Stress

Today did not meet my expectations. Let's just say that.

I was super happy doing laundry, hanging it dry, patching a duvet cover that the cat ate, and sarting to make piles of my mom's stuff in my home office so that I can, as a local sportscaster says cleanse the palate of the eye. 

This morning mrguy comes in the kitchenden and asks me to look at something really weird. There is a ton of water pooling in the primary bathroom, the vanity, the closet -- coming from who knows where. We finally figure out that it is coming from the sprinkler system. Everything probably needs to get tweaked now that we had people prune and take out a few trees. He cleaned up the water. I went back to blogging and looking at an auction.

After the baseball game, mrguy asks for my help in figuring out which sprinkler head is pointing the wrong direction. I ask him if he can try to figure it out without me and ask for help if he needs it, because my auction item is coming up soon. The closet window is open. That wasn't the direction that the water seemed to be coming from. Uh...

He starts working on the problem, and comes in with a look on his face. Water has started pouring into the closet through the open window, from a broken sprinkler head. Like a fountain. He turned off the water right away, but the aftermath was horrendous. All of my clothes were sopping wet, but there wasn't anywhere to hang them dry because I'd done all of the laundry. Duffle bags were filled as if they were buckets. My walnut jewelry box was humid. Even my clown shoes were doused.

Mrguy used every towel and every paper towel to clean up the mess. I have the dehumidifier going in the closet. My silica bags that I stash everywhere started to pop open, so I have to vacuum. It's a total shit show. I was so proud of making progress in putting my house back together post parental death, but I've really taken a few steps back today.

I usually have the reserves to laugh when life is really dumb. But the stress of it all, and mrguy doing all of this work while his treatment has him feeling poopy makes me sad.

I bid wrong and did not win my auction even though I put in a bid that was more than the winning bid. Operator error. Why does my hand smell like sandalwood. Good grief!

Sorry for my egregious mixing of tense in this entry. It's been a bit much. 

Jury Duty 2025

This was my first experience with being on a jury. It was fine, but frustrating. Prior to this, I didn't know that everything seems to take forever. And when you get in the jury room, things that you thought were obvious are not obvious to others. And that when everybody lies on the stand, you have a bunch of conflicting evidence that none of the jurors can agree on.

Here's the summary: a couple who lives together has a fight. The woman leaves and goes to her sister's place. She doesn't pick up when the man calls her, so he drives over to the sister's place. In the meantime, a friend (who is also a delivery guy) delivers a pizza to the two sisters. The man sees the two sisters and the pizza guy talking in the apartment parking lot and drives into the pizza guy's car, causing damage. He gets out of the car and says that he's caught his girlfriend (i.e. cheating). He and his girlfriend resume the fight. He wants her to come with him and talk. She says no, you always go too far. He picks her up and brings her toward his car. He puts her down. They continue arguing. She agrees to go with him. He puts her in the back seat of the car and he drives away.

They are still in a relationship, but there is a protective order that prevents them from seeing each other.

This was a bilingual case, and we were told to ignore everything but what was in English, be it the written translations of 911 calls or the interpreter on the stand. Several of the jurors understood the original language.

The defendant doesn't testify, which is his right. The alleged victim, the pizza guy and the sister all testify, along with a police officer, who is only responsible for part of the scene of the 911 call.

During the trial I thought the whole thing was a mess. I was sure that we were not going to convict. But then I flipped. And there were two days of arguing. And that conflict in the jury room, although not angry, was awful. I started to shut down. Two others and I were the holdouts for conviction on all counts. It was hard.

It's not like I *wanted* to convict the guy. But I felt like I was interpreting the evidence and the instructions the way that the court was asking us to.

We were split on three of the four counts, and not even close. We asked for help from the judge, and the judge asked us to reread a specific line of the instructions. Suuuuuper unhelpful. We're not dummies. 

We decided to see if overnight thoughts helped. They did not. I, for one, could not sleep. Also I felt trapped by my fellow jurors who sometimes followed instructions and sometimes did not, especially where translations were concerned. Or they'd tell me I wasn't allowed to consider something a certain way, but if they used the same methodology to make their own argument they didn't realize they were doing the same thing they'd disregarded when I was speaking. It started to feel unfair. I started to feel exceptionally miserable. I went into the last day of deliberation super bummed.

We turned in our votes and the judge asked us return to the jury room to deliberate further. I actually gave her angry eyes. Especially when she said that if we needed guidance, to ask. That made me so mad because that was total performative bullshit. Her help was proven to be unhelpful before.

We went back. I said swear words, and shared that this case was too complicated to be tried as a single trial, my frustration about all of the conflicting evidence, and that we couldn't even start over and decide which pieces of evidence were valid for the four counts. On these things we all agreed. The person who I disagreed with most said we had to have an open mind. I calmly explained that I'd been on her side until we started deliberating, and that was a large example of me having an open mind. One guy got super passionate and started smacking the post-it board. There were disagreements over whether, in thinking about false imprisonment regarding the man picking the woman up, you could consider anything that happened before (like that the guy had just driven into another guy's car and loudly said that he'd caught his girlfriend cheating with him). 

The whole thing went down in flames. Mistrial on three counts, except for the hit and run.

In the past six weeks I've had Covid, my mom died and I had to clean out her apartment, our beloved friends were here (that was the good part), and then my vacation was truncated by two weeks of jury duty.

It's too much, man. I want some normalcy.

The Blue Window Craze

Lately I've been thinking about blue glass. Blue window glass, specifically. In my hometown there were a number of houses that had blue glass, usually in a solarium. Not the whole house. The town's main period of growth was the 1930s to the 1950s.

I figured that our friend Paul Lukas would know. Anything that I think about he's already thought about in depth, so I asked. He didn't know it was a thing. So I sent him this photo, and then I started digging. It's so good. I haven't found anything that really explains why early 20th Century houses have blue glass, but there certainly were lots in the 1870s due, in large part, to a guy named General Pleasonton, and another guy named Dr. Ponza.

Pleasanton started the fire, so to speak, in 1876, in his address to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. The reprint of his presentation was printed on blue paper with blue ink. He attributed healing powers of all kinds to bathing in blue light. Is your pig poorly? Blue light.

One of my favorite quotes attributed to Pleasanton: "Boys with unsatisfactory legs, and girls with more tremors than are necessary or useful....and persons afflicted in a vague but objectionable way, and mysteriously described as invalid, all became suddenly healthy and strong after taking a few panes of blue glass."

Then came Seth Pancoast, later one of the founding members of Theosophy:

By 1877, blue glass was a craze. It was big in Watsonville, California.

And then eventually there were the detractors:

Poems:

And even the Blue Glass Schottische. A colleague from the forklift factory was kind enough to play it for me on the piano. Check back here later for an audio recording.

By 1889 blue glass was relegated to the trash heap with its fellow fads of the past, like crazy quilts and roller skates.

Roller skates have come back into fashion many times, as have crazy quilts. Is it time for the rebirth of the blue glass craze? Oh right. Science.

Father's Day 2025

One of my favorite sounds, back in the day, was of my dad at his typewriter. It was his weapon of choice, and I guess that might be where I get my love of writing and storytelling. Fueled by disgruntlement he would smite the keys with his index fingers, serving up nasty letters intended to make himself feel like a warrior.

He used carbon paper, and he always saved his favorite letters. I found this duplicate left in my mom's files.

Happy Father's Day