Jury Duty Update

Today I decided to search for the name of the defendant in last year's jury trial. 

As we left it, my jury pool didn't agree to convict him of spousal battery, kidnapping and the like. Only hit and run.

This, despite:

• Having a fight with his girlfriend
• Driving in anger to where his girlfriend was staying
• Driving into a pizza delivery guy's car in the parking lot because he saw his girlfriend talking to the pizza delivery guy
• Yelling "I've caught you"
• Arguing with her about whether she'd come home with him
• Picking her up, putting her in his car and driving off (battery, kidnapping, hit-and-run)

The guy totally did it, and everybody on the stand lied. The jury selectively ignored the judge's instructions. I initially thought that the state hadn't made its case. But I changed my mind.

From the time of the case, a year ago, I've regretted not finking on my fellow jury members who ignored the judge's instructions. I told them outright that I was worried that the defendant would harm his girlfriend again. I wondered how long it would take for him to break the law again.

Answer: 3 months

He and two other guys were arrested and tried for shooting three other guys out of their car window. The victims all lived.

It looks like my defendant got off with probation and anger management.

Wondering how long it will be before he acts out again. I hope never.

I Am Not My Own Grandpaw

It was right there under my nose, but I simply didn't see it.

I have been working on my mom's mom's family tree for 30 years. But only half of it, the reason being that there were some really dedicated genealogists working on my maternal grandfather's line. I figured that they had it handled.

So when DNA matching came about, I figured it was one more tool that could help tease apart the knots in the genealogy that were hard to unravel. But it also turns up some questions. I did not think that my family would be one of them, and here we are.

A woman contacted me years ago. Her own DNA test had proved that her dad wasn't her bio-dad. And she had two half-brothers who had the same bio-dad. They were related to relatives of mine, so she reached out. She thought my uncle was her dad. I told her that if we proved the relationship I was happy to tell her anything she wanted to know.

But she was a dna match of people that I expected to be related to. And I was not. It turned out that she was the daughter of a 2nd cousin of mine. But it seemed I was not related to him. 

There was another question. Also on my mom's side. A person showed up as a DNA match and I couldn't figure out how. I reached out to the person and he did not respond. I looked him up. He looks exactly like everybody on my grandmother's maternal line. Looks like my brother. Looks like my uncle, Mom's brother. We all have the same bulbous nose.

I hired an Ancestry.com genealogist to figure out the two mysteries. Who is this first cousin of mine, and where is the break in my mom's paternal line? I had so many theories. The truth blew me away.

The first cousin is, in fact, my uncle's son. Not a huge surprise. And the break in the family line? My grandfather is not my mom's bio-dad. More mystifying is that she and her brother have the same bio-dad. He just doesn't happen to be my grandfather. My siblings, who loved him deeply, would be horrified and I don't plan to tell them.

I sat with that non-grandpaternity information for a few days and hired Ancestry again. It's expensive, but I need to know. Unlike other parts of my family, where there was a bit of lore to go on, here I have nothing. Even with the Irish side of my family I had a (very common) surname. I just hammered at the research for a decade and found the answer. I have more money than time these days, so I hope to get some answers that will let me dig in to another family tree and do research on some new topics.

More as I know it.

20 Minutes

I remember exactly the moment in which I last pruned the wisteria. I was listening to an audiobook and decided not to continue it. What a great revelation. My first entry into audiobook spurning. Life is too short, people! Listen to something that doesn't bug you!

This past year the rain was plentiful and the wisteria responded by PROLIFERATING!! And covering about a quarter of the window in the aku room. It was bugging both of us and we responded by (drum roll) not discussing it with each other. Then we did, and I suggested a time limit of 30 minutes. We forgot how easy this task is -- how tender the shoots and the way that you can simply follow last year's cuts to prune the new growth. It was unbelievably satisfying. After 20 minutes we felt satisfied with our work.

Before:

After:

:

Ahhh

A Saturday in April

It is a magnificent grey day here in the big brown box. We had a good coffee time convo this morning, with the brilliant mrguy realizing that if our insurance doesn't pay for the PET scan we want, we could totally pay for it ourselves and make it happen. This is exactly what money is for. For saving your life. Yay!

Yesterday we talked to the oncologist and our oncology nurse navigator. The onco doctor has referred mrguy to a radiologist, and now is suggesting that because we think there aren't any mets, radiation could just zap that little effer and get rid of it. Radiation is not a groovy time. He'd switch to carbo/taxol as his chemo, and for 5 weeks he'd get zapped 5 days a week. Both the carbo and the radiation are cumulatively awful. That's why we'd want to get a PET sooner than later. a) are there any metastases and b) is the kanjinti already beating the cancer back by itself? If b, why worry about radiation? It was doing so well before. Or can he have kanjinti instead of switching up his chemo while he's doing radiation? Our nurse navigator is hoping for kanjinti rather than radiation. Anyhoo, mrguy is doing his research.

Today's The Kentucky Derby. It's my sister's favorite thing, and it always reminds me of her. It used to fall on the same weekend as Norway Day, which was our sister thing we did together. But we'd always need to find a spot nearby to watch it. Apparently I wrote this up in mrsguy and don't have to retell that story! But today my sister reminded me of a different story that she was telling to some friends over coffee this morning:

My brother-in-law, her husband, used to go to the races on Fridays with his friend Junior. One of those Fridays was the day before the Derby, so my sister gave her husband a tenner and asked him to put it on Giacomo to win the Derby. She wanted Giacomo specifically because that was her husband's grandfather's name. Next day they were watching the Derby and Giacomo won!!! It was at this point that her husband confessed that he hadn't placed the bet because he thought it was such a bad bet. Yeah, he was wrong. It paid out 50-1. A $2 bet paid out $800, and her ten bucks would have been many times more than that. Sis told this story to her feisty 90-year-old friend this morning over coffee and her friend said "And he's still alive?!" Funny. And Giacomo the horse is still alive, apparently, living the stud life.

Because it is Derby day today I went to the Derby website to look at the horses. I don't believe in racing, but this was in solidarity with my sister. There was a grey horse who was sooo pretty. Then I remembered that my grandparents owned a grey race horse at one point. Her name was Eleanor Grey. Not sure what the nomenclature was, but she was a harness race horse, and a pacer. She did some racing in the early 1950s. So like my granny to want a race horse.

Before signing off, here are some of yesterdays colors.