As you may have surmised

As you may have surmised by my lack of Wednesday post, I did indeed get called in for jury duty. I didn’t actually get PICKED for jury duty, I simply had to sit around in a room all day ready to serve if they happened to call my name. Which they didn’t. We were informed early on by Ed Bradley in a video that we shouldn’t think of it as “just sitting around” but instead as “fulfilling our civic duty.” You can imagine how this changed my perception of things greatly. I brought a book and read a lot and ended up making a jury buddy with the girl sitting next to me. Let me tell you: if you ever have jury duty you should make a jury buddy. It makes the time pass much more swiftly if you are able to point out to another person that that guy has a comb over that starts at the base of the skull near his neck and sweeps up over the entire skull. There was a moment where we were afraid we’d have to come back on Friday (thus claiming another vacation day) and that was fun to bitch about, too. After lunch they started dismissing groups of people, but they made sure to wait until the very last group to include our names, which means we sat there until 4:00 fulfilling our civic duty. This would have been more tolerable if they gave any inkling that they were going to call more people to sit on juries, but they had called the last group of people for that about an hour before lunch, leaving us with the knowledge that they were just teasing us. For fun.

But anyway, dismissed is dismissed, so I’m done for another six years. I did some shopping at Macy’s to celebrate and got a cute jacket—originally priced at $100—for $5 (after some major discounts, sales, and a gift card) and a shirt and tie for J. Shirt and tie shopping is a lot harder than it sounds. Just finding the right size shirt is a chore when you’re trying to match up all the little numbers that make up a shirt size. Then there’s the colors and the patterns and corresponding tie colors and patterns. I almost went blind, let’s just leave it at that. But J looked right nice for Thanksgiving, so I guess it was worth it.

Mashed potatoes + cashew gravy + yams + orange cranberry sauce + cranberry muffins + grilled veggies + pumpkin cheesecake + apple pie + pecan pie + chai tea + family + even more wedding presents + nice train rides = Thanksgiving 2005.

I had brunch with Sweet Lucy this weekend and she mentioned that she always feels sorry for me when she reads my blog because my cats sound like such assholes. I thought maybe others had this impression, so I’d like to clarify that it is only Max who is a total asshole. He is the one who is at war with the cat in the back yard and scrambles and hisses at the window at all hours; he is the one who cannot be defeated by squirts of water; he is the one who repeatedly leaps up onto our high areas and kills nice figurines and artwork. Pinky is sugar and spice. Although, I will mention that she has recently decided to sleep with me at night. Being the insanely picky cat that she is, she will only sleep on a small patch of sheet that is right on the edge of the bed next to me. She starts off the night all compact, but as she gets deeper into sleep, she starts increasing her density and shifting her weight against my back until sometime in the middle of the night I will realize she has taken over my side of the bed completely and I am locked into position halfway across the bed. I can usually shift her over, but for a cat that will hide under the bed if you look at her funny any other time of the day, she becomes amazingly difficult to maneuver. Almost like she’s made of lead and is being held in place by a series of magnets aligned under the mattress.

Hogged beds, locked up breakables, constant vigilance, loss of sleep…aren’t these things supposed to be for couples with human babies? I think we’re getting the raw end of some deal.

--------