Big Trial Day

I've been spending nights after work cleaning my apartment. The level of filthiness was truly ridiculous when my roomates moved out. Stayed up until 2 cleaning the spare room. Hauled out several bags of trash and 2 elevator loads of boxes and papers. This morning I got up early (as usual) to be in Manhattan Family Court by 9:30. When I got through security and up to the courtroom at 10, only lawyers were there. All the clients were late. Lovely. I spent the time reading over some of the case precedent for our constitutional argument. Also scurried around serving copies of an affidavit and motion on several of the parties' attorneys. When we were finally called in for our hearing before the judge one of the partys was still absent. The judge seemed to be in a bad mood overall and started yelling at the attorney I work with. She tried to throw out our motion, ranting about how our client has no constitutional rights and complaining that we were "wasting trees". The father needed a court appointed attorney so we had to take a break soon after getting started while that was attended to. Several attorney's commented during the break that the judge seemed to have PMS. I concur. From now on I'll try glueing Midol to courtesy briefs. After some wheeling and dealing in the antechambers we came back in session and quickly ended up in conference in the judge's chambers. The judge clearly was unfamiliar with the statute we had cited in our motion and her interpretation was a travesty. She went off about how allowing relatives to adopt children encourages drug users not to get clean. I tried to correct her by bringing up the legislative history/intent from the governor's bill jacket but she cut me off and went on a new tirade about how this is the "real world" and we don't care about matters of law. Wow. Funny, maybe I'm crazy, but that is EXACTLY what I thought courts and judges were supposed to care about. But I'm a lowly law student, what do I know? Anyway, she tried to throw out our motion, then changed her mind, then did absolutely nothing and adjourned the whole mess. Crazy day. I can't wait to go to appeal. Preferably in Fed court. I'll bet the judges are saner there. After the hearing we went to a Japanese place in Tribeca for lunch and headed back to the office. Did very little work for the rest of the afternoon and then went to a great party at a yoga club. No yoga occured but they had some very nice wines for tasting as well as fruit/herbal juice blends. The food was great too. Bruschetta and grilled eggplant, tofu, vegetables, etc. Very fun and relaxing time. From there we went to Battery Park for some street theater. The view of the skyscrapers in the financial district and the sunset over the river was gorgeous. Great clouds too. After the performance I went to the nearest bar looking for a bathroom. I didn't notice it was a bar/cabaret (called the pussycat club). Oops. It was packed with wallstreet suits gettign lapdances from some less than beautiful exotic dancers. Got outa there in a hurry...  ¶ 9:15 PM