The Rural Juror

I got summoned to jury service on Monday. I know everyone always gets the notice in the mail and groans, but I've never been called in before, so I was looking forward to a new experience. Also, the Yolo County Superior Courthouse is within easy walking distance from my house and on a normal Monday I have to drive 65 miles each direction in crappy traffic. So I'll just admit that it was not a bad thing to call in the night before and find out that I needed to go to court on Monday morning.

When I got there, it was just like going to Home Depot, except without the smell of lumber or the feeling that I have more DIY abilities than I really have. No, what I mean is that there was an automated check-in kiosk that scanned the barcode on the summons. Actually, there were three kiosks but one wasn't working according to the employee whose job it was to stand there and help people get the scanner to work properly. So you see, it was exactly like Home Depot except the kiosk didn't keep beeping because the item hadn't been put in the bag.

The good news is that the new courthouse is nice and spacious and the jury room is gigantic so I was able to snag a comfy chair next to the window without anyone next to me. There were probably around eighty people in the room by the time another employee came in and took roll. When she started at the top of the alphabet I was still rolling my eyes because we had just checked in and they already knew who was there, but -- someone had already skipped out. Theodore, you naughty boy, you can expect to get another summons in the mail soon.

Then we watched a quick video which reminded us that we were doing a great service to our country by showing up for jury duty (unlike Theodore!) and then we had a half hour recess. At this point I was trying to figure out how to switch my career to "professional juror" and I got half a page of my current novel written.

After recess, they sent all of us up to department eleven on the fifth floor.

Side note -- I hate elevators. I'm not really claustrophobic, but if I'm not in a hurry and it's only a few floors I'll usually find the stairs.

So seventy people lined up for the three elevators, and me and another ten people wandered around until we found the stairs and then started climbing. Only five floors, right? Piece of cake. Except each story in the new courthouse has high ceilings, so this was more like ten stories. After three flights of stairs I think all of us were regretting the decision. Silently regretting it because we didn't have the breath to speak. Then we finally made it to the fifth floor, walked down the hall to department eleven, and found out that all those bastards who used the elevator had taken all the seats.

When we walked into the room there were three high school students facing us. Then the bailiff -- who might have celebrated his eighteenth birthday at least two weeks before -- introduced them as the prosecutor, the public defender, and the defendant.

Some days I feel really old.

Then the bailiff took roll again. Theodore still wasn't there.

When the judge came in I was relieved to find he was at least my age so there was an adult in charge. The first thing he did was call out thirty names and send those people back downstairs again. I was starting to see some inefficiencies in the process but at least I had a seat.

The judge briefly explained that the case was for DUI, and that he expected it to be done by Thursday at the latest although he couldn't promise anything. Then he asked if anyone had a hardship that would make it impossible for them to serve.

About fifteen people raised their hands and we went through each one of them. In the end I think the judge let them all go, but most of them he sent downstairs to reschedule. I was secretly giggling as he grilled the first college student on whether he had talked to his professors about making up the absences. Of course he hadn't. I wouldn't have either when I was in college. It wouldn't have occurred to me that being in college wasn't a valid excuse for getting out of jury duty. But now that I'm older and see what entitled little snots college kids are, it was fun to watch the judge explain that college is a job like any other and that nobody wanted to go to jury duty. The students had to go reschedule. A few other people were primary caretakers who claimed they couldn't get anyone else to do what they did (and had to go reschedule). Three people didn't speak English well enough to serve (although the third one seemed comfortable enough to use slang, so I have my doubts). They didn't have to reschedule but I think the first two didn't understand what was going on so they might have rescheduled anyhow.

Finally eighteen random names were called (not mine!) and those people were seated in or in front of the jury box, and the fun began. The judge read off the list of people expected to testify and asked if any of the eighteen knew them.

How many people had been arrested or convicted of a DUI? (Clearly the whole designated driver thing hasn't caught on because fully a third of the potential jurors had a DUI in the past...)

Did anyone have any background in chemistry? (Apparently the defense was planning on challenging the blood alcohol results.) Woodland is only ten miles from Davis. We had three retired professors in the first group who were in fields that had some use for chemistry.

Did anyone have relatives in law enforcement? Turns out almost everyone does.

