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I realize that this post is only going to amuse a fairly limited portion of my readership. And even those who understand the joke may not be particularly amused by it. But it’s my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to, so to speak.

Anyway, I was drafting a document that discussed various property being using as a collateral for a loan. One of the schedules listed all the relevant property, and required that I indicate whether it is “owned” or “leased” property.

Maybe it was too early in the morning for my brain to function properly, or something, so every time I tried to type “owned property” it came out as “own3d property.”

As much fun as it would be to draft my documents in 1337, I think I would be the one getting pwn3d if I left my typo in there.

For those of you who don’t know or can’t remember, I work with little people for a living. Specifically, I teach music and art classes for toddlers every morning. It’s quite a living, I must say, as it does not pay nearly as much as other professions do, but from what I can tell, is so much more fulfilling than said professions. That being said, there are times when I don’t necessarily enjoy arguing with a 2 1/2 year old about putting his/her instrument away.

However, today, as such an incident arose, I had some much-needed assistance from one of my students, Evelyn. To give some background, Evelyn has always been one of the more precocious and linguistically-gifted two-year-olds in our class. So, at around 9:40 am, when I was locked in a showdown with an impeccably dressed little girl named Ryan over a small percussive frog**, Evelyn came to my rescue. I try to make it a point never to grab anything forcefully out of my students’ small yet terrificly strong hands, as this generally results in mild hysteria. But, apparently, Evelyn has the right touch. The following is verbatim:

Me, the “Teacher”: Ryan, please give me the frog.

Ryan, stubborn, yet fashionable student: No, I put away.

Me: Ryan, you need to give me the frog.

Ryan: (shaking her head all the while, with hands behind her back): No.

Enter Evelyn: Ryan! You need to listen to Jannine. Give her the frog!

At this point, Ryan looks over at Evelyn, lets down her defense, and in one fell swoop of the hands, Evelyn recovers the frog and places it in my hands. Then Evelyn ran back to her other friends looking quite pleased with herself, and all was well.

**In the music world, there exist small, medium and large intricately designed wooden frogs. They come with stickes that are used to scrape against the frogs bumpy heads, thereby producing a distinct “rrribit!” sound.

My coworker forwarded this Dilbert cartoon to my entire practice group a couple days ago. It tells the story of my life pretty much perfectly.

In other work-related news, my deal finally closed on Wednesday. So for right now, I am in the glorious between-deals phase, where I have very little work to do and can relax without being barraged by dozens of emails, phone calls, and demands that documents be finished five minutes ago.

The closing was fine, although we hit a few snags along the way, none of which were necessary and all of which were manageable, but together they conspired to keep me at work for one more all-nighter and delayed the actual closing by a couple hours. But the money finally moved and then there was much joy at various locations around the country as people became richer than they already were.

Such a worthy avocation, mine is.

Lawyer humor is like pizza rolls: even when it’s good, it’s still pretty bad.

So take this quote, which I currently find hilarious, with a grain of salt.

It came at the end of an extended email dialogue about getting some additional signature pages for a document, which had to be on safety paper (you know, the nice green patterned paper like they use for printing checks). Instead of scrapping the pages we executed yesterday and starting over, we could just execute additional copies.

After we had finally confirmed that we didn’t need to waste paper and time redoing all the pages, the counsel for the company emailed the whole group and said:

Always happy to save a tree, even if it’s an odd-looking safety-paper tree.

See, I told you it wouldn’t be that funny. But I think it’s hilarious.

(Credit for the opening quote goes to Michael Rosenberg, comparing MSU and U-M basketball: “Michigan State is like pizza: even when it’s bad, it’s pretty good. The Wolverines are like pizza rolls: even when they are good, they are pretty bad.”)

When you’re closing large corporate deals, you typically have a long list of “closing conditions” — milestones that must be met prior to the money moving. It’s a long list of documents that have to be signed, opionions that must be given, collateral that must be secured, factual conditions that must be met and everything else necessary for the bankers to feel comfortable giving away a few hundred million or some billions of dollars.

