In late April, California celebrated school bus driver day. Pete Meslin, director of transportation for Newport-Mesa Unified School District in Orange County, has worked with and around school bus drivers for almost his entire career.

When I was in-house counsel for the district, I tried to make it a practice to follow up verbal discussion with a short email depicting what we had discussed. I began the practice only after having my "words" come back to me as gospel, when I hadn't said – or at least meant – what the listener had heard.

I had a gum graft two weeks ago. No fun, but not as bad as I'd anticipated. In fact, I was made more comfortable during the procedure with the help of a healthy dose of nitrous oxide.