where I've been.

It's 8 pm on a Friday night and it's a perfect summer evening.  The relentless rays of the sun are gone although it still hasn't set yet, and it's the time of evening that everything seems more vivid right after the rays of the sun have passed.  There's a wonderful breeze and it's a comfortable temperature, just warm enough to be fine with a t-shirt but cool enough not to break a sweat. 

 

I regret that I've settled into the evening on my couch with ice cream.

 

I wish I had great plans for a summer Friday evening, in theory.  But in actuality, I'm tired.  I left work late and then had to stop at the grocery store because I hadn't been in over a month, although that didn't matter because I'd never been home, and then I skipped the trip to the drug store despite the fact that I'm out of just about every toiletry just because I was tired and hungry and wanted to get home before I ran out of energy to cook the dinner I had planned.

 

I came home and made skillet-seared tomatoes with mozzarella and parsley, and the accompanying sizzled citrus shrimp never made it into a pan although they are now happily marinating in the fridge, for tomorrow perhaps.  Instead with my tomatoes I had some leftover black bean and corn salad, along with my favorite summer fruit beer, and dinner was good.  Now I'm sitting down on the couch with the apartment to myself and if I hadn't shuffled across the street to my neighborhood Kwik-E mart, I wouldn't even know what a gorgeous night I'm missing. 

 

I've been out of town a lot.  A lot of weddings.  Visits with friends.  Several unpacked suitcases are spilled across my room and there is no clean clothing in my drawers.  This weekend was the only weekend left in the summer that I'd be in town and not working.  That all changed today, when I couldn't get in touch with an incarcerated client about whom I am deeply concerned.  That means I'm heading out to the facility tomorrow - a facility that is not particularly close and is quite difficult to get to.  It will be an all day ordeal.  Most of my days recently have felt like I'm spinning my wheels.  Every single case I have, it seems, is scheduled for trial, and as we all know, our system is not even close to handling the volume of cases caught up in it.  Especially now that it's summer.  99% of my work will not come to fruition, but I have to be prepared just in case THAT client, THAT day, THAT judge, will be the 1% to actually happen.  Preparing (or not) 100 cases for trials that you know won't happen, in addition to trying to keep up with motions and paperwork and program referrals and phone calls, is exhausting. 

 

Although I'm tired, I'm not unhappy.  I'm actually feeling pretty good.  I'm better off when I have a lot of work going on at once.  It keeps my energy level up.  Dating life has slowed a bit, but in a good way.  Since he's out of town, I have the chance to spend an evening by myself, and it's been so long since I've had to make time for someone else that I never realized how much alone time I need to stay sane. 

 

I'm going to put the devil's ice cream back in my freezer, get off my tuckus, and see if I can get to some laundry and mail-sorting.  That won't make my habitat anywhere close to "clean" but it's a start.  And then off to bed to get up, get to the gym, and start another workday.