cindy's world

I am SO fighting the urge to yell across the courtroom at our 14 jurors, “So did any of you guys see the UCLA game last nite?” I can’t seem to stop talking about it with random people who come through the courtroom. The judge and all the attorneys in our trial are at a sidebar conference in the judge’s chambers right now, with the door closed. I’ll keep fighting it a bit longer.

I can’t believe Diana’s gonna be at Saturday’s game! I so don’t expect her to have a voice on Sunday.

It’s been 10 YEARS, Bruins, 10 YEARS. I’m gonna drive up to UCLA to buy Final 4 (and hopefully championship) gear if they make it this weekend against #1 Memphis. My 1995 NCAA Championship cap is feeling lonely!

“I see you’re gloating in your school’s victory,” my judge said just now, walking into the courtroom.

Of course I’m wearing a navy suit with a gold top inside today. Just when you think the Texas win was gonna be “the” big finish of NCAA, UCLA does something even more amazing! Truthfully, I’d lost hope when UCLA could not close the 10+ point gap against Gonzaga (coming in with a 20-game victory streak) throughout the basketball game. It occurred to me that the voice mail greeting I had put on my cell phone before the game, something to the effect of “Hi, this is Cindy. If you’re a UCLA fan, please leave a message and I will call you back. If you’re not cheering for UCLA, don’t even bother leaving a message because I won’t call you back until NCAA is over”, would be retarded when we lost and I’d have to change it right after the game before people started calling me to harass me about the loss. But the first time UCLA took the lead was with less than 30 seconds left in the game, and they kept it through some unlikely moves. CrAzY! Like they say, it’s not about how you start the game, it’s how you finish it that counts.

I also really liked the fact that when Gonzaga’s star player Adam Morrison collapsed in tears on the court floor, it was a UCLA player Arron Afflalo who walked over and helped him up from the floor and made sure he was okay. The two of them almost got into a fight at one point on the floor with the fouls and elbow-throwing, and then when it came down to the end, the victor chose to help instead of rubbing the victory in. At a post-game interview, Adam Morrison (known for not just being a phenomenal player, but also for his trash-talking on the courts) said humbly that “that’s just a sign of great people and great players. It’s more than basketball.”

All right, I’m rounding off this week and just tossing it away as a designated failure. I’ve worked out twice — weights at lunch on Monday and jujitsu Tuesday afternoon. I skipped the gym today at lunch because of some more of the same style idiocy and I felt alone and frustrated in this, and now I don’t think I can go to jujitsu tonite, either. I’ll just get my ass kicked all over the room. So I guess this week’s a loss where health and body is concerned, I’m just gonna buy laundry detergent and do laundry and vacuum and hang out with my cat and veg out.

And to think, this morning I sat there sadly looking at the low number of entries I’ve written so far this month (sidebar), and wondered what it is I can possibly blog about.

The avocado that I had brought with me to work yesterday in Grace’s bag had been sitting on my kitchen counter for a week and a half, still hard as a rock, and I figure that since it’s been like 60 degrees Fahrenheit in my house, the avocado hasn’t ripened because it thought it was in the refrigerator. It sat for a day on my desk at work, and then this morning, it did feel like a slightly softer rock than it’d felt all week. I decided to cut into it length-wise.

The reason I was eager to cut it was because, while I was complaining about its stubborn hardness in jujitsu last week, my instructor had asked, “Is it a very large avocado?” I told him it was. “Uh-oh. It might rot on the inside before it softens on the outside, because it’s so big.”

So the plastic knife I used strained and creaked against the hard avocado, which almost felt crisp as its skin reluctantly gave way to my sawing. I couldn’t get the knife to cut in closer to the seed, so I ended up having to pry the avocado open. After exerting some brute force, it snapped open. The seed’s thin brown outer skin separated from the whitish brainy-looking inside of the seed, such that half the brown seed-skin stuck to the inside of both halves of the avocado. I could not peel it off the halves. I tried to insert my spoon into the flesh of the avocado, but the spoon couldn’t break through the rubber avocado flesh. I looked closer at the white seed I pulled out, and it already has a half-inch stem coming out of one end! So this stupid thing was about to SPROUT and it STILL won’t ripen?! I bit into a little portion of the hard avocado flesh on the corner. It was bitter as rubber, too. Stupid tease of a fruit.

For punishment, I decided to put the white seed in a clear plastic cup in water and put it on display in shame. It really does look like a brain. If anyone asks what’s in my cup, I’m gonna say that I got attacked by a male mountain lion who, after I was through with him, is only half male now.


Sorry for the bad quality of the photos, all I have is my cameraphone. Rest your mouse pointer over the photos for captions.

