Ramblings

Lasagna and Lawyering

/ Bruce Cameron / 2 Comments
Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community.

Anthony J. D’Angelo
For a community to be whole and healthy, it must be based on people’s love and concern for each other.

Millard Fuller

The inevitability of living in a small rural town is that eventually events conspire to prove yet again that farming is dangerous and that horsepower and steel can conspire to illustrate the fragility human body. Such events seldom happen in the clear light of day, rather they wait until those hours when fatigue fogs the brain and diminishes decision making. Yet, these moments are also the moments when one can glimpse the defining element of a rural community – the outpouring of care and support that follows in tragedy’s wake.

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Within Lies Invincible Summer

/ Bruce Cameron / 4 Comments
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer – Albert Camus
Recently, I was asked if my being a rural solo practitioner was because I saw the practice of law as a vocation. After all, wouldn’t there have to be something more behind the decision to invent many tens of thousands of dollars into a legal education and then to invest even more starting a solo practice that, by its very focus cannot be expected to generate even half the income of the career I left behind. I found it strange to be faced with a question I had once asked a lawyer whose career was spent in public law and was amazed by how difficult a question it is to answer. Continue reading →

Hearing Truth

/ Bruce Cameron

TRUESamuel Johnson is quoted as saying “[i]n order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.” My chance to learn to hear truth came  as I tried to wrap my “think like a lawyer” brain around the concepts of interest-based mediation during a 5 day, 10 hours per day course on family mediation. There is a leap of faith one has to make when transitioning between being “lawyer” and being “neutral” and, after years of legal training it is not an easy leap to make.

The mediation crowd calls it “letting the process work”. It took me 3 days to stop calling it “a quick way to get into trouble.” The hardest part in leaving the advocate behind is abandoning the lawyer’s laser focus on issues, facts, and law for simply hearing truth – not the law’s truth, but the parties’ truth – and realizing that in that moment of silent hearing meaningful solutions are generated without your involvement. Continue reading →

That Was The Year That Was

/ Bruce Cameron / 1 Comment

Its official, last year is finally put to bed, taxes are done, accounts reconciled, bills collected, and the books are closed, so now there’s time to reflect on the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good – Mac’s, CrashPlan, Grasshopper, personallized pens, and getting an accountant

The bad – Iomega REV, Retrospect, phonebook ads, “door” law, and conservative business cards.

The ugly – the high cost of tuition when taking graduate courses at Reality U. Continue reading →

It went bump in the night

/ Bruce Cameron / 1 Comment

Well, I knew that one day I would lose a disk, but I really didn’t need it to happen today, I really didn’t need to lose the disk with my database on it, and I certainly did not expect a 2 month old disk to pack up and go south. The cool thing is that I was down for less than 90 minutes and half of that was spent running to the local big box computer store to get a new drive.

It took all of 3 mouse clicks and less than 45 minutes for CrashPlan to do a complete restore from my on-site backup. Had I not wanted instant gratification, I could have restored from my off-site personal cloud in little over 2 hours. Had I ever wondered about justifying the cost of having a highly redundant back up system, today put all my doubts to rest. Rather than spending countless hours rebuilding my contact list, document database, forms, etc. I went to lunch while my hardware and software did their thing.