Yes, I was run over by a car this week, but it was the good kind of getting run over by a car. Yes, I walked away. I still don’t recommend it.
It’s autumn in Chicago, and we’re going apple-picking today if the weather holds. We usually go in October, but as we looked at the calendar we realized that our weekends are pretty well booked until November; we’ll probably end up with a different variety of apples, which will be a nice change. We’ll try to keep the haul down to about 50 pounds of apples this year.
Miles run today: None. Because, you know, I got run over by a car. Here’s the story: on Thursday, I was in California for a hearing, and the Senior Partner, our clients, the husband of one client, and I went out to lunch before the afternoon court appearance. After lunch, the client’s husband (a very nice guy) pulled their car around to drive most of us to court (a couple of members of the group got into another client’s car). The curb was too high to allow the passenger-side doors to open, so the client’s husband was asked to pull up a little, to where the curb was lower. Unfortunately, at just that moment, I was on the driver’s side, with the back door open; my right foot was in the car and my left foot was on the street. As he pulled up, the tire started riding up my heel and the back of my leg. I let out a yell, he stopped the car, and after a moment’s confusion, backed it up and I hopped onto the sidewalk.
If he had gone another couple of inches, my achilles tendon probably would have snapped. As it is, my ankle and heel hurt a LOT, but after a few minutes of icing the foot and a handful of Advil, I was queasy and shaken, but decided I would live and off we went to court. When the hearing started, I was nauseated and light-headed, and I think I was in a little bit of shock, but by the end of it (three hours later), I was mostly back to normal, except that my foot hurt. A lot. The poor guy who had been driving the car felt so bad about it that he was in worse shape than I was.
Back in Chicago on Friday, I did see a doctor. I don’t have the results of the x-rays yet, but based on how I’m feeling, I think it’s just bruised. So no run today, but maybe as soon as Wednesday.
So, to sum up how to get run over and walk away: as the car starts to roll over you, scream like Agnes Moorehead. The person driving will probably stop. Hope that helps.
Weather: cool and overcast. It’s supposed to be a sunny day, but it doesn’t look good. We’ll have to give it a little more time before we decide whether to go to the orchard.
Words of Meet the Larssons written this week: 1,633, to a total of 97,727. A definite decline in productivity, generally because of the travel. I was gone from Tuesday to late Thursday night, the only time I wasn’t actively working was the flight home, and my foot hurt enough that I didn’t really feel as though I could concentrate. No travel this week and no overwhelming deadlines, so I hope to get more done. Instead, on the plane back to Chicago I read Tim Ferriss’s The Four-Hour Work Week, which has gotten a lot of press, good and bad. Much of it is completely useless to me (as long as I’m working as a lawyer, I essentially get paid by the hour; a four-hour work week doesn’t really cut it), but I thought he had an interesting perspective. The book made me think about some of the ways in which I do spend my time that is neither productive nor interesting, and reminded me that one of the benefits of my job is that the office schedule is somewhat flexible; I should take more advantage of that. I blew off the chapters on internet-based reselling as creating an effortless income stream; what I did read of that section had the faint odor of the “easy money from real estate” books that were so popular not very long ago. Maybe that works for some people, and don’t let me discourage you from giving it a try if you’re so inclined — the up front investment is certainly less than for buying homes out of foreclosure and rehabbing them; it’s just not for me.
Speaking of unproductive uses of my time, and of feeling queasy and light-headed, I made the mistake of checking the balance of my retirement account yesterday. Good God. It looks like Congress is going to work out the bailout, which I suppose is necessary. Peter Bernstein has a good piece in today’s Times about the moral hazard inherent in any broad bailout scheme; rescuing an entire industry from its bad decisions about risk doesn’t exactly discourage people from taking similar risks in the future. I’m afraid It’s going to take more than a little Advil and ice to recover from the truck that’s hit us this past year.
The Unfocused Life 