Right now, 30 hours before the deal is supposed to close, I’m in my own “closing condition”: I’m tired and I’m drained. It’s two rather different conditions. Being tired can be cured with some sleep. Being drained is an ongoing condition, and no matter how much sleep you get, you aren’t going to suddenly feel “not drained.”

I need a break, not like a vacation (although that would of course be nice), but a break from the stress. I looked back at my time reports today, and since early November, I’ve had 15 days when I didn’t bill any time (note that that period contains six holidays). That’s a long time with no real weekends.

I would write more, because I actually had a fun weekend despite all the work. But the car service just called and said that my car will be here in two minutes. So I’m off for now — maybe I can get three hours’ sleep if I’m lucky.

I tried to get to work early this morning (meaning prior to my typical 10:15 arrival time) but I just couldn’t drag myself out of the house. My motivation level seems to be at an all-time low, which is really saying something. So now it’s 11:00 am and I have two key achievements for this morning:

1.) I went to the cafeteria and got two slices of seven-grain toast (plain) and an apple. Both were delicious, although I bit into the apple and it sprayed all over my desk and my sweater.

2.) I figured out how to change the desktop image on my BlackBerry (yes, I realize that after having it for six months, I am a little slow). But I finally got sick of the clouds floating behind my icons and uploaded one of my Disney Hall pictures and set it as the background. This makes me happy and satisified.

Now, however, I have an indenture to draft. Suffice to say that this makes me neither happy nor satisified.

Hi everyone. My name is Nathan, and I write a blog. What, you mean you didn’t remember me? In two short weeks, you forgot all about my little blogging experiment? Frankly, I’m a little hurt.

Then again, even my blogging co-conspirator has been absent since a triumphant super bowl screed three weeks ago, so perhaps I have more pressing problems than the lack of reader attention.

Whatever the case, I finally have a free minute to post again. I have to say I feel dead today. I’m coming off a stretch where I billed 130 hours in eight days. Once you subtract out 24 hours for hours for sabbath, the means I worked 77.3% of the available hours, leaving me with a whopping 5.5 hours each day to do things besides work. when you think about it, that should really be more than enough time, right?

Anyway, I skipped work yesterday (I got home around 5:30a) and slept most of the day. I felt ok yesterday, but today I just feel terrible. I can’t focus on anything. I didn’t even want to get out of bed this morning.

So that’s what’s up with me. I’ve probably bored you enough with the details of my sleep schedule, so I won’t even bother explaining what was so urgent at work that it required 20-hour days.

In such a bad mood this afternoon. This should be a great day, as the partners (as well as some of the midlevels) are gone. Everyone’s wearing jeans and feeling pretty relaxed. I guess the problem is that I just want to go home, but I have work to do. It’s not pressing work, but every hour I spend on it now is an hour that I don’t have to work this weekend.

Anyone have some motivation for me?

In other news, I actually left the office and got a sit-down lunch today. I think it’s the first time I’ve done that since starting work. I got pizza from Adrienne’s Pizza Bar in the Financial District. (The Financial District is now apparently being called the FiDi by some people who are cool. This is a terrible name for the area. First of all, it sounds like something that you connect to with your laptop for internet access. Second, the belief that neighborhoods have to have a “name” that is some sort of retarded abbreviation before they can catch on is so annoying. The area already has a name: “the Financial District”. It does not need an abbreviated one.)

Anyway, I believe I was talking about pizza. The pizza was extremely good. It is (at least in Michigan parlance) Greek pizza, meaning that it’s square and has a nice crisp, yet greasy, crust — otherwise known as square deep-dish pizza, according to the website of Buddy’s, the Detroit-area restaurant where I first discovered this culinary wonder. The prices are perhaps somewhat high (I think you pay more for a single pizza at Adrienne’s than you would at Grimaldi’s, although the pizza at A’s is more substantial and probably larger), but it’s good, unique pizza in New York, where it’s hard to find anything other than traditional Italian-style pizza.