cindy's world

I secretly feel bad that my life has stabilized to the point that there is no drama to entertain people with on this blog. But I don’t feel bad enough to hope for drama just to keep my readership up. I also secretly feel bad that what little drama I deal with can’t be posted on here for privacy reasons regarding the people I would be bitching about. But that just gives my friends a reason to call me and see what’s new that I can’t write about on this very open, very public, surprisingly searchable site. I don’t like censorship. I also secretly wish people out there know enough “inside” stuff to get how boundary-flirtatious some of these posts truly are, but I’m not gonna spell things out. They just have to read between the lines or be on the inside path.

As a single-digit-age kid, I loved flipping through those thick Best department store color catalogs. Those things were like phone books! Best doesn’t exist anymore, but in the 80s it was a mega department store that had unbelievable inventories of jewelry, household appliances, bedding, knick-knacks, tools, and my favorite: toys!! When I was 6, I would turn to the jewelry section and “randomly” put initials by rings and such to designate a “random,” “fair” divi-ing up of loot between me and my 2 favorite playmates, my cousins Diana and Jennifer. And then I’d show them the book. And they’d realize that altho the assignments seemed random, I appeared to always have the prettiest rings designated to me. “No fair!” my cousin Diana had once said, throwing the book into the air. I had to later ask my mom what “no fair” meant. Hey, I was 6 and didn’t speak the language, okay? But darn it, at ages 7 and 4, my cousins were on to me and my youthful double-edged stealth.

My point is, at that age, I’d flip right by the bedding and appliance “grownup” sections in a catalog, and I’d wonder, “Who looks at this?! It’s so boring!” And here I am, blogging about INSURANCE. My inner child is screaming and rocking.

Yesterday after work, I jetted over to Mercury Insurance Company and signed up for car and homeowner’s insurance with them. I then called State Farm to cancel both policies with them. The lady who answered the phone sounded surprised and maybe even a little hurt that I’m killing a 14 year relationship with State Farm. And call me lame, but I feel bad. However, my previous State Farm agent, whom I really, really liked and who had helped me out a lot in the past, had retired, I got transferred to a new agent who left State Farm within a matter of weeks with him, and my polices have been in limbo ever since. The State Farm girl I’d been talking to about transferring to their office was really nice and helpful, but it’s been a couple of weeks since I’d last spoken to her about transferring my policies to that office from its present limbo state, I haven’t heard back from her, and now I’m afraid my car’s uninsured since the new car was never recorded. I need to drop the old car off my insurance too, since it’s no longer in my possession.

I’d emailed the lady at Mercury who gave me the car quote ($400/yr less than State Farm’s quote!) to see if she’s available to meet with me after work yesterday, and she emailed back within minutes with directions to their office. When I walked into their very large offices, the lobby had a whiteboard on an easel before the front desk that said “Mercury Insurance Companies welcomes CINDY [my last name]”. Awww! I felt all special. And after my numbers were tightened and input in the computer, my car policy, which is as amped up as they can offer with the maximum coverage possible on everything, ended up being $600/year less than State Farm’s estimate on my new car! I’m pretty happy with my decision. The auto insurance was so great that I also amped up my homeowner’s insurance too, wrote a full check for both policies, and was off.

I hope to never have to use either policy. Insurance is such a waste of money. We pay hundreds and hundreds for something we hope to never need.

Yesterday was the first “Los Angeles” Angels vs. Chicago White Socks game in the series. Because the game was on Sept. 11, the stadium paused for a minute of silence for our people in memoriam, as the advertising banners turned off. The screens flashed the American flag with the words “We will never forget.” Orange County Sheriff’s Dept.’s bugle squad performed in the beginning, and some uniformed military men marched out on the pitcher’s mound and were honored. In front of me was a navy officer in uniform, complete with the little white cap. Mr. W’s brother said, “It’d just be perfect if he started eating a box of Cracker Jacks.” They were indeed selling Cracker Jacks. I was shaking my head at how disrespectful that comment was, until Mr. W said, “Yeah, and a little dog ran up to him,” and I had to burst out laughing. The guy got so much free stuff for being there in uniform. People came by to take photos of him with his little girl on his lap, to shake his hand, to give his little girl souvenir baseballs and other little doodads. “I never learned to milk the uniform like that,” Mr. W, who was a Marine, observed. I don’t think he was milking the uniform as much as honoring the country on Sept. 11 by going to the great American pastime in uniform. BTW, there were a couple of people there with a large handmade sign that read, “AUSTRALIA REMEMBERS AMERICA’S HEROES OF 9-11-01.” That’s really nice. I don’t know that the average American would go to Australia and hold a sign for them in the same respect.

