uprooting, it’s getting tiring. At least starting from now on we’re hiring movers. My lumbar spine and other bones and joints are worth much more than the few hundred dollars it will cost for movers.

Anyway, I have court in half an hour and I need to prep the cases. I’ll try to be better about blogging. I feel insecure a lot at work, which drives me to perfectionism and paralysis, which hinders creative efforts such as blogging. So that’s my feeble excuse for not writing more.

2 Comments  | Tags: attempts at profundity, young bureaucrat, married life