Every time someone answered in the positive the judge went through it with them and asked questions to see if the person could be fair to both sides.

Finally every person had to give their full name, what town they lived in, their occupation, and the occupation of any other adults that lived in the house. By the time we got to the fifth person this was going pretty quickly because everyone was ready for the question. And yet... the last guy, who'd listened to seventeen people answer the exact same questions before him... no. He gave his name. Then he had to be prompted on the rest. "Where are you from?" "Yolo." "The city of Yolo?" "No, Yolo County." "What city do you live in?" "Woodland." I'm really not sure how people like that go through life. He said he built buildings. "What kind of buildings?" "Big buildings, little buildings." Everybody who has dealt with contractors is nodding right now. This guy had found his tribe.

Then the judge turned it over to the attorneys. The defense and prosecution were pretty evenly matched, by which I mean that neither one could ask a clear question. The public defender was particularly bad about that, often starting the question in one direction and ending in another so that if someone answered "yes" it wasn't clear what they were agreeing to. The judge stepped in a few times and reworded the question after the potential juror became hopelessly lost.

Then we stopped for lunch. I took the stairs down to the first floor, walked home, let the dogs out, ate lunch, then walked back. I took the elevator back to the courtroom.

The attorneys finished confusing everyone with their questions. The defense attempted to remove a juror for cause, but the judge denied it. Then they alternated picking people. "The Defense would like to thank and excuse juror number..." "The People would like to thank and excuse juror number..." It was just like P.E. during grade school, but in reverse and a lot more polite.

Nobody was surprised when the village idiot was the first to be excused.

They freed up seven seats before they stopped, so another seven names were called out. I wasn't one of them.

Then the whole thing started again with the new people. The public defender looked like he thought the woman was pulling his leg when she said she was part of the Sheriff's Posse during the law enforcement questions. (We have a mounted group that does search and rescue operations in rural areas and also does PR at events.) The judge had to explain it to him. The public defender still couldn't say "posse" without looking confused and finally switched to calling it "that group". I started to feel sorry for him.

More confusing questions from the defense and prosecution. Most of the seven people just gave up on yes and no and talked about what they thought might be related to the answer. The judge stepped in and told the defense that he wasn't allowed to ask if anyone was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, but gave him an alternate wording that would be okay. The public defender repeated the revised question word for word.

I continued to feel old.

The attorneys took turns getting rid of the new people and stopped when they had twelve people total -- which meant they had to do it all over again because they still needed an alternate.

My name was the first to be called.

This time there were four of us. We knew all the questions. We had quick answers. We weren't members of the posse, but at least the public defender knew what a posse was now anyhow. I had to explain that my brother being the chief of lifeguards actually made him law enforcement but that didn't particularly bias me one way or the other. I had to say that I had been a veterinarian, so I had sent blood out to be analyzed, but that wouldn't keep me from going with the facts as presented. One woman, probably in her sixties, said that she didn't drive because she'd gotten her license when she was young, had three accidents, and decided the world was a safer place if she wasn't behind the wheel. The entire courtroom laughed.

At this point they only needed one person, and I was in the first seat. I didn't have any obvious bias one way or the other. I was pretty sure I was going to have to tell my boss that I'd be out until Thursday, especially when there was a long silence as both attorneys stared at their post-it notes.

Then... "The People would like to thank and excuse..."

Yep. I'd been rejected by a guy in a cheap suit. Story of my life.

I did the walk of shame through the room into the empty corridor, then took the elevator down to the first floor and walked home again.

It's Almost February!

*** 31 Jan 2018 -- I've unpublished the rough draft chapters, but if you want to the novella shoot me an email and I'll send you the whole thing as a pdf.
-------
So my sister sent me mail to ask why I haven't written a blog post since August. (Then, a few days later, she sent me another email asking me if I wanted another dog because she knows of a great dog that needs a new home. Because clearly someone who already has two dogs, four cats, and three birds is in dire need of another dog. But I digress.)

I have a bunch of answers, ranging from the politically angry to the generally snarky, but it all boils down to this -- because I haven't felt like it.

However, that's all going to change because February is Thingadailies month. That's right, it's the "make something and post about it every day" month. Last year I did the origami-like things that were fairly successful except for the one that really looked like a swastika and oh god, am I responsible for the angry yam being elected after all? * deep breath * Anyhow, that gave me something to do every day and then Scooter peed on them all and that was that.