I think it was really cool and fun and funny to hang out with the people we went to the game with. But as far as the game itself went, I still don’t think baseball is a great spectator sport for me, and that’s not just because we lost (unless you’re a Chicago fan, in which case you won), or because there were only 5 runs scored total in the game, or because the first run was scored in the 4th inning and before that (and after, actually), we couldn’t keep a man on base. I found myself people-watching more than ball-watching. The loud tattooed guys to my left kept whooping at some blond girls whenever the girls would stand up and cheer. The large young lady in front and to my right kept eating throughout the game and dropping food on her stomach, sandwiches, nachos, pretzels, cheese drowning everything. (I had to take a cameraphone pic of her and send it to college roommie Diana, who received it ironically while she was at the gym.) The uniformed officer in front of me with his little girl on his lap with the identical profiles, gray eyes and sandy brown haircolor, made me wonder whether his Asian wife had any genetic input at all. I guess I could’ve eaten junk food and drank beer, which was what everyone around me was doing, but my response whenever someone would ask if I wanted something was “Bikini…2 months…can’t.”

Driving home after the game, I touched base with James who said he was on his way to the gym in Brea. I seriously considered going to work out, too, but changed my mind because it was almost 10:30p, I already hit the gym at lunch yesterday, I have 3 hours of jujitsu after work today, and I can’t afford to be sore for my half marathon run on Sunday. *biting fingernails*

Today, a little cat got into the building and went into the employee restroom behind my department. He lit up a cigarette and smoked a little bit while he was in there, while he sat in his litter box. He may have put out his cigarette in his litter box, too.

I know this because this is what the restroom smelled like when I walked in there earlier, as I held my breath and fought the gag reflex.

Reading Jordan’s blog today got me thinking about my September 11, 2001. I’ve never told anyone the details of what happened with me that day, mostly because I am ashamed of the first half of it.

Because New York is 3 hours ahead of California, when it all went down, I was still in bed. The phone ringing woke me up. It was my then-boyfriend, Gary. “A plane just hit one of the Twin Towers in New York!” he exclaimed. That meant nothing to me. I’d never been to the Towers, didn’t know about the now infamous landmark. I was just annoyed that he woke me up. I said something crankily into the phone and hung up, rolled over and went back to sleep. Some time later, I was once again awoken by Gary. “A second plane just hit the tower! You better call Grace and make sure she’s okay!” he said excitedly (but not in a good way). “I’m sure she’s fine!” I said, and prepared to hang up again. “CALL HER!” he told me. “They’re saying it’s an ATTACK on America!” What the hell. I hung up, once again pulled the cover over my face, made myself go back to sleep, and overslept. A third phone call woke me up, and when I saw the time, I leapt out of bed in a panic and did not get the phone. Turned out it was my court reporter. She left a message on my answering machine and said they were evacuating our courthouse and other government buildings are shutting down, so if I had not left for work yet, I needn’t come in. (She gets to work super-early.) I finally was curious enough about what’s going on to turn on the TV in the downstairs living room, and since every channel was playing the same breaking news, I didn’t even need to look for information. I stood close to the TV to see it since I hadn’t put my glasses on yet, and as the images processed in my brain, as tiny suit-clad people fell out of two smoking highrises on national television, I on the other end of the country fell to my knees. And cried, and cried and cried.

Grace lived and worked close enough to the Twin Towers to have the immediate air around her affected by the smoke and debris, but as I found out later, she wasn’t home, nor at work, because her leukemia recently had acted up enough that her concerned doctor had hospitalized her to keep an eye on her to make sure she wasn’t coming out of remission. Her then-fiance Justin had just walked through the Twin Towers and gotten on the subway to his office at Deutsche Bank, so was out of harm’s way. Grace’s father, who was visiting, was near the towers when everything went crazy. Grace’s mother, at the hospital with her, called and called her husband’s cell phone but could not get through. The rooftop of the towers served as a communications signal relay point and when the buildings were hit, many satellites and other cell sites couldn’t bring their signals down to the people. They eventually heard from her dad, who only managed a seconds-long phone call to say he was all right and trying to find a way through the mess to get to the hospital to them, before the phone call went dead again.

