Yeah.... Jury Duty. Quite a bummer.

I wrote a letter to the Clerk of the County Court requesting that I be excused from jury duty. The response came back in record time, exactly two days, declining my request. I made my employers aware of this fact and cleared my schedule of patients for the following Monday. I called the Friday night before to see if I had to show up Monday and the recording did not call my jurer number. Well, after cancelling my entire schedule for Monday, which meant I had no work, I decided that just to be sure that I was not called, I needed to report. The letter also stated that if you did not report that you would be subject to a $500.00 fine....so, although I did not think I had to report, I had no work scheduled! I drove an hour to the courthouse on Monday and went through the initiation process for new jurers and signed in. I was in fact not supposed to be there that day but now that I signed in, I was not allowed to leave until I was formally dismissed sometime in the future. This was a mixed blessing. A week later I was dismissed as a member of a  "hung jury",  following a horrible experience as a jurer.  The horrible aspect of this experience were the "jurers" themselves!!

more down than up today...

..more change in the house. Christmas Eve we lost our third wire fox terrier. We had just lost her dam, that is, her Mother, when I last posted. The quality of life in our living space has improved tremendously which sounds dreadful in spite of our loss. She was 15 years old and a month. She had not, for years , enjoyed our company. She could no longer see or hear and after awhile, it became apparent she no longer enjoyed touch or affection from us. I would pick her up and she would give up and just lay her head beneath my chin as I stroked her hair, allowing me a few minutes until she had enough love. She would go outside and come back in and then begin barking incessantly to go outside again, ten minutes later. She was suffering from some form of dementia, to some degree, as if she had forgotten that she was just out a few minutes before. If you've ever lived in a situation where your home was divided by doors and gates to protect one dog from the others, you understand what I mean. The younger dogs naturally sensed her old age and inability to protect herself and would attack her if given an opportunity. She had little muscle tone and lacked the strength to lift herself from the floor, at 99 years of age. We protected her from them. Aferall, were it not for me, she would never have been born. I loved her and now I miss her even though my homelife is healthier than it has been in many years. This is committment and the end of another chapter in our homelife.

Life is good most days

and today was another of those days. We woke up to the sound of Kaley (one of our cats) asking for his breakfast. He usually insists around 4:45 a.m. and by the time the alarm goes off at 5:00. am , he may have bitten one of us already! His brother, Summer, is a totally different kind of cat. Summer never stalks us when he's hungry; he just goes to his place setting and waits for us to realize why he's patiently sitting there, waiting for one of us dummies to figure it out on our own! However, if Summer wants to come in from outside, he nearly breaks down the door, scratching and actually pulling the door open with his paw. Poor wild man Kaley just sits there looking up at the door, silent. Two brothers, so different in all ways except one; they both love to lie on top of us totally spread out, luxuriating in the long caresses they expect. Their purring makes it all worthwhile. I don't know how a person could live without some type of animal in their life. We have four dogs (opps! that was a slip...we lost the oldest dog three weeks ago) and two cats. We're always talking about adding more and different types of animals but come to our senses just in time. We have a nice balance now and living with them softens the real world tremendously.