Family Law Attorney Drafts Starter Custody Agreement; Non-Custodial Parent Held in Contempt for 74.2°F Maintenance Violation

PORTLAND, OR — The Modified Consent Decree Governing the Care, Feeding, and Thermal Maintenance of Sourdough Starter Designated 'Pro Se,' filed March 4 in the domestic division of the Circuit Court of Multnomah County, runs to seventeen pages and contains four exhibits: a laminated temperature log, a color-coded feeding schedule aligned to the Gregorian calendar, a chain-of-custody protocol for the transfer vessel, and a signed acknowledgment from respondent Derek Vann that ambient kitchen temperature in his Pearl District condominium shall not fall below 74.2°F during any period of custodial occupancy. The starter is doing fine. Pro Se was propagated in November 2023 from a heritage culture maintained by Margaret Holloway, J.D., partner at Holloway & Crane Family Law, at 100% hydration. At her downtown kitchen counter, Pro Se reliably triples within four to four and a half hours at 75°F, reaching a peak pH of 3.9 before second-stage acidity suppresses further Leuconostoc activity — textbook performance for a mature Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis consortium. Saturday country loaves average an irregular open crumb with alveoli ranging 8 to 14mm. They post well. None of this required a court order. The court order came later. "My concern was always continuity of care," said Holloway, who drafted the custody agreement herself on a Friday evening and initially billed the three hours to an open client matter before reversing the entry. "Pro Se responds to temperature variation in ways that are measurable and documentable. If Derek's apartment drops to 71°F during an overnight bulk ferment, the fermentation window extends by forty to sixty minutes. That isn't a preference. That's microbiology." Derek Vann, a commercial real estate broker, received his copy of the agreement via certified mail and signed Exhibit C — the thermal maintenance acknowledgment — without reading past the recitals section. He believed he was acknowledging a parenting plan modification from a previous proceeding. He reports that he fed Pro Se three times during his February custody weekend and that the loaves, in his estimation, "turned out pretty good." The contempt citation arrived six days later. Holloway had equipped Pro Se's transfer vessel — a Weck 745 jar double-sealed with food-grade parafilm and wrapped in a dual-band neoprene sleeve — with an Inkbird IBS-TH2 Pro Bluetooth humidity and temperature sensor before the handoff. The data log, timestamped and exported to a shared Google Sheet filed as Exhibit D, showed a 38-minute window on February 9 between 1:14 AM and 1:52 AM during which ambient temperature registered 72.6°F: a deviation of 0.8°C outside the agreed tolerance. Holloway filed the motion the following morning, noting in the caption that the violation coincided with what would have been Pro Se's overnight bulk fermentation window had Derek initiated a loaf, which he had not. "I'm not being difficult," Holloway said. "The agreement specifies ±0.5°C. Zero-point-eight is a material breach. I've argued contempt on thinner facts in a different context." The motion was assigned to Judge Renata Solis, who has presided over Multnomah County's domestic division for eleven years. According to a court clerk who requested anonymity, Judge Solis read the motion twice, then called her clerk in and read it a third time aloud. The hearing is scheduled for April 17. Holloway has requested that Pro Se be present in its travel vessel for purposes of judicial inspection of the asset at issue. Holloway's associate, a third-year named Priya Mehta who was asked to cite-check the filing, describes the experience as professionally formative. She notes that the citation to *In re Marriage of Sorensen*, a 2019 appellate decision on heirloom asset classification, was both applicable and correctly formatted. "The starter is defined as a living marital asset in the agreement," Mehta said. "Which means the argument works. It technically just — works." Pro Se's most recent feeding occurred this morning at 6:47 AM: 20g culture, 20g King Arthur bread flour, 20g filtered water at 78°F. Holloway logged a 2.8× rise at the three-and-a-half-hour mark and noted the aroma as yogurt-forward with a mild acetone finish — the healthy heterofermentative signature of a culture in full metabolic stride. She described Pro Se's condition as thriving and her position in the April proceedings as strong. She has begun drafting proposed terms for the summer schedule. The document currently runs to eleven pages and does not yet include the scoring protocol addendum.