The next day at work, before we called our first case in Law & Motion, my judge took the bench and asked the courtroom to observe a moment of silence for the victims of the terrorist attack in New York, the Pentagon and United Flight 93’s foiled attack. The courtroomful of civil adversaries bowed their heads collectively and for once, was actually “civil” in their shared grief and patriotism.

We will never forget.

Vicky’s boyfriend introduced us to a great seafood champagne brunch on Sunday at Tom Ham’s Lighthouse in San Diego. The restaurant has some of the freshest tasting seafood I’ve ever had, and the buffet was just $25 a person. The big window overlooking the city skyline across the water was great, and service was more than tip-worthy. Our waiter kept calling champagne “grape juice,” as in “Ready for some more adult grape juice?” I didn’t know champagne was made from grapes. But I guess everything is. After brunch, the four of us walked around Seaport Village and explored the shops. There was a jewelry place that had a nice little selection of Alexandrite, so I got all excited, but then it turns out it was all simulated. Ever since I made the very difficult decision to turn down a $1000+ genuine Alexandrite/diamond/white gold ring on the cruise Mr. W and I took in February, I’ve been regretting it. Although the simulated Alexandrite at this place claimed to be better quality than natural Alexandrite, I did not see the dramatic color change from purple to blue-green when I put my ring-clad finger out the window into the sunlight. Mr. W noted that a genuine Alexandrite ring would make a better engagement ring for me than a diamond, because it’s my birthstone and it’s a rarer stone than a diamond. I agreed, and recalled a time when I’d told an ex a few years ago how I’d prefer not to have genuine diamonds because of the violence surrounding their mining in Africa. I’m gonna have to go another cruise again for the ring, it looks like. =P

I washed my car for the first time Saturday morning. Drying is a pain in the arse! Chamois, my butt! Those things just smear the water around.

Having just returned from our morning 3-mile run (not bad, considering it was freaking sunny and I despise running in the sunlight, but the conversation made the run feel shorter than the half hour it took), I suddenly had a thought and asked Mr. W, “When does that show Shark premiere?” He said, “I think it was this past Thursday, you just missed it.”

WHAT?!?!?! I’ve been waiting for that show FOREVER, since they filmed the pilot episode in my courtroom! Upset, I ran a search on the ‘net.

“THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21,” I said. HMMPH! So, 10pm in 2 Thursdays, guys! On CBS! Most of the courthouse scenes would be filmed at my work. They used the front of the courthouse entrance, the main lobby hallway, the hallway outside my courtroom and outside the public defender’s office, and they re-did my jury room to make it look like an interrogation room cell. They put up fake walls and stuff. You know what was cool about that film crew? They were supposed to restore the courtroom to exactly the same state it was in before they redressed with their props, but they returned it to us in BETTER working order. They patched sections of our wall, fixed the door so it’d close smoother. My gawd, private industry people are brilliant. It takes me so many phone calls and going thru layers of incompetence to get someone in here thru County to fix my stuff.

Yesterday evening I watched the series premiere of two Fox sit coms, Til Death and Happy Hour. The humor was odd and witty, and I found myself chuckling aloud. I think I relate to Happy Hour more, because the theme of the show so far is about getting on with life as a single person and enjoying your post-relationship freedom. Til Death is a comedic gripe about married life, contrasting a long-time married couple and their newlywed young neighbors. I’m glad that I have new TV shows to look forward to on Thursdays again. I miss fresh episodes of Friends.

This morning I reached a new low, if low can be used to describe what I did. I noticed two light-colored smudges on the inside of my back seat passenger door, but I had nothing on-hand to clean the smudges with, so in my garage, with the garage door wide open, I lifted up my light-colored gauzy pretty skirt and rubbed the stains off my car with the inside of my skirt. My priorities are wack. Today, only 2 people brought up my car to me. I think the novelty is wearing off.

