The schedule's finally coming back, but as always, it doesn't creep back and give me a chance to build up my chops. Rather, I step right back into a doubleheader, 230 pages of realtime pharmacology expert followed by 100 pages of OB/GYN expert, both overnight delivery. I, with the help of my scopist and proofreader, managed to get 'em out the door and even take an asbestos plaintiff the next day.

To any of you control freaks out there still having a hard time giving up the reins and letting a scopist and/or proofreader do your work, it's time to let go and use the Force, Luke. Faced with the last two days' workload, sans scopist, I would have had to stay up around the clock to get the two experts out and likely would have had to give away the 9:00 depo the following day. The revenue generated from the asbestos case paid my scoping and proofing bills for the pair of docs, and I got five hours sleep to boot! I ain't 18 no more. If I catch the sun coming up, you might as well put me in the coffin next to Dracula because I'm about to keel over.

On the really lighter side, I recently had a great mistran. With a roomful of realtime screens (all with requisite $35 Engate tokens, you bastards!), I had "plan of executive succession" tran as "plan of executive suck session." I'm not sure exactly what that would entail, but I'd hate to be on the janitorial crew when it's all over. Luckily it's just a plan at this point...

"If Dracula can't see his reflection in the mirror, how come his hair is always so neatly combed?" -- Steven Wright

Here in Houston, we've got a "just add water" recipe for rush hour disaster. To understand why rain presents such a problem for Harris County commuters, you have to understand the average driver on our roadways:

An IQ roughly equivalent to that of a Rhesus monkey...
Piloting a Ford F-350 with a muddy four-wheeler in the bed...
A cold Coors in one hand, cell phone in the other...

So this morning when I wake up to a steady downpour and a TranStar website lit up like the Vegas Strip, a flat tire was absoultely the last thing I needed. So I pulled out my Indy pit crew A-game and got going in record time, somehow managing to get clear across town early.

I'm set up, already collecting business cards, when a second reporter shows up. Ordinarily I'd hold my ground, but since this was a Dust Docket case (Asbestos, for the uninitiated), two universal rules always apply:

1. The reporter appearing pursuant to the earlier notice wins, and...
2. The attorneys don't care which reporter takes the depo. Their only interest is to escape the mind-numbing world of asbestos products as expeditiously as possible. I've literally had my best client look at me and say, "Hell, she's set up. You've taken enough of these. Go home. Take a break."

Since her notice was dated a week before mine, I lost. So I packed up, somehow snapped my overpriced Treo 300 Sprint piece of crap phone in half, loaded up the F-350 (kidding!) and headed back across a rainsoaked Houston. Counting the tire change, it was four hours of complete futility, not a single solitary one of them billable.

Now for kicking a man when he's down. It seems that while I was frittering away my morning in traffic, some bastard spammer sent hundreds of thousands of herbal wang ointment e-mails to everyone in the free world with my spoofed personal e-mail address as the reply. Rather than just dealing with the roughly 200 spams my filter catches a day, now I'm getting literally hundreds more from angry masses rudely demanding to be removed from my "f#*$ing list." Best part, not a damn thing I can do about it. Until Mr. "1ncrease your d1ck size" runs out of people to spam, I guess I'm gonna keep getting hate mail.

"I find nothing more depressing than optimism." -- Paul Fussell

Sorry for the hiatus, but I just couldn't get my creative juices flowing over the holidays. My abundant spare time was monopolized by second-story Christmas lights and a nine-foot pre-lighted evergreen that broke down into four "easy-to-manage" pieces, each roughly the size of Oprah. I tried to sell the kids on a Christmas Ficus, but they weren't buying.

With Christmas now safely stowed away in $200 worth of Rubbermaid totes, I'm ready to hit the ground running and get back to being a court reporter. Trouble is, what the hell happened to all the work? Everyone I talk to in Houston, reporters, videographers, even lawyers, seem to be in the same boat. December and January are always deader than fried chicken, but I'm on a run of luck that's approaching the magnitude of the Great Dallas Drought of 1993. The good news is if the Supreme Court upholds the 10-pitch ruling, a 10% paycut on my current pageload equals precisely dick, nada, zilch. I've finally found a way to beat the beancounting bureaucrats... just stop turning pages!

Enough crepe-hanging on my part. On the lighter side, I got a call from an old friend today who took a deposition where, no joke, "The Lollipop Guild" was a party. He actually had the opportunity to ask counsel, "Do you represent The Lollipop Guild?" Unfortunately the attorney didn't respond in a falsetto with a refrain from the Wizard of Oz, but you couldn't make up a scenario any more perfect than that.

"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy." -- Edgar Bergen