Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

No drugs today. Yay. But stuck in all day meetings which were more like mini-let’s-not-panic sessions. I think half of my job right now is calming people down to get them to focus. Eventually I sent some notes to the leaders of the committee after I had some quiet time by myself to think about what we were trying to accomplish and laid out my thoughts in a doc to share.

Then a senior manager who was in the meeting with me all day had a related legal question and instead of emailing me, the guy who had been answering legal questions all day for the group including him, he emailed the general counsel directly. Who, of course, then had to turn around and send it to me to give her the answer. Dork. After everything else that was the “I’m out!” moment of the afternoon. Not really, but I seriously wanted to smack him upside the head.

The day was very busy at work, trying to calm people down, and trying to keep up with demands for information. The calming part is the harder bit, especially as we discover things where other offices have fucked up paperwork that can affect application of 47’s memoranda. Ugh.

Quiet night, despite that. Watching a Continuing Legal Education class to maintain my license. Urban Farming and the Law. Pretty interesting, actually.

I’ve been telling people at work to just focus on the small tasks they have to get done and not try to encompass the entirety of all the new orders coming down the pike; that way lies madness. Like trying to follow the entirety of social media, it’s just not possible.

Still sick. Ran to the pharmacy for refills of various cold medications that I’ve almost run through. Napped for a bit right after lunch. Comics and dinner out, then reading and serving as a cat bed when we got back to the house.

After sort of being in remission the head cold the husband gave me last week came roaring back this morning. That or it’s a new things on top of the other thing from someone at one of the rest areas on the way home. Who knows. Still managed to straighten some things in my office and catch up on a few comics, but otherwise was pretty much a lump for most of the day. Back to the job tomorrow, but I may use the excuse of not wanting to infect my coworkers to telework the rest of this week.

Whole lot of changes coming down the pike at work, as expected. I suspect some of them will end up being pulled back as impossible to implement from a practical standpoint, but others will end up creating a lot of work. Eh, elections have consequences and all that. I don’t anticipate that it’ll be life changing for my little agency, just a lot of busy work changing language around.

The drive down wasn’t too bad, just shy of nine hours. The various highway departments from Massachusetts down to Maryland did a good job of clearing the snow and keeping the roads free of hazards, which made the drive down pretty good. Not much use of cruise control this time because there was more traffic, but at least the roads were in good shape.

Cold as hell down here at home, and due to get colder. It’s currently 15F (-9.4C), and getting down to 12F (-11C) tonight. High of 20F (-6.7C) on Wednesday when I might or might not have to commute in (I’m scheduled for Thursday, but 47’s workforce orders might change that; hopefully not that quickly, though). Planning to get up in time to drive the husband to the Metro in any case so he has that much less time out in that mess.

We feds got a message today from the outgoing president about how much he appreciated our work. Well, 46, if you appreciated it so much why did you limit our pay raise this year to 2% instead of matching the military’s at 4.5%, as is customary? For someone who claimed he was a champion for labor he sure didn’t show it. Of course, neither did 44, who agreed to ridiculous pay freezes because he was afraid the opposition party in Congress would say ugly things about him. Fools. Meanwhile, insurance and living costs continue to outpace raises so we’re not even breaking even (a big reason you lost, 46). Again, fools. So thanks, you senile old fool. Enjoy your early retirement, and do us all a favor and take more of the other 70+ year olds with you into the sunset.

The drive up to Massachusetts wasn’t bad. We made good time, and only really hit traffic when we got to the Boston I-95 beltway during rush hour, and even then the maps app had taken that into account with the timing. Checked in, all good. Got an upgrade to a “suite” because we walked into our first room and there were a handful of tools (think hammer, etc.) on the counter, so they switched us. Not bad.

Then dinner took as long as the drive up here did because we had The. World’s. Slowest. Waitress. Seriously, she was just bad at her job. Good food, but overly warm in the place and slow service left me slightly cranky. Felt good to get outside into the cold.

All unpacked and ready for whatever we’re up to tomorrow. I have a video call from 1-3 for the training class, and the husband is meeting one of his college friends while I do that, but otherwise we’ve no plans until Saturday.

Uneventful day at work, which was fine by me. The husband and I are headed up to Massachusetts tomorrow morning for a couple of days, so we’ve been doing the light packing required. Mine is a little heavier than normal because I have to take my work laptop for a video meeting with my little cohort from the training I attended back in early December, a kind of mid-break check-in to see how we’re doing and (I suspect) get us back on track, post-holidays.

Commuted to work, Metro was behaving. Got to pull out one of my favorite wah-wah court quotes (“However, nowhere does our Constitution extol the virtue of efficiency and nowhere does it command that all our laws be fiscally wise.” Guadamuz v. Ash, 368 F. Supp. 1233, 1243 (D.D.C., 1973)). Was in the context of telling someone that it didn’t matter that it would be cheaper if we paid for individual memberships for people to attend a conference, and that while buying the memberships plus the member registration rate was cheaper than paying the non-member rate, Congress said in law that we couldn’t pay for memberships for individual feds, so they’d just have to suck it up and pay more money. Yes, sometimes the law is like that (and frankly in most instances the law makes sense because you don’t want to use taxpayer funds to pay every employees’ voluntary society membership dues, it’s just that in this particular instance it happens to cost the taxpayer more). My job is weird.

Past that I walked on the treadmill this morning. I think my knee may be hyper-extending and thus causing more issues, so I’m going to dig out some of the lighter knee braces in my collection and see if one of them helps. The walk was fine, and I stretched a lot right after, so it was okay for most of the day. There’s still a lot of ice out there so I was very careful where I put my feet, especially in the Metro parking lot, where ice melt had refrozen as black ice.

I had rough plans with a friend this weekend while the husband is down at MAL, but as usual with this friend a house emergency came up (leaking roof this time) so I’m flying solo. I told the husband I looked forward to him complaining about the number of comics I’ll read this weekend (complaining because he then has to sort and file them all at once).

Spent the work day on a last minute emergency that is only an emergency because a) lawyers who worked at the agency before me gave bad advice; and b) our public affairs shop can’t plan things in the normal federal budget cycle. The agency has an anniversary next year with a big number and what should have happened was that planning should’ve started 2-3 years ago so that we could’ve asked for the budget authority to do the big shindig they now want to hold, but which they didn’t start planning until last year (an agency develops their budget plan each spring for the fiscal year that starts almost two years later; so for 2025 they would’ve had to develop it internally back in the spring of 2023). When they did approach me about it, I got to tell them that no, we don’t have any authority to pay for food for a shindig, and in fact there’s a statute that affirmatively says we may not pay for food for a shindig, and by the way here’s the two Justice memos that back me up on this. The previous lawyers had told them that a certain pot of cash we have didn’t have to follow the normal rules, which is horse shit. I did tell them how to get the authority to pay for food (ask for a one-time increase in a special reception budget, or ask for permanent authority to pay for food at shindigs. Or, preferably, both), and I’ve told this to everyone in management who will listen, but the game of telephone based on the previous bad advice is still going strong and people don’t want to hear the bad news. Oh well.