Easy Monday

So it’s been a week since my last entry. I guess I was decompressing after finishing my big case and was feeling lazy.

It was a pretty passive week: lots of rain, quiet days in the house, time for reflecting and reading. No walks in the park, but I did exercise everyday. 

I pulled seven jalapeños off my plant and pickled them.  Will I actually eat them?  Time will tell. Adding jalapeños as a condiment to an already satisfying dish is like choosing to watch a horror movie instead of something funny or thrilling. When it’s over, you might appreciate the jolt to your system (or the lingering burn on your tongue), but seeking out and overcoming fear is almost never my first choice. I guess that says something about me.

I also made a nice roasted pepper basil pesto, which was an interesting variation on the usual green basil pesto, a little smokier, an open challenge to my palate. I think the sauce would be a good accessory to a plate of Italian sausage and ravioli with a light sprinkle of dried red pepper flakes.  That’s the kind of zing I do like.

My favorite dish this week was an eye of round roast, a notoriously tough piece of meat, which I put in the sous vide on Saturday night at 133 degrees for 24 hours!  The water whirred all day and all night and when I was ready to take it out on Sunday evening, I heated my trusty cast iron skillet (one of my most valuable possessions, slick as an ice rink, endlessly black black black, heavy and ready to gracefully transfer high heat to the surfaces of food) and I seared that roast to a beautiful crisp. Perfectly medium rare inside, it was a hit with the family, a light beef gravy glazing the slices of meat and the accompanying roasted rosemary and thyme potatoes.  Hoo boy - that was a dish that contained multitudes.

Today was a simple roast chicken in the same cast iron pan, following the recipe in my extremely limited edition cookbook, Recipes That Mostly Work All of the Time. I tucked a halved lemon in the cavity and some rosemary sprigs from my garden under the skin and it was just about perfect. That’s the thing about cooking - if you get good at it, you really never need to eat bad food again (at least at home).  If only I could convince my children of this elemental fact.

I had a medical setback on Saturday of the self-inflicted kind.  My trainer Art sent me a text that said, “If you’re bored…” along with a flyer advertising a track meet that his daughter was running in.

I’m a big fan of Art’s kids - I’ve known them all since they were born and they seem to like me. We’ve made Christmas cookies and had swim dates and I coached his middle daughter in soccer.  They are funny and sweet and interested in the world, which makes them interesting to me.

So I took a quick shower, threw some clothes on, considered and rejected wearing a hat and putting sunscreen on - it was a cloudy day, probably rainy - and raced to the Pearland High School stadium to catch the Parade of Teams.

Big mistake.  The sun came out with a vengeance and Art’s daughter did not race until an hour has passed.  I enjoyed her race and went down to congratulate her, and she said, “You are really red, Mister Scott.”

She was right.  I was red, not brown, not pink.  Ripe strawberry red on my head and forearms.  It was as if my head had been neatly sauted in my cast iron pan, or roasted on a rotisserie spit.  By the time the meet was cancelled due to a ironic monsoon of rain and lightning (leaving me soaked to the skin and burned, like a campfire doused with a bucket of water), I was miserable and pathetic.

Massive doses of aloe vera and moisturizer have mitigated the damage, but I should be peeling in earnest at precisely the same time I will be giving my speech on Friday morning.  Imagine!  The presentation will be to both a live audience and also broadcast to attendees in 4K on their room TVs. They will be able to see every sloughed flake of dead skin swirling around my face like a sandstorm in the desert.  Maybe I should just go full MC Doom for the speech (and if you don’t get that reference, look him up: it’s worth at least a medium dive down the rabbit hole).

This week is action packed: the usual workouts, taking my mother to a dermatology appointment tomorrow and guitar on Thursday, poker Tuesday night, dine with an old friend from law school on Thursday night, and my speech on Friday.  I may also throw in some professional work.  

Then it will be time to start mentally preparing for next week’s WSOP trip and the fame and adulation that will follow when I win the tournament.

Onward!

Finished Up Monday

If you are reading this blog, you know me, probably better than most. After all, this is not a general dissemination blog for the masses - it’s just a one-sided conversation between me and you.

(And I am self-aware enough to know that my in-person conversations are often one-sided with me being the storytelling bully…but I am working on bring a better listener.)

What you may not know, unless you’ve known me for a very long time is that I am prone to internalizing my anxieties, tamping them down deep, and obsessing privately over them.  This condition manifests itself as procrastination and peevishness, a real weight in the center of my chest belaboring my breathing, and an overwhelming desire to just flee my problems.

