Update: Spring Break is Springing

So, this is spring break for me, which means ORDINARILY I would be writing A TON and finishing something, in this case the Tano book I’ve been working on.

However, this particular spring break is very busy for me, because allllll the stuff I needed to do sometime, I scheduled for this week, on the grounds that it’s convenient to do stuff in spring break plus we’re not likely to have an ice storm in March (I realize I could have been mistaken about that, but luckily no, we’re having beautiful weather). Many, many smallish projects, plus putting heaps of papers in order to hand to a CPA, plus starting seeds, plus the beautiful weather means all the dogs ought to go to the park. All I can say is, last year at this time, Morgan had puppies, and bam! there went that spring break. So nothing is that busy or nearly that stressful this year.

Meanwhile!

I suddenly realized I should add another vignette to the vigil chapter in Midwinter [not the real title], I wrote another chapter of “Sekaran,” and yes, I’m also moving ahead with Tano’s book, but not that fast at the moment.

Also, I am now, as of last week, on a grand jury for the next six months. Yes, that was the third time I got a jury summons in two years, but this time the summons was for the local court system, thank heaven, and for a grand jury instead of a regular jury.

I had to look up what a grand jury actually does, which, to put it in a nutshell, is this: the grand jury listens to a fifteen-minute presentation by the prosecutor’s office regarding a specific case and decides whether there is enough evidence to move forward with that case and bring it to trial. We do that over and over, for around thirty cases per day. It turns out that here, in my small town / rural county, this is not a big deal. Or rather, this is obviously a giant big deal in terms of responsibility, but it is not something that is a huge time commitment, because the prosecutor’s office stacks up all the cases and presents them in one day per month.

And — again, I think this probably depends a lot on locale — but it turns out the court and the prosecutor’s office here is remarkably easy to work with. The judge explained what the grand jury would do and the basic commitment and then asked who, out of the fifty summoned potential jurors, would actually like to serve on the grand jury. About seven people stood up. Then the judge asked who had a problem with serving, and one at a time various people stood up and explained that they were the mother of triplet toddlers or whatever — I’m making that up, of course. I mean whatever might be a concern. I said my mother was 89 and she was fine right now, but what if something happened? And the prosecutor stood up and said, basically, “We should have explained this earlier, but there is no problem if some emergency gets in the way. We’ll have a zillion alternate jurors. If you can’t make it on a specific day, that’s fine.” They even turn out to be flexible with the dates. “Which would work best for you all, this date, this date, or this date?” So there are no problems with conflicts with the dates and this sure was a load off my mind.

So I said, “Really? Well, in that case move me to the list of people who would be fine with serving on the jury.” The judge selected basically everyone who volunteered and then about ten more people. Then they dismissed the alternates and everyone who had been selected for the actual jury heard a dozen cases that very afternoon.

And this is going to be somewhat grim at times because it turns out that one of the main reasons the prosecutor’s office decides to use a grand jury for a particular case is that the case involves child abuse and they are keeping the child out of the courtroom as much as possible and reducing the amount of crap the child is going to have to go through. That’s not the only reason, but it’s a big one. So that is going to be ugly. But at least it is a darn good reason to go through a grand jury. Also, did you know — I bet you did not know — that there is such a medical specialty as a “child abuse pediatrician”? Because I did not know that. I can’t imagine a worse medical specialty. If you lined every possible medical specialty up in a long, long list with the easiest at the bottom and the hardest and worst at the top, that would be at the very tippy top of the entire list and the next worst would be way, way down below that.

So that was last week.

Despite all the myriad tasks lined up for this week, it IS spring break and I DO expect to get a lot done. Including putting together the next newsletter, which I will send out on the 15th. It’ll be the 15th every month this year unless I have some important reason to move it; eg, a sale is scheduled for some other time.

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