Oh, the love of a mother and her daughter, and their fun with clothing! This was sent to me as one of those email chain letters, you know, those emails that have the great message that you would’ve sent on to warm the hearts of your friends, except when you get to the end of the email, it threatens that if you don’t send it to all your friends in the next 6 minutes, you will be cursed forever or at least until a herd of runaway bulls trample you on your way home and gore your broken body into meat pulp on the street so that the only way anyone can identify you is by the bloodied printout of the aforementioned chain letter that has your name on the “to” field and the “friend” who cursed you on the “from” field and the explanation of what would happen to you if you fail to curse all your friends in turn with this email. That’s what keeps me from forwarding chain letters — the threat at the bottom that tells me to save myself by cursing my friends. I figure if karma really is that sharp of an entity, then I should get more karmic brownie points by refusing to spread a curse and letting it stop with me.

Aaaaanyway, without further ado, here’s the story, and just the story by itself, sans curse.

The Yellow Shirt
(more…)

I am stiff from the bottom of my skull down to my ankles. My wrists and forearms are sore.

Yay, me!

I’m just gonna take it easy on the elliptical trainer for 40 minutes or so at lunch today.

It still amazes me that women in their 40s and 50s can be so petty and so catty and so BORED that they’re going to gossip about someone who’s totally under the radar, and they’re going to say negative things to A SUPERVISOR that they made up on their own, and these people aren’t even FRIENDS with the person they’re talking about so they don’t have the inside information, and furthermore, their information is WRONG so they had to actually PUT IN the effort to LIE about something and someone! These people need to get a life, get laid, and/or get an anvil dropped on them. Why isn’t life more like a cartoon and less like a stupid soap opera? It’s so disheartening when I first came into contact with this crap/phenomenon 6 months ago, because I look up to women in their 40s and 50s because they’re, like, grownups! They’re like my parents’ age! And they act like elementary school kids with the gossip and the lying and the “if you’re friends with her then I’m no longer friends with you” and make people take sides as to who they can talk to?! Oh..my…gawd. It’s sad that cattiness and pettiness isn’t something you outgrow.

But here’s the bright side. The more they talk, the worse they make themselves look, cuz people with brains WILL consider the source. And the more they talk about a particular victim, the better that victim looks, especially when there are lots and lots of victims all of whom have done no wrong and have strong, positive character traits that everyone else knows. And the more they want to talk crap and stay away from me, the less I have to bother staying away from them. So they can make all the effort for all I care. Go ahead. Shoot yourself in the foot. I feel sorry for you losers.

I just got word that on March 26 (Sunday), a movie crew’s going to be using our jury room for filming. A few years ago, Ray Romano’s movie Eulogy was shot in our courtroom and I was here, and got his autograph. He’s a very nice and down to earth guy, thanked me for letting them use our courtroom. We chatted a bit about his twins. I think the extra who used my desk dressed in bailiff’s uniform was trying to pick up on me. Anyway, I’d never seen Eulogy, and it seems to have bombed in the theatres. I don’t even know whether our courtroom scene was kept in thru the edit.

I was too tired to go to jujitsu yesterday evening, so I decided to run my errands after work. I stopped by the bank, upgraded my checking account to this great new free checking program they told me about just before I ordered checks, and thereby ordered my free checks (now I’m so glad that stupid mail order check company screwed up). Then I went to a local haircut place. There were 3 people waiting, 1 in the chair, and there appeared to be 1 person cutting hair. I left. Mr. W suggested I call the upscale salon by his place that had me on the wait list all weekend. I did, and they said they were completely booked up except for…oh…a 6pm appointment. “What time is it now?” I asked. “5:20.” “I’ll be there.” I grabbed my laptop and tax stuff and drove 20 miles down there, arriving 5 minutes late.

I pretty much told the lady to do whatever she thinks would look good cuz my hair was completely grown out, anyway. I told her the backup was to cut it really short, above my shoulders. She didn’t want to do that, she said she liked my hair long, thought about trimming an inch or two, but then opted for about 3.5 inches and relayered everything. She trimmed the bangs a little, left them long and sweeping across my forehead, blew the layers outward to give a very retro-70s go-go-girl flip. It was really cute. Of course, when I do my own hair, it’ll flip inward, not outward. The first person to notice today was my trial DA. So I guess it isn’t very extreme of a cut, but it is a nice refreshing change.

While I was at the salon, Mr. W and his daughter (who had been having dinner at a Red Robin nearby) stopped by the front glass wall and waved and pointed and mimed. Yes, mimed. Mr. W mimed walking down stairs with his daughter piggyback on his back, and almost couldn’t get back up from the squat position. “You know them?” the lady doing my hair asked. “No,” I replied.

Then I went to Mr. W’s house where I