It’s not depression, as far as I can tell.  As soon as the underlying cause of my anxiety passes, so do the symptoms. It’s more like a slowly simmering panic attack, one that I manage by just pressing forward, knowing that whatever it is that is triggering me will eventually resolve itself because nothing lasts forever, right?

It is ironic that I chose to be a lawyer, because the profession is nothing if it is not taking on other people’s problems as if they are your own, and worrying about the worst possible outcome.  I spent 27 years representing my friends at the DA’s office and it was my job to keep that worst possible outcome from happening to them.

Most of the time, the conflicts were manageable, just professional disputes with ethical adversaries, ultimately leading to a reasonable result. But it seemed like there was always that one case where the adversary was irrationally angry and unreasonable, where he or she would take everything too personally, and their anger would extend from my client to me.

Even as I write this, I can remember these people and how they got under my skin with a practiced and amoral efficiency. The public information requestor seeking tens of thousands of documents to get even with the office’s refusal to accept a charge against the requestor’s enemy; the plaintiffs’ lawyer sending over gigantic amounts of discovery on a patently frivolous case; a variety of slash and burn attorneys pursuing a strategy of winning by attrition.  Everything was too personal, way too personal.

What got me through these hard cases was the love and support of my colleagues at the office, who I think could see the toll those cases took on me and did what they could to help, sometimes carrying the ball when I could not lift my head off the desk.

I was also buoyed by a fundamental belief that the law was on my side and that I would eventually get the result that the law supported.  I really was (and am) a true believer that good lawyering leads to just results.  It just might take longer than you’d like it to.

And finally, I drew on a core strength from a childhood in which some things were not easy, but I had been forced by my parents to persevere. You want a car? Earn it. We signed you up to be a reader at Mass.  Go do it. Want to be on the swim team?  The pool awaits, every morning at 6 a.m.  Want to convince your mother to ease up on her anger towards you? Put on your poker face and just keep going.

When I retired, I thought I left those anxiety triggers behind.  I can pick my projects, screen out the hard stuff, work on my own schedule.

But the case I was handling this month was a blast from the past, a bundle of irrational arguments made by an amoral murderer (literally!), high stakes litigation against a jailhouse lawyer.  I am going to win as long as I don’t screw it up.  But if I screw it up, embarrassment and a parade of horribles could ensue.

No parking ticket, this.

So I have been anxious and sleepless and consumed with dread as I march to the conclusion.  And today was supposed to be the end - I’d written a fifty page brief and another fifty page draft order for the judge to sign.  It was finally done.

Until I got a phone call from the clerk telling me that my adversary had filed three new claims.  I sat down and looked off in the distance, contemplating my fate. More briefing, more time worrying.

And then I gathered myself and waited to see what he had written. And it was nothing, nothing at all. I did some quick research, knocked down the arguments, amended my brief and draft order to address the new claims, and filed the bitch.

Done.

I then came downstairs from my office and made a Sidecar - lemon juice, brandy, Cointreau - a great drink and a happy celebration. And a new resolution to avoid these cases like the soul-sucking hairballs they are.  I’m 62 and I want to make it to 92.  Or 102. But I won’t if I keep doing this to myself.

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Since last checking in, besides the hairball case, there’s not much to report on.  Some good meals - Killen’s BBQ Sunday fried chicken yesterday, a chef’s tasting at Amalfi on Westheimer on Saturday, some excellent fajitas on Friday with the family - and more swimming in May than I probably did in all of 2025.  

The bubby is a big part of that: he is getting more and more comfortable in the water and loves to throw the basketball we use in the pool.  He is getting very verbal, but everything besides “doggie” and “ball” is still gibberish, at least to me.  But he is getting closer to becoming much more interesting.

Today, I also pickled my crop of banana peppers in a solution of apple cider vinegar, white vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds and fennel seeds. They are curing for a day, and then I will try them in a ham sandwich.

Tomorrow: dealing with the aftermath of my filing, some exercise, a stop at Home Depot for a large pot to transplant one of my tomato plants into (it’s almost ready to explode with fruit, but its pot is way too small), and then preparation for a speech I will be giving next week at the Annual Meeting of the State Bar.  I think it will be an easy speech, as long as I don’t freak out in my old age over the size of the audience and the topic (Transitioning Your Law Practice).

(Thinks.)

Have I learned nothing?  No more speeches after this one.  Geez.