a week to leave behind

I was on call for jury duty last week. It’s not something I like, but I respect my civic duty. However, since the height of the pandemic and lockdown I have been sleeping later and when I need to get up early I am not functioning well by early afternoon. Add to that the fact that the courthouse is twenty miles and thirty-five minutes away. That’s not bad in and of itself, but to get there I have to take a country highway through a pass in the hills in the early morning light in order to arrive at the courthouse by the 8:00 a.m. start time. Given that would be before the sun was fully up, and given that my night vision is not what it once was, I did not feel safe or comfortable making that drive.

I asked my doctor to excuse me from jury duty, and he generated a document that did just that. The court, however, ignored the document, perhaps because he didn’t provide any reason for my being excused. So I was still on call.

This meant checking the web site each afternoon to see if I needed to go in the next day. Fortunately, I had a high group number and remained on standby. When I checked the web site on Thursday afternoon it showed my status as “Ended.” I was delighted about that, but geez Riverside County, not even a “thank you” for being available all week?

Then there was Friday. A day of interruptions and disruptions.

My calendar told me I needed to change the air filter in our HVAC system. I went into the garage to get a new filter and there was no filter. So I made a trip to Home Depot. We took care of that, but then checking my email I had a bill from Kaiser for some outrageous amount for my shingles vaccine. Seems that was entered as though I was not on a Kaiser plan, even though I am. So to resolve that I called the phone number on the bill. Turns out that number was for people who use Kaiser but are not on a Kaiser plan. I then had to call Kaiser directly to get the error taken care of. Of course I spent a lot of time on hold, but I finally got that worked out.

After that, I was sitting at my computer minding my own business composing an email when the doorbell rang. There was a guy from our electric utility, Southern California Edison, who said that our power meter had stopped transmitting data and needed to be replaced. The power was off for only a minute or so, but when the Wi-Fi router came back online our iPhones and two of our Amazon Echo devices did not like the connection. So I had to do another power cycle on the router to resolve that problem. Finally it all worked out.

But it’s a new week. Yesterday Terry and I had a marvelous Easter dinner of pressure cooker pot roast with mashed potatoes and gravy. We used china Terry inherited from her granny and silverware that my grandparents and great aunt and uncle gave to my great grandparents for their fifty-ninth wedding anniversary. A wonderful start to a week that we expect to be much more normal than last week.