Today and tomorrow, I’ve been pulled out of my courtroom to handle Law & Motion, which is a specialized courtroom that not a lot of clerks are trained to handle. I asked the judge in Law & Motion about half an hour ago how he prefers his papers to be organized in the name change files. He said it doesn’t matter, once I’ve checked over the name change requests and verified that all the criteria have been met, the only thing he really looks at is the reason for the name change. I said that the best reason I’d seen in my experience as a Law & Motion clerk is that a guy had to change his name because he changed his gender. The judge chuckled and said that when he was in his last courtroom, he kept looking over papers for this one petition in which they kept referring to the “wife” as “he”, or somehow the pronoun didn’t seem to match the spouse they were talking about. He thought they’d made a mistake on their papers, until the hearing when he learned that the husband WAS male and then he went through a gender change operation and became a female, but they were still married. I said, “Well, that’s nice that they were still able to remain married. That’s an understanding wife to say, ‘You’re gonna make me a lesbian? Okay.’ ”

And then I start reviewing my name change files on calendar to be heard tomorrow morning in here.

Name change #1:
Mom wants to change her name and her 5-year-old son’s name. All they’re doing is adding a hyphenated 2nd last name to their own last name. This is common, they usually do this when the mom gets remarried, so that the whole family has the same last name. That’s what’s stated in the “reason for name change”, too. The petition says that both parents are petitioning to change the minor’s last name. I look at the parents’ names. The first parent, of course, is the mom who’s also getting her own name changed. The 2nd parent, on the line that says “father’s name/address”, they had “father’s” crossed out and they’d written in the name of a woman who has the last name they want added to their last names by hyphenation. It’s a lesbian couple that wants the boy to have their last name. I’m sorry, this other woman is not the child’s biological father, no matter if they consider her to be the 2nd parent and crossed off “father” in the information. The natural father needs legal notice that his son’s name is being changed. So I’m gonna have to talk to them tomorrow when they come in for the hearing.

Name change #2:
A man whose first name is John wants to change his first name to something that looks really gender ambiguous. It’s a name I’d never heard of. The reason for the change states that it’s the name that he was given at birth, and he wants to change it back to that instead of “John.” The criminal assessment report shows that he has an a.k.a. of…Joan.

I don’t work in West Hollywood jurisdiction. This is NOT common for our name changes. I’m not even going to look at name changes #3 and #4 today, so that I’m 2 for 2 today.

James is continously floored by how every time I talk about something, it happens. In fact, we talked about that phenomenon yesterday. And look at this whopper today!

Mr. W and I went to a Japanese curry house for dinner last nite, and I ordered chicken curry udon. I brought the leftover half for lunch today, and I’m eating it right now. It is so good. I don’t know whether it’s good cuz 2nd day curry’s good, or because I’m starving after my noon workout today. I should eat lunch more often. Altho, on days when I skip the workout to have lunch, food doesn’t taste this good.

I got stopped twice on my walk from the courthouse out to lunch by people who wanted to praise me about my car. I seem to have shot up in popularity points just because I dished out for a Lexus. If I had believed that this is how popularity worked, I would’ve bought my way to homecoming queen in high school. But instead, I’d believed in being who you are and having faith that your inner beauty will find worthy fans. *guffaw* For the past few weeks, anytime I talk to people (especially men), it’s because they want to ask questions about the car. “I heard you got a new car! How fast does that thing go?” “Is that your Lexus down there in the structure? The blue one with the beige interior? It’s beautiful!” “I saw your car yesterday! I’m not worthy!” *kotowing* One bailiff came into my courtroom at 9am the first day he was back from a 2-week vacation and said, “I heard you got a new Lexus!” I guess people are buzzing in the building about the car.

I have to say, I am really happy that I have the only IS 350 in the structure. I’ll enjoy that while it lasts. My bailiff said that I’m likely the only clerk in the county to have that car. I ran into my old bailiff in the building earlier, who also brought up having heard about my new car, and said, “How could you afford that? You’re a clerk!” like it’s a bad word. I ticked off my fingers. “I’m single. I’m not divorced. I’m not married. I have no kids.” “Say no more, please!” his clerk begged.

As an off-handed thing, when my cat greeted me with his meows this morning at the door, I patted his fuzzy little head and said, “Hello, my little kitten caboodle.” And then I thought, “That’d be a GREAT name for a cat! Caboodle!” Cuz then you can say, “This is my kitten, Caboodle.” Especially if the kitten’s the only thing you have in your life, as is my case with my Dodo. He’s my entire kit n’ caboodle. He’s my kitten Caboodle. I wonder if it’s too late to change his name.