Here is an update from me. Oh my, the amount of time I spent on hold trying to get through the family court services every day... hours in total. I am glad I have a speaker phone.

- Ted has not made the final appointments with Susan
- Ted cancelled the mediation which was scheduled a week from today and which I scheduled at his request
- he was supposed to provide the family court services with his availability and I was supposed to call them and reschedule based on his availability. I was calling them every business day. Finally, today a guy there took pity and told me to have my lawyer deal with it because ex H clearly is not going to cooperate.
- my attorney wrote a letter to Susan and Ted's attorney asking Susan to write the report based on the information she has collected.
- she responded saying that she would like to see the girls for one last time before releasing the report - just the girls - and gave her availability.
- I wrote asking my attorney to have Ted's attorney confirm when he schedules the appointments.

At best we would see the report in January, given the Christmas season.

So for now I will focus on the job search since there is not much I can do to speed up the report beyond what I have already done.

Ted runs half-marathons. His results are publicly available. He regularly runs half-marathons, yet claims full disability due to back pain. My lawyer told me that for $3K he could order a vocational assessment of Ted to see what Ted should be able to make working. I am not disputing that he has back pain - I am disputing that his back pain is so disabling that he cannot engage in any work activity. I mean... I would never be able to run a half-marathon!! Actually, most people would not be able to run half-marathon, and yet they work.

So as soon as I make money, I would start saving towards ordering this assessment. The idea is that the assessment would result in a wage that could then be imputed to Ted. And it won't be minimum wage because he has a college degree. So it would be higher. On SSDI one can earn 800 dollars a month and still get full SSDI payment. Why is he not doing that? A dead weight on my shoulders PLUS he has thoroughly alienated my daughters. But the truth will win over with time, I am sure!

How it all came up - an old friend of mine whom I have not seen since 1997 but with whom I reconnected over email looked up Ted's full name in Google. And those running results came up just like that. My friend originally thought it was marathons - no, half-marathons, but still. So my friend said - and this is a fully disabled person? really???

And then it dawned on me, but the thing is, it is not that I did not know. I knew. I knew very well, but it did not occur to me to put two & two together. So I started working - I made a spreadsheet noting when he ran and for long. His times are pretty good for his age category... I must say. And I would never be able to run a half-marathon at all.

Anyway, I got that spreadsheet. Obviously, the spreadsheet only records publicly available results - Big Sur Half-Marathon here, another one there, a 10K run, another 10K run etc. BUT!! he must be training in-between. One cannot run a 10K once every two months and spend the rest in bed. Only continuous training can allow somebody to maintain that kind of long distance performance.

So I shared it with my attorney, and he agreed that Ted obviously must be training in-between half-marathons and that evidence is damning. Originally we wanted to use it as a (im)moral character evidence (gaming the system), but then Robert said that it could be used to reduce my support obligations. I hope he is right...