This year I've decided to try something different.  I'm going to write and post one chapter each day, encouraging blog reader participation along the way.

Here are the "rules":

• Each day will be a new chapter.
• Chapters will be as long or as short as I feel they should be.
• The term "day" may actually refer to a collection of days if I can't get my act together. 
• I reserve the right to ret-con (i.e., go back and change things in prior chapters if necessary for plot purposes). I'll try to make a note of it if I do anything major. No promises though.
• Notes in the comments suggesting character names, inanimate objects, and plot twists will all be considered. I reserve the right to ignore suggestions (because I refuse to write a story about Girly McGirlyface and seven other characters all named Daryl, half of whom are women -- I KNOW HOW YOU WORK, INTERNET!) However, if you make it fun or interesting, I will try to play along.
• This will be PG-ish, by which I mean there might be the occasional short word of Germanic origin, but there won't be any explicit sex scenes posted here. Remember how I started this all off by saying my sister was complaining that my blog hadn't been updated? Family get-togethers don't need to be any more awkward than necessary.
• Annoying characters named George are probably named that way because of my big dog, not because of my sister's fiance. I just want to make that clear from the start.
• The genre is... cozy mystery. Unless I change my mind.
• I'll post the chapters here, but I'll also see if there's an easy way I can add a link to a pdf for people with Kindles and the like.
• Yes, this work is owned by me and I retain the copyright. (But let's be honest here -- there's not a huge market for first draft, unedited, unspell-checked books from a completely unknown author. No, I'm not particularly worried about someone stealing my work.)

So that's the plan. Feel free to give me suggestions.

And now here's a picture of the big dog in his favorite bed:

Pokemon Stop

So in an attempt to learn to at least tolerate the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+, I installed Pokemon Go.

This was a mistake.

I first knew something might not be right when I started it up and my cute little avatar was sharing the exact same pixels as not just one but two creatures. I couldn't select them. I couldn't catch them. I couldn't do anything except make the whole thing spin in circles.

After spending a while googling and posting a plea on Facebook, I changed my location settings and suddenly I wasn't all up in the Pokemons. Soon I, too, had a Rattata, which I gather is sort of like having an STD.

Then I got stuck on a screen that wanted me to pick a nickname. A nickname using only letters and numbers. A nickname that nobody else in the world had picked. Millions of people have downloaded this app in the last five weeks. After seven tries, I finally found "p9o8i7u67u8i". (It rhymes with "Tim".)

The whole point of the game is to get exercise and have fun, so I gathered the little dog and woke up the big dog -- it was after 6pm, so he was already sleeping on the bed -- and headed out for our usual evening walk.

Up to now I hadn't even tried to bring my phone with me on walks because I was convinced I would drop it on the sidewalk. It turns out that fear was justified. This phone is so big that I have a hard time holding it, and there is literally no way to hang on to it without triggering some option on the screen unless you balance it on a flat palm. So I took it out of my pocket while we were stopped for the dogs to sniff something and then Ginger tried to walk off and I almost dropped it on the concrete.

So I put it back in my pocket and learned that with the location services on, the phone uses so much power that it heats up quite a bit. Yes, the phone was literally burning my ass.

I still hadn't seen anything to catch when it got stuck on some random screen and I had to kill off the app.

I started it up again, and five minutes later it was asking me to pick a nickname again. Really? That was when I started to think that maybe I should throw it on the concrete deliberately because it would be super satisfying to hear it shatter into thousands of shards. Also, this was the point when I noticed that I had a stress headache.

Here's the final screenshot:

Basically, if you enjoy playing this, good for you. I'm glad you're out getting exercise and having a good time.

I still hate this phone.

They Don't Make Them Like They Used To

Long time, no read I know, but I've been busy with my new job which is almost exactly like the old job except now I'm an employee. There are only a couple of differences.

The first is this:

When I went in Monday my boss handed me a box with the shiny new phone on the right. I unpacked the box and started charging it. That's pretty much all I've done with it for the last two weeks. Every time I stop for a few minutes I have to plug it in. It's a bit like a Tamagotchi -- if I don't feed it often enough it dies. Hopefully I don't ever need to use it for anything because the battery life seems to be about ten minutes. I give it another week before I drop it and the screen shatters.

In contrast, the phone on the left, which constantly causes outcries of "Hey, that was the first phone I had in high school!" from the young 'uns, is about seven years old, has a battery which lasts for almost a week, and has been dropped on hard surfaces at least once a week without anything worse than a little paint chipping. One of the engineers even sought me out last week to borrow it because they couldn't find another phone old enough for something they were trying to test. Unfortunately, at some point in the next couple of years the network will probably stop supporting it. That's probably okay, though, since I mostly use it as an alarm clock.

The only other real change is that as an employee I'm not supposed to be allowed to telecommute. I'm not even going to try to explain this. In any case, I now have a second cubicle at an office halfway between my house and the people I actually work with. It's situated nicely between the Budweiser factory and the Jelly Belly factory, so I figure I'm set in case of a disaster. There are only about ten people in the building. There are no vending machines, which is probably a good thing. The microwave in the break room is huge (like, Thanksgiving turkey huge) and looks even older than my own microwave which I got used from my brother over thirty years ago. It's probably going to kill us all with the number of rads it's leaking, but I'll never have to wait more than thirty seconds for my food to get hot.

Tuesday I have to go relearn the secret company handshake along with all of the nineteen year-old newly-hired retail employees. It's going to be a very, very long day...

Some Days...

To alleviate the severe shortage of space to lie down in a three bedroom house with a gigantic yard, I bought some more dog beds.

So we've gone from this:

to this:

Meanwhile the three gigantic dog beds in the living room are sitting empty.

Not really how I had envisioned it working out.

"George, Don't Pee On Your Sister's Head!"

The house has been lacking a big dog for the past few years, so I rectified that this week. Meet Georgie:

He's a lovely five year old mumble-mumble-something-Shepherd mix who was looking for a place to live.

I took Ginger over to meet him at his foster home last Sunday,  and Ginger was pretty terrible but Georgie was good, and since I couldn't just swap dogs I brought Ginger back with me and adopted Georgie two days later. Better yet, he was 50% off. Such a bargain!

After a short detour to the Sheriff's Detention Center (Me: "Why do they have razor wire around the Solano County Shelter?"), I signed his papers and then picked him up.

The household has been adjusting pretty well. Georgie's about four times the size of Ginger. She can walk under him without ducking. This has led to a slight problem when they both run to sniff the same thing (which happens constantly on walks). They sniff, Georgie moves forward, lifts his leg, and pees on Ginger's head. Not ever having had a boy dog, I hadn't realized this would be a problem. Luckily Ginger is starting to back up when Georgie lifts his leg, so I think this phase is almost over.

Georgie also eats 4x the food and poops 4x the amount. Let's just say the yard will be kept short from now on.

Most importantly, Georgie is polite to the cats, even when they do things like this:

Yes, that's Ripley plopped in the middle of the one bed that Georgie sits on. He lay on the floor next to the bed for almost an hour. Eventually Ripley gave up and wandered off and Georgie got his bed back.

Another Day, Another Rejection

Remember back in the good old days before the Internet when you had to send a story via snailmail to get a rejection? You would stick some insane amount of postage on a manila envelope with your story and a self-addressed stamped envelope (aka SASE if you wanted to show you knew the cool lingo) and drop it in the box and then three months later you would get your SASE back with a letter saying "sorry, not what we want, try again later".

It's gotten easier. Now you just attach a file electronically (or paste the text into a box) and click on a button. And then the next day you get an email saying "sorry, not what we want, try again later". And then you go to the next website and do the same thing until that story has gone around the world enough times to retire. Then you start the same thing with the next story.

The process has gotten so efficient that it's almost as fast as just sending the story straight to the recycle bin.

It's okay, though. It keeps me amused.

In the meantime I'm working on my Camp NaNo novel. It's moving forward nicely. It's almost time to kill off someone. He's a jerk, though, so I don't feel too bad about it.

Obligatory graph:

Astute readers will notice that my bars are slightly under the ideal trend line. It turns out that sleep deprivation is not conducive for writing. Clearly the only solution for this problem is to quit my job. I mean, eventually I'll make a sale, right?

(The delusion is real with this one!)