It was time to go home. The day was a little rainy but not terribly so. While I was getting ready for the day, I heard a knocking on my window. This was a little more than odd, because I was on the fifth floor. I turned around to see a seagull, knocking with its open beak. I ignored the bird, but he was quite insistent, staying around for at least 10 minutes. He flew off but soon returned, knocking and knocking. I finally just ignored him, but he stayed there for quite a while.

I finished packing, had a pastry, checked out of my room, and went downstairs to catch a cab. We stopped by to pick up Matt at his hotel. He was waiting outside, so that did not take too long. On the way to the airport, we had an interesting chat with the cab driver about the homeless people in his city ("there's a welfare system; if they still need to beg, they must be on drugs") and about legalizing marijuana use (he was for it). He got us to the airport in plenty of time, and I gave him a very generous tip.

Matt's flight was 3 or 4 hours after mine. Our plan was to check in, find somewhere to eat, then clear security and wait together. Unfortunately, this did not work out so well. I went to my airline to check in, and Matt went to his. I had to fill out the customs card, and while I did, the line was invaded by a Japanese tour group. I had to wait behind the whole lot of them, who were loud, slow, and annoying. While I was waiting, Matt arrived back at my airline. His airline would not let him check in until noon, and it was only 9am or so.

Then I found out that I had to go through U.S. Customs right away and had to go straight from the ticket counter to security and customs. So there went our breakfast plans. In security, I was randomly selected (AGAIN!) to be publicly molested. SERIOUSLY! I went through security and customs and easily found my gate. I did a little window-shopping and then decided that I was still hungry. I decided to try Tim Horton's, because I had seen their stores all over Vancouver. Not a good choice. The chicken salad sandwich was mediocre, and the chicken noodle soup was tasteless and watery. I was very unhappy and was glad that I still had snacks left over--snacks that I did not want to bring on the plane.

The plane arrived, and I was able to board without incident. I read a book throughout the whole flight, which, except for a bit of excess turbulence, was rather uneventful. I got to LAX, where my dad picked me up. There was a lot of rush hour traffic already, but I made it home after a successful conference! :)

In the past few weeks, Southern California has experienced at least 3 storms in a row. We even had some snow (not in L.A.). We are not used to the rain. We can't drive in it. And it causes mudslides. And most people don't like it.

But after the rain, Southern California is GORGEOUS! The air is clean and crisp and clear. Right now there's snow on the mountains, and they are beautiful to look at.

Today I took Milo to Petco to have a bath. I had to wait almost three hours for him to finish, so I did a little shopping, had some lunch, and sat outside reading. It was the perfect afternoon for being outside. I really should take advantage of our weather more often. Plus, I actually got some work done, which was something I really needed to do. I read a great article that I am pretty sure I can use for the dissertation, so now I feel productive as well. LOL

I think that this year I need to spend more time outside. With all of the reading I'm going to have to do, it is not going to be that difficult to do. Right???

A day off is an interesting concept for me. After all, I don't have a "real" job. OK, the job itself is real, but the hours really aren't. So even though I can't really take off and go anywhere for more than a couple of days at a time, I do have a lot of free time during the day. Thus, the idea of a day off is different than that of most people, I guess. Nevertheless, it was nice to have a real day where I didn't go to work at all, and it was even nicer (at least in theory) to be able to spend the day with my old friend M (read: dysfunctional relationship).

He arrived about an hour after we had planned, due to some communications issues. (We kept missing each other on the phone.) He got to meet Milo, which was nice. Milo actually liked him, after the initial wariness. Then we were off to breakfast. I kind-of wanted to go to Foxy's, but I hate the parking there. So we just went to Ihop, where I had country fried steak and eggs (no lectures, please), and he had a strawberry sundae. It was mediocre, but I love breakfast anyway.

Then it was off to the beach. There was some tension in the car because I didn't exactly know where we were going. It would have been easier if he had told me which beach he wanted to go to, but he we pretty vague and then was annoyed because I managed to confuse the both of us. *sigh* We finally ended up at Santa Monica, found parking, and walked to the pier. I hadn't been there in FOREVER, so it was fun to see it again. We walked around a bit and then rode the Ferris wheel. That was really fun but very overpriced. We walked around some more and then headed toward the actual beach. The beach was crowded--one of the reasons I rarely go to Santa Monica. But we sat on the sand, watched people, and talked. That turned out to be very nice--or so I thought.

After running out of quarters, we headed back into town to have dinner. We faced a bit of a dilemma, because we were leaving right at the height of traffic, so I suggested an alternate route. Actually, I thought I suggested heading back to Century City and hanging out at the mall until the traffic was better, but I think he just heard the directions and not the part about the mall. *sigh* We ended up being in the car for a really long time. Unbeknownst to me, he was getting more and more annoyed with driving. *heavy sigh* It all came to a head when I managed to get us lost. (I really did think those streets met!) Soon I was in big trouble for getting us lost, not paying attention, and not respecting his feelings by making him drive for so long. (Gee, I only drove us everywhere for 4 years . . . why in the world would my feelings about that make a difference?) *enormously heavy sigh*

We finally ended up in Pasadena, where we had dinner at Green Street Restaurant. The food is really good there, even though it's not where I was planning to go. It's amazing how good warm, freshly-made potato chips can be. Dinner was OK, though still kind-of tense. I had wanted to go to the movies afterward, but I figured that wasn't a good idea. I wanted to go to Vroman's, but Borders seemed closer to walk to, so we went there. I was very sad, because the day hadn't turned out how I'd hoped. So even though most of the day was nice, it was now ending on a not-so-great note. He drove me home and gave me a hug good-bye.

I don't know if I'll ever see my friend again. I miss him already. He was my best friend, and now he's gone . . .

One of the interesting things about living in L.A. is the famous people that one sees randomly. For example, last month I spotted Eva LaRue shopping at H&M in Glendale. I've been a fan of hers since she was on "One Life to Live" a gazillion years ago. And, of course, there was the time I sat in a jury waiting room with Ian Ziering. I blogged about it here.

Teaching in private schools in Southern California is interesting, too. One tends to run into well-known people or people who are connected to well-known people. (By the way, it is this latter group that is more annoying than the first.) So I could relate a little to the scenario in this article from the L.A. Times. I've met people who work at Oaks Christian, and I can only imagine that teaching there is similar to working at other private schools. Anyway, since most of my readers are from not-here, I thought you might get a kick out of life in La La Land.

So, for those of you who are out of state and wondering, here is a map of the fires in Southern California. I couldn't find a better one that was static.

If you look at the middle of the clear area, you will find "Los Angeles." I live/work/etc. pretty much in that little area. So--at least for right now--I'm not near any of the activity. I'm praying that it stays that way. More later. I need to get to work.

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.