Still hard at work. Don't have much to write about. So I'll pass the buck to a worthier author, to give you something to think about while I'm eating nothing but takeout.

It is these comparitively cheap and private expeditions that substantiate our existence and batten our lives -- as, where a vine touches the earth in its undulating course, it puts forth roots and thickens its stock. Our employment generally is tinkering, mending the old worn-out teapot of society. Our stock in trade is solder. Better for me, says my genius, to go cranberrying this afternoon for the Vaccinium oxycoccus in Gowing's Swamp, to get but a pocketful and learn its peculiar flavor -- aye, and the flavor of Gowing's Swamp and of life in New England -- than to go consul to Liverpool and get I don't know how many thousand dollars for it, with no such flavor. Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him. Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy.

- Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits (1859), excerpted in Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History (Mark Kurlansky ed.), at 319, 320-21 (Ballantine 2002).

Good advice for all of us, particularly New York City lawyers.