The nicest thing about tearing your ACL is the fact that you have one concentrated injury - and that's what hurts. There's no ifs ands or buts, if it hurts - it's your ACL.

Now that I'm on the mend, despite the ever present swelling anytime I do more than sit on the couch for a day, I'm back in the world of varied aches, pains and scratches. Suddenly it's not about crawling into bed the same way to avoid putting weight on the bum knee; it's suddenly about inching my way in without bumping the scratches on my right elbow, right knee, left ankle, right toes and oh yeah still not putting weight on that knee.

However, the nicest thing about tearing your ACL is not really so nice in the end. I am so glad to be horsing around in pools, waltzing on terraces and playing ultimate again! Thank you Dr. Masters!

And, after all that work, I managed to lose the client anyway.

If I had known in the end that I was going to lose the client, I wouldn't have worked the 100+ hours on the project. Nor would I have missed half the July 4th festivities at Adam's, the after wedding fun, the various ultimate practices, the extra time at communal dinner, the runs and the sleep. I would have said, screw it, the grapes are sour anyway, and enjoyed the last two weeks.

Though, probably feeling guilty the whole time.

The day started off crappy, with my staying up until 6 in the morning trying to finish a site feature that later in the day I found out wasn't actually in the original statement of work. Essentially, I was done on Monday, but the client confused two projects, and insisted a feature be added. I didn't realize it shouldn't be, and spent the last four days trying to put it in. Nothing like finding out Monday at 9:30 PM that a feature needs to be in by, oh, that day's morning to add stress to a project.

Yesterday, I had sent a note to the client letting them know I couldn't work Thursday or Friday on the current project that's been sucking up all my time, but that I'd be working on the client's other projects. Instead of being thankful for the heads up, they completely freaked, called up Mike on his vacation, demanded he contact me.

Because, you know, Mike is my dad and he tells me what to do.

The worse part is that I ended up spending all of Thursday working on the same project anyway.

I give up. I'm done with clients. As soon as I finish up the current projects for current clients, I'm not planning on taking on any more. If some amazing client project comes along, I'll probably take it. But I'm not seeking any new clients out.

Instead, I'm going to work on our projects, build our products up. Finally, finally, finally. Our work.

Kitt and I have been discussing trading cars for weeks so that Kitt can be the fourth best roomie ever and get me new rockin' tires on my car. So far as a roomie she's slightly behind Kris who catapulted me into backflips in the pool on Tuesday (but to be fair Kitt has never tried that - who knows maybe she could catapult me higher!)

So far, one or both of us has forgotten the plan and I keep ending up at work with my own car. It's starting to be a little unnerving as the gods keep sending me signals in the form of ripped rubber on the freeway (once even in my lane!). So this morning I took the bull by the horns and stole Kitt's car.

Ridiculously early I stepped out of the house with the excitement of being able to be a convertable owner for a day - too bad my perfect sexy red dress has yet to be found.

I awkwardly slipped into the driver's seat in my heels and carefully backed out of the driveway experiencing for the first time what it was like to drive before the wonderful invention of the rearview mirror.

Completely yuppied-up after a quick stop at Starbucks, I pulled into the gas station to uphold my end of the bargain for the car switch - filling up Kitt's tank. Finding the gas tank opener button was a new puzzle and not the fun kind like sudoku or LSAT logic games. Very difficult. Hmmm....good thing I had a sports car today because by this point I was running late.

So boo - Honda decided the best place to hide a gas tank button is on the doorframe, which of course is only visible if the door's open! But...yay - Honda decided it was a good idea to put a label on the inside of the gas tank with instructions on which kind of gas needs to go in the car. So I was off to work and getting very good at the km/hr to mi/hr mental conversion.

Now I've decided that the reason white collar men in their midlife crises don't get convertables to compensate, they get convertables because the only thing that keeps a person who works in an office for at least eight hours a day in a cubicle without windows somewhat sane is to put the top down and fly during a lunch break. But so much for my sanity anyway, since I'm headed to law school in a month!

The only thing that saved my rotten full-time, rut of a day was the thought of being able to put the top down and speed down the freeway, which is exactly what I did. I was falling asleep at my desk after an awesome four-day weekend but as soon as I hit 120 km/hr I was wide awake!

And then the ice cream on the cake was Kitt waiting at the end of my temporary forget-about-everything-but-the-wind fix to help me with a more permanent fix. Okay maybe Kitt could be second best roomie ever. Obviously my day in Kitt's car was infinitely better than her day in my car. Thanks roomie!!!!

I haven't worked less than 10 hour days since Mike left. Nearly all of the hours have been for a client of Mike's. The one he said don't lose, so I'm doing my damnedest not to lose, but think I may lose anyway because the requirements for this project are a complete moving target ("Oh, can you add this? How about that? I'm sure this was a project requirement. Needs to be done today. Can you push live to this server that you've never seen before, and oh, btw, runs IIS, not Apache?").

Tonight is the final night. After this, I'm done. I'm not doing any more work for this client. I've gained even more weight. I have bedsores on the back of my legs from sitting for so long, and my knees hurt. No client is worth the loss of my health like this.

The worst part is the realization that, if I had worked this hard on one of my own projects, it would have been something to behold. I could have made something of this life.

Louis Davidson Ricketts.

Been struggling for the last few days on what the D stood for in Louis D. Ricketts.

Yay, Wikipedia!

Oh, and Google, though the answer was on the third page.