This new year has gotten off to a real bang!  Most everyone I know is scrambling around, and apparently doing their level best to get monumental things accomplished on an immediate basis.  This certainly sounds great and productive, but this is pure illusion.  Watching things unfold in my corner of the legal world, I’m struck that most times the reverse is quite true.  Many of my colleagues are spinning their wheels, and with each spin of that wheel, it seems that things are slipping further behind.  What amazes me is that most people never really consider the option of “pacing themselves,” as opposed to trying to get a year’s worth of work accomplished in the first two weeks of a new year.  My Dad used to call it “killing snakes,” I prefer to think of it as just “insanity.”  In either instance, the sheer volume of contrived emergencies always has a way of working itself out.  Therefore, in my latest effort to maintain one “New Year's Resolution” (keeping it simple), I have now decided that, “someone’s lack of prior planning will no longer constitute an emergency on my part.”  I have a feeling this one will last all of about .0003 nanoseconds, or until the phone rings, whichever comes first. ~ Michael S. Pauley

While I’m still scaling the steep slopes of the mountain of paper that grew in my chair, at least I got to see the seat today.  It was only a brief view, but there it was, the cheap noxious Naugahide that adorns the office chair.  Now, maybe sometime in a few months, there will be enough room for me to put my ever expanding tuchuss in it.  I wasn’t really kidding in the last posting, please buy the book before the mountain of paper consumes me.  I almost thought I saw a mythical creature as I flipped through a memorandum of things “to do.”  If it wasn’t a troll, it missed a very good bet, and to think, until I read the memo, I was convinced they only existed on the internet! ~ Michael S. Pauley