uggghhhh cont.

I love this bank of red phones, I feel like I'm supposed to rush here as soon as the verdict is in and call the folks in the newsroom.

In the meantime I'm missing a beautiful day so I can participate in the justice system.

Although to be honest I'm kind of sick of the justice system.

I prepared myself early for a long day when the woman came over the loudspeaker at 8:00 saying, "well folks, this is normally when I would start my introduction but it seems our entire computer system is down.  We've never had this happen before so I'm not really sure what is going to happen but we'll just figure it out as we go along."

That's always what you want to hear.

At least the court stenographer has framed pictures of her dogs lining her area so I have something to look at while the endless juror questions continue after this lunch break.

uggghhhh

I tried my best.  Guess I can look forward to an early morning adventure next week.

I really don't like the idea of somebody else's fate being in my hands.

to Kinkos and back

I've been summoned to serve on jury duty in the great city of new york, finally.  I'm a little disappointed that I finally get called now that I'm not living there, I would have loved to have gone.  I feel like jury duty is one of those experiences that most people have shared, yet each experience is so different.  And if I'm going to serve jury duty I might as well do it in new york, the odds that I'd get a case involving some nutso would be high.

But sadly I am not going to be able to serve since I am not living in nyc at the moment so I had to go to Kinkos down here and make copies of my drivers license and bills to my florida address.  I decided to walk since it was a nice day and traffic in Sarasota is usually nightmarish, especially in the afternoon.  Scott came with me and we ended up finding a lot of fun things in the neighborhoods between the house and kinkos.

For example, that tree.  I love that tree.  It was hard (as usual) to capture the spectacle of it on my phone but it was really really huge and just had a perfect single layer of leaves covering its perimeter.  From outside it looked like this giant full tree but then when you walk under the first branch you realized that it was actually completely open inside like an umbrella or an igloo.  It was wild!  I'm not sure what kind of tree it is but I feel like it would make a great tree for kids.

Less whimsical and more disturbing was what I found in the front yard of another house down the street:

You might not notice him in this picture but trust me, our eyes locked from down the street.  I don't know why but there was something unsettling about him.

I was really scared going up to take this picture.  I figured either some big dog, or man, would come barreling out of the house thinking that I was going to steal their precious robot.  My other fear was that the robot was going to come to life at which point I probably would have started crying.

But nothing happened, perhaps the most sinister scenario of all.  Several months from now I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night and go to the kitchen to get water and look out in the backyard to see him sitting in a patch of moonlight.  Watching.  Waiting.

Anyways, does anybody know how seriously they take the jury duty stuff in the city?  I was looking at the form and it said that I had to reply within 10 days and I'm fairly sure it was mailed to my apt in nyc back in January.  Will I be in trouble?  Am I going to have to come back to ny just for jury duty?  That would be pretty typical.