So, in the legal profession, we are constantly encouraged, begged, and mostly guilted into donating our time and skills to help those who cannot afford to pay for our services.  The argument is that we have a special training that isn’t something people can just go out and acquire on their own, and therefore we have a duty to help those in need.  And on the one hand, I completely agree with this.  And on the other, I really resent that this is the only profession that seems to have this complex.  I have friends who are teachers, doctors, stay at home moms, professors, corporate big wigs, designers, decorators, engineers, business owners, nurses, physical therapists, researchers, and well, that basically covers it.  And guess what – I can’t do any of those things.  I don’t have the special skill set that it takes to cure disease, raise and train children, build websites, design or run anything.  But I don’t see my friends being constantly pressured to find yet more hours in the day to do their jobs for free.

But then, I can’t blame them.  Who wants to end a busy work day by going out and doing more of the same?  I’ve spent most of my Sunday deeply stressed (and frankly, highly irritated) about a brief I’m researching and writing for a pro bono client.  I’d rather have spent my volunteer time doing something I don’t do day and night in and day and night out – maybe painting a house or tutoring kids or making meals for the elderly, for starters.  But I guess that isn’t very altruistic of me, is it?  Those things would be fun for me, so maybe they wouldn’t mean as much on the karma scale?  Anyway, I am under a huge amount of pressure to get this brief right, because whether I can win or not will make a huge difference in 5 people’s lives.  Every minute I spend on this work is a minute that I’m not billing, which is the curse of law firm lawyers, so I’m stressed about that too. But mostly I’m stressed about the prospect of losing and then being another link in the chain of failure for this family.

Anyway, I have now firmly moved from procrastinating from doing work into complaining territory, so I will cut myself off.  But before I do, I’ll say this – have you hugged your lawyer today?  If not, maybe you should.  Or at least not tell so many lawyer jokes.

In the past week or two, Jeff and I have seen something mighty strange in our yuppie urban neighborhood: a dude in a 10 gallon hat.  No joke; there is a cowboy on the loose.  The first time we saw him was when we were walking to work together.  He passed us by, and Jeff and I both looked at each other in shock.  ”Did that just happen?” I asked.  ”I was about to ask you the same thing,” he said.  Just to put this in perspective, I rarely see such hats in South Dakota, let alone a major metropolitan center like Minneapolis.

Jeff saw the guy later the same day.  Today I caught another glimpse of the Cowboy on my way home.  He not only had on his huge hat, he was also smoking a giant cigar.  I dropped my bags and grabbed my phone to try to document it, but damned if he isn’t the fastest walker I’ve ever seen.  Those doggies must be tired.  Here’s the best shot I could get:

I started an imaginary conversation with him the rest of my walk home.

“What’s a man like you doing in these parts?”

Even in my head, I couldn’t come up with an answer.

So I recently tried Shellac, the nail polish that involves using a UV or LED light to dry.  It’s supposed to last two weeks, and once it’s dry at the salon, it’s super dry — no worrying about bumping your hands on the steering wheel when you get into your car.  Actually, my brain couldn’t fathom that, so I still acted all careful for awhile until I realized that I needn’t bother.

Having Shellac on was AWESOME.  After 17 days, I still had no chips.  None.  Zero!  Here’s a photo:

Sorry for the giant, weirdly yellow photo, but I wanted you to see the lack of chips.  The only reason I removed it was that my nails were starting to grow out, and that was not a good look, as you can tell.  I had no idea my nails grew that much in 17 days.  Also, I was sick of having dramatically red nails.

So, if you’d asked me two days ago what I thought about Shellac, I’d have talked your ear off about how great it is.  Then I tried to take it off.  What a fiasco.  I think you’re supposed to go back to the salon to get it off, but I don’t have the time or money to constantly have my nails done.  So, I looked for advice online and decided to de-Shallac myself myself.  First, I tried the cotton balls stuck onto my fingers technique:

Jeff said it looked like I’d had all my fingerprints amputated.  I was more bothered by the blatant waste of cotton balls and Press ‘N Seal.  I’m very passionate about not wasting Press ‘N Seal, as my mom can attest.  She always uses exorbitant amounts, and that stuff is expensive!  I always call her out on it.  But I digress.  After 15-20 minutes of that, the polish was going nowhere.  I had to resort to the extreme measure of soaking my nails in maximum strength acetone.  This also meant, of course, that my fingers got the acetone bath as well.  Nasty!  That just doesn’t seem like it can be good for a person, does it?  But I’m no chemist.  Anyway, after 10 minutes of soaking, I was then able to use a wooden stick and other fingernails to scrape away the polish, but it was a slow, smelly process.  And I still feel like I’ve got some of the base layer on my nails, but I’m not willing to soak them again to get it off.  Still, I don’t think my nails were damaged or anything, so that’s a positive.

So, the bottom line is that I’ll probably never get another regular manicure again because it just seems silly to throw money away on something that only lasts 5 days when I know I can get a Shellac to last 2-3 weeks.  On the other hand, I can’t see myself regularly Shellacking, unless I find that there is a different remover I should try using.  The UV part freaked me out enough — I don’t need to add chemical baths to the mix.  But if I was, say, getting married again, I’d definitely Shellac it up.