So, as I mentioned before, I reported for jury duty last Wednesday. After sitting around for most of the day, my number was called for a panel at around 2:35. I was asked to wait so that I could bring up our group's paperwork to the courtroom, and I did so. While I waited, I learned that nearly everyone--except one lucky guy--had been called from our jury room. Upon arriving upstairs, I saw the previous group still waiting in the hall--including the guy who had talked to me all morning and Mr. Ian Ziering.

We were asked to enter the courtroom about 20 minutes later, where we finally saw the judge, the district attorney, the defense attorney, the defendant, the bailiff, the court reporter, and the court clerk. After being sworn in, numbers were chosen for the jury box. Twenty people were chosen--and I was among them. Honestly, how come I never will any of the sweepstakes that I enter, but I seemed to "win" on this jury thing?

We had to answer several questions about ourselves, first asked by the judge and then the attorneys. It was a long process that lasted for the rest of Wednesday and all of Thursday. I found myself irritated because people kept feeling the need to answer every question by telling the judge how "important" their job was and how "inconvenient" this was to their life. The judge tried to explain to them that no one is any more important than any other and that everyone is inconvenienced by jury duty. But they felt the need to continue to waste time on it. Eventually, most of those people were let go, and we empanelled a jury at about 3:00 on Thursday afternoon. Then we spent a little over an hour choosing the 5 alternates.

These were sworn in on Friday morning, and we were finally off to the races. We heard the opening arguments and began to hear testimony from the first witness. Sometime in there we had lunch. I was asked to lunch by a couple of girls, and we walked to Starbucks in the heat. I had a sandwich and a tomato-mozzarella salad and an iced tea. Quite delicious. Oh, we also saw a guy that we THOUGHT was Steven Weber, the actor. Isn't L.A. great?

The afternoon was more of the same, until we were finally allowed to leave. *sigh*

Thoughts: 1) We are not allowed to talk about the case, but I am allowed to say that it is a murder case;
2) I missed Phil Specter walking up and down the hall sometime on Thursday. Bummer;
3) This case is expected to last 10 days, which I am NOT thrilled about;
4) People really shouldn't think that their lives are more important than others, because they're not.

I received a summons for jury duty last month and promptly forgot about it. I put the dates in my calendar and figured I'd show up when it was time. I didn't notice that the summons said I was supposed to register by phone within [some number of] days of receiving the paper. Oops. I finally figured it out and registered by phone a couple of weeks later. I was a little worried that I would get in trouble, but I didn't.

So, my instructions said to call the given toll-free number the weekend before I was scheduled to serve and to follow the instructions. I was scheduled to start this past Monday, and it was supposed to last all week. So I called last Saturday. Yay! The instructions said I did not have to report on Monday and to please call on Monday after 5pm. I called on Monday. Yay! The instructions said I did not have to report on Tuesday and to please call on Tuesday after 5pm. I called on Tuesday. So sad. The instructions said to please report to the courthouse on Wednesday at the ungodly hour of 7:45am. Yuck.

I was very unhappy that the assigned parking lot was 6 blocks away, some of the walk being uphill (and some of it downhill--which means that the old "it was uphill both ways" actually rang true here). With my sciatica, this was NOT a good way to start the morning.

I arrived at the courthouse and found the appropriate room. I've been through this a couple of times before, and the procedure is pretty much the same, so I expected a lot of sitting around and waiting. As we waited for the person to give us our original instructions, a guy sat next to me and started talking to me. He talked and talked and talked and talked. He was nice enough, but we had absolutely NOTHING in common, and I couldn't figure out why he would want to talk to someone that obviously was the complete opposite of him. I mean really, he started off the conversation with, "So, I went to OzFest last weekend." And it went downhill from there. Anyway, he talked to me for most of the morning until he put himself to sleep, and I moved to a table so I could work on my math book.

We were given a short break so I could make some phone calls and grab a snack from the snack shop. How funny was it when I walked back into the jury room and saw that Ian Ziering was sitting and talking on a phone. Apparently, he'd been called for jury duty, too! I spent the rest of the morning watching TV and working on my math book. The funniest part of the morning for me was when the local news aired a story about next season's Dancing with the Stars, and they showed a picture of Ian Ziering for about 2 seconds. I was like, hey, I'm in the same room with him!

Soon it was lunchtime, and I pretty much stayed in the same place after grabbing a couple more things from the snack bar. Those of us who were in that part of the room became pretty involved in All My Children. Stephen called me, and I was telling him about my day. Someone came by and asked if he could have the Car and Driver magazine that was on the table in front of me. I nodded yes and kept talking. He asked if it was mine, and I shook my head no and kept talking. I looked up, and it was Ian. He then sat on the couch that was essentially right next to my chair and read his magazine and watched TV. Then he moved to another part of the room where I could see him. By then, the show had changed to One Life to Live. Someone on the show had some hilarious line about "your rapist, stalker, psycho boyfriend." (It was actually funnier than that, but that was the idea.) I looked at Ian, he looked at me, and we exchanged a smile because it was such bad dialogue. After a few minutes, he sat on the couch next to me again.

Soon thereafter, he was called to a panel. They called his name, and when he left, he said, "It's like being called to the principal's office." I was called to another panel about an hour later, and when looking for the appropriate courtroom, I saw him waiting in the hall for his court to start. I was hoping that he would be there again today, but I had no such luck. Oh well.

I'll tell you more about the panel some other day when I have more time, as this post is getting rather long.