(Warning: boring post alert.)

As I was leaving to go to work this morning, I walked by the bouquet of flowers and thought, “There’s yoga class tonight, so I won’t be around to enjoy these until tomorrow morning for a few minutes, and then I’m gone for the weekend again.” So I decided to bring them to work with me so I can have a full 2 workdays with them. The ceramic vase I’d put the flowers in has a vertical crack down the side, so water was slowly leaking. I planned to change them into one of a few glass vases I had in the courtroom. I put the flowers to the side on my file cabinet as we did a hearing on a criminal case that was returning today for sentencing. The defendant, who was in custody, decided his attorney was “railroading” him and had a fit, cussing and trying to stand to leave the courtroom, not shutting up or settling down so that we could resume sentencing. 15 sheriffs in our courtroom (2 with stun guns) later, this defendant was escorted out of the courtroom and we sentenced him without his being present. It was downhill from there for the rest of the morning. I selected the beautiful cylindrical frosted glass vase that Vicky had sent me flowers in for my bday last year, and looked around for the packet of flower food I’d brought. I could not find it; it’d vaporized sometime during the morning struggle. I ignored that BIG HINT from fate. I had a spare packet from a previous bouquet, so I took the vase to fill with room temperature water (as directed on the printed instructions on the packet) in the bathroom sink. The sink was too small for the vase and it was not gonna fill sideways, so after making a slight mess in the hallway restroom, I took the vase into the jury room restroom to fill. The vase fit in the sink albeit at an angle, but after I filled as much as I could, the vase would not come out of the sink. I pulled, rolled, manipulated as best I could, and called my court reporter to help. She put soap on the rim where it was making contact with the sink edge, couldn’t get it out. We called our bailiff. He couldn’t do it, either. “I can’t just leave it here for now,” I said, “They just sent us another trial. We’re gonna have jurors using this restroom!” Finally, with a clink, my bailiff broke the vase, and we took the pieces out. =( I got another less exotic vase and rinsed that over the water fountain at the back of the courtroom. Water spilled out of the shallow metal fountain bowl and spilled all over the ground. I sighed and got a bunch of napkins to put on the floor. I adjusted the angle of the vase, and the new angle made water trickle out the side and onto my skirt. Another puddle on the floor. I cleaned that up. The angle wasn’t vertical enough to fill the vase and neither was another water fountain I tried after that, so I finally got smart and filled my water bottle with sink water and poured that into the vase. The flowers beautifully displayed in a clear vase, I went to rinse out the cracked vase in the hallway bathroom sink, and in pouring out the brown-green water in the vase, a wave of it skipped over the sink water’s surface, flew out of the sink and landed right on my skirt. I sighed. What next? Was I gonna slip on a puddle or get hit by a car on the way home? What a bad plant day.

And then, lunch came and everything started getting great! We worked into lunch because our new trial defendant decided to take a plea bargain instead of going to trial, so that freed up our afternoon. I spent some time with Mr. W at lunch, then came back to work to make some phone calls to my retirement program people. I received a check in the mail from them yesterday with a letter stating they’d erroneously deducted this money from my pay to switch my retirement plan, which scared me because I’d been trying to call them for months to say the retirement plan that show me on in the annual statements is wrong and that I’d paid money for the switch. The fact that they returned money may mean that they kicked me out of the plan I want to be in and refunded my money, which is going to cost me thousands more to get back into the right plan. I got thru finally on the phone, and the representative I spoke to said that nope, it was their error for not putting me in the right plan years ago, and that I’m fully paid for the correct plan, and that the check I received was a refund for the money they’d pulled out monthly to switch plans without realizing that I should already be switched. He apologized, and said to just go ahead and cash the check, they’ll mail me confirmation of the plan I’m in soon. Happy birthday, me! How often do we get a check for thousands of bucks from the County that we didn’t have to kill ourselves to get?

Oh, and Victoria’s Secret also sent me a giftcard for my birthday. And Mr. W didn’t feel like going to yoga so instead of seeing crazy yoga lady, we’re gonna have a nice dinner and watch “Friends” and eat green tea ice cream. Karma’s being so nice to me right now. 🙂