Adventures in Jury Duty

It all started with the joy of getting up at 5:30 to feed The Cat. . .

• Train ride
• Four-block walk (ruminating on how much I do not enjoy being in the city by myself)
• Stop for coffee
• Walk too far and--after enjoying the view of Louise Nevelson's sculpture--ask a nice older gentleman who I think was wearing a city uniform (not sure for which service) to point out the entrance to the building (BTW Sara knows why I know who Louise Nevelson is)
•  Get purse x-rayed by security, then personally scanned by security and thanked for doing my civic duty
• Instructions delivered live by one person and then via instructional video read by a justice who says "particular" the same way my Great-Aunt E. used to ("par-tick-ler")
• Wait through all the names called and numbers assigned, and there I am near the tail end of the second selection set
• Seeing the inside of a courtroom, with a real judge!  Neat!
• Sitting through all the questions. . . I honestly could not say yes to any of the screening-out-problems questions, and being at the tail end--not selected for the jury!
• Back to the waiting room where it is freezing; reading for about half an hour
• Another half an hour later, after all the other "non-selecteds" have returned, we get our certificates and are outta there
• Walk four blocks back
• Have a soft pretzel and some Coke Zero (to settle my stomach which was bothered by "woman troubles" all morning) and people-watch as I wonder what happened to what used to be a nice shopping center (fugly neon and sequined clothes in the display window? Yuck!)
• Miss the train by a couple of minutes, of course; sit and read and people-watch some more
• Finally back to my car by 2:00

All that adventure--and to think, I get a check for $40 or so in the mail for it in a couple of weeks!

I wonder how things went at school without me.