At 5:01pm today, I got the slightly unwelcome news that I have to show up at the LA courthouse tomorrow at 7:45am for jury duty. There are three possible scenarios now:

1. I sit in the courthouse until 5pm and never get called, and then I’m done with jury duty for at least 12 months
2. At some point during the day I get called into a jury, subsequently dismissed, and am done with jury duty for at least 12 months
3. I get called into a jury and they like me, and then I’m stuck there for an indeterminate number of days.

I’m kind of hoping for #2, actually. It would be fun to go through a bit of the process, plus I’d get dismissed before 5pm and would beat the horrible crunch getting out of the parking lot. #3 would suck for a lot of reasons, mostly having to do with how incredibly busy I am at work these days. Caltech pays for 10 days of jury duty, so that’s not the problem; it’s just that I’ll probably wind up working nights and weekends to keep from falling behind. I’m not really a fan of working outside office hours; I prefer to sit on my ass and vegetate.

To celebrate my impending doom, I got a library card. As I stepped inside the Glendale Public Library, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t even been inside a library since college. And I hadn’t been inside a non-school library since… umm… I’m not sure, but an embarrassingly long time.

See, I always buy my books. I don’t know why, when there are perfectly good library books sitting around that you can pick up for free. I got into the habit when I was young and living in South Carolina, and the library didn’t carry much in the way of science fiction and fantasy - after all, only heathens read those books, and the South Carolina libraries weren’t big on sending their readers to hell.

But books get expensive, and also take up a lot of space. So, with the possibility of a 9-hour day sitting in a courtroom with nothing to do looming over me, and being out of already-owned books to read, I decided to make good on my promise to myself to quit throwing away money on books.

Sadly, the library only had one of the books that I wanted, so I went and bought the other one. (New hardcovers tend to have long waiting lists at the library, so I guess it’s still no good for those super-long fantasy series when I have to have the new book RIGHT THIS SECOND.)

The book I checked out of the library was Listening to Prozac, which I can’t believe I haven’t already read. As I was checking it out, the girl in line next to me noticed the title and asked me if it was actually about Prozac. She announced that she was on Paxil. I was a bit thrown - I mean, I’ve always been very up front about the fact that I’m on Prozac, and I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed of, but this was the first time I’d ever had a stranger tell me what psychiatric medications they were on. Either she’s part of a new enlightened generation, or she’s just really neurotic (after all, she is on Paxil).

Somehow, I doubt tomorrow will be nearly this interesting.

Well, I’m home sick with a cold.

So what’s the bright side?

This is the first cold I’ve had since last August, which might be a record for me in terms of consecutive healthy months. Also, it’s not really that bad a cold. It’s bad enough that I’m keeping my germs home away from my co-workers, but I’m not nearly as miserable as I usually am when sick. There are no horrible white spots on my throat, no enormously swollen glands. I don’t have a cough. It doesn’t hurt to talk or swallow. I’m just really stuffed up and slightly muzzy-headed, which I can live with.

This is the first year that I’ve gotten the flu shot, and so far I feel like it’s helped. A bunch of nasty colds and flus went around my office that I didn’t get - that’s a first; I usually catch everything. And now that I finally caught something, it’s pretty mild - another first.

It’s pretty hard to prove either way, of course; maybe this is just a good year for me, with or without flu shots. But I think I’ll get it again next year.

I don’t know why I’ve been so reluctant to blog lately. I can’t blame it entirely on lack of bloggable material, because it’s actually been a fairly busy month so far. A2 and I even spent the whole day Monday taking pictures at the beach; here’s what I have to show for it so far, prior to more careful editing to remove all the CRAPOLA that got stuck all over my lens:

Birdie at Santa Monica beach:

Pretty sunset from Leo Carillo:

Oh, and here’s my favorite shot, taken by A2. It shows off my best feature: my incredible expanding ass.

I would say that’s definitely part of my lack of blogging lately. I don’t want to come on here again, as I do several times a year, and bitch about being fat and how hard it is to lose weight. But honestly, I don’t have anything else to talk about. I’m back up to 200 lbs, and although I’m faring pretty well at getting said ass to the gym on a regular basis, I am majorly SUCKING at eating healthy. I’ll never understand why it’s so hard to, say, NOT eat at McDonald’s every night that Jeff is out of town. But it is.

So I’m off to the gym now in hopes of burning off a few french fries, at least. Maybe I can lose that 10 lbs again that I always lose and then put back on. Maybe I’ll finally lose the other 40 after that. We’ll see.