I noticed that one of the things on my memetracker is "it sucks being a paralegal". I guess you might get that impression from me at times, but sometimes it's really fun, and I will say that both cases I've worked on have been big complex, interesting monsters. Usually when I'm really enjoying myself it's because I'm doing something almost akin to detective work--for instance, putting together a timeline from documents about where our client and other people were on particular days 19 years ago. This is challenging and interesting and is just like the stuff I really liked about being in the archives as a historian--the details, the minutiae--as opposed to the ultimate putting things all together that proved to be my downfall. Also a hallmark of the good times is generally Ed's non-presence.

But today I did something that was brainless and way more fun than it had any right to be. See, we have this document database, and out of it we've compiled some newspaper articles for an upcoming pleading. But some of them were written on, either by our client or by one of his attorneys. Since this material is privileged, we can't include it.

So I got to redact. Specifically, I got to work in our image program, using the highlight function, except highlighting in white--a brilliant solution devised by one of my predecessors here. This may sound like nothing, but it's like photoshopping in reverse, or trying to uncolor between the lines. That, and it's the best I've got folks. But 7 weeks from today is my last day, 8 weeks from today I'll be watching Cardinals-Pirates in St. Louis, and 9 weeks from today I'm moving into the Lawyers' Club. Woohoo!

In other news, I've bee super-obsessively playing with LaunchCast since DEK showed it to me last weekend. It just so happened that my first experience with it coincided with the first two-day period at work when I had access to streaming radio, since I was working in our co-counsel's office printing down cases. If you want to listen to a station featuring a lot of Los Straitjackets, White Stripes, Dead Milkmen, Liz Phair, Bruce Springsteen, and the Flying Burrito Brothers (and where you're guaranteed never to hear Creed, Limp Bizkit, Eric Clapton, Dave Matthews, or "Brown Eyed Girl") then by all means check out mine.