The temperature outside broke 100 today, and is supposed to break 100 again tomorrow. Diego and I are hiding inside, moving very slow, and even with the A/C maxed out, wearing as little as possible. That’s a stylish tropical-print collar for him and gym shorts for me.

I’m as prepped as I’m gonna be for a hearing tomorrow, and the Business of Law is just slow in general right now, so most of the day (at least when I’m not napping) is going into website work. I’d love to show it off to you. Really I would, but it’s not going to happen. The biggest web project of mine for the last couple of years (and probably for many to come) is a homework and class project site for a bunch of local fifth graders and their most-wonderful teacher.

Unlike when I was a kid (paper, books, trudging 100s of yards in SoCal weather, blah blah blah), these 10-year-old learners get their homework assignments served online and do group projects on a restricted-access wiki space.  Their parents see their completed homework assignments as e-mail, and teacher comments and in-class test grades are posted online.  It’s simple to avoid browser compatibility problems (the school itself uses some pretty archaic hardware), but after over a year of watching 10-year-olds bash my code with everything they’ve got, it seems pretty resilient.  From looking at the server history we know some kids are even using iPhones and Wiis to complete their assignments.

More importantly, the teacher is not hauling paper back and forth to be graded, and not getting dinged for going over the school’s ridiculously low photocopying allotments.

So I code and nap and try and avoid the heat, but really have nothing to show you.

Just kinda drifting here.  Work (billable hours) and coding (unbillable hours for a good cause) and waiting for the washing machine to get repaired (the personal gratification of clean undies).  Can you guess which is highest in my priority list?

Today was one of those days where nothing appeared to get done, even if things were completed.  Three hours of coding and troubleshooting upgraded some of the tags enough that Howling Point does what I want it to under the new version of WordPress.  Documents were sent out for review and comments and signatures and the like.  A reasonable start was made on a backlog of filing that may have built up.  But on one of those days when the personalities can be as bad as any grouping of ancient, senior and senile partners, not much billing.  Work, but not the paid kind.  Unbillable Hours, not just a great blog that went missing a few years back, but a daily reality of independent contracting, also known as being a solo practitioner.

Unbillable hours was also one of the (many) reasons I left the Cubedwellers a few years ago.  Rather than being salaried I was paid commission based on billable hours, but a management change made the arrangement completely unprofitable and I left.  Two years later I’m getting calls from an attorney who seems to think I’d love to help (as a witness) expand on an investigation I did.  Don’t I want to sit and talk for hours about a file I worked almost three years ago?  Do I really want to testify about how my former employer handled evidence and documents and correspondence?  Uh, no.

Tomorrow might be just as unbillable if some people don’t get back to me, but a sanity swim will be be taken.  Probably should have worked one in today.  Need to let the black line and chlorine work their magic, no matter how many Advils it takes.