Thursday Miscellany

Today I did yoga and had the usual walk, hanging around and chatting with Julie afterwards, about gardening and stuff. I shopped FEEST with Leigh and a laid-off barista from Capitol Hill. I lent my weed whacker to a young couple from Buy Nothing.
I sent a suggestion to a couple of Snohomish County family members to recruit them to drive for the Snohomish Mask Brigade, but no response. I probably need to recruit more boldly.

Galen from work called; it had been 30 days since our last contact and he was just confirming I'm still employed and all that. There was talk of letting the seasonals go but since I accepted moving to permanent that doesn't affect me. There had been a lot of work to set people up to start working the phones from home but that got halted, so who knows? I heard a 3pm lecture by the Attorney action Club on IRS COVID-19 Relief Beyond The $1200 Check. It looks like they'll be doing weekly Zoom meetings and this one was pretty good; it was interesting to hear outsiders talk about IRS operations.

Ed Getting His Stuff

Ed called last night for permission to come get his wheelbarrow today. I told him that was fine and I also had a small box of his stuff he'd left behind. He came by with his friend and they loaded up. Ed assured me he'd been tested for COVID19 and was negative but he has 3 masks now that he used all the time - I was wearing it when he got the wheelbarrow. He mentioned our mutual friend Cyril being in the hospital. We wished each other well. I had not intended to kick him out immediately when I learned he was smoking (after cancer recovery) and drinking quietly in his truck, but it worked out ok because even if he is testing negative, I don't need to take a chance on him.

I probably got too excited about the Washington Legal Foundation's proposal to the section-leaders listserve that we use some of our section reserves to create a program to help attorneys struggling due to COVID19. My point was that charitable gifting unrelated to education was not within our bylaws and, even if we could figure out a way, the whole gifting process is too much work for too little impact when the best way to accomplish this worth goal is for the BOG to set up a Work Group to do much the same thing but including the whole bar. The proponent replied to the various criticisms by saying that someone from some sections had thought it was a good idea to repay the people who had contributed to whatever reserve the Section had, in particular by way of CLEs, which annoyed me since the nonmembers who contributed through CLE did it for credit not as a contribution, and it was impractical to make gifts only to those nonmembers who previously expressed a desire to make a charitable contribution, but mostly because this whole thing would be much better done via the BOG using economies of scale. Much of my reaction was due to prior attempts to convert Section balances to WSBA purposes, but also my experiment with cash gifts through DAV is that they frequently go astray; figuring out who has a claim we can help with, making sure the money goes to the purpose, and above all ensure that the recipient has a plan for avoiding this happening again is complicated, but necessary to keep this all from just being a gift to the mortgage bank.
I suppose I should have let a day go by, or not responded the 2nd time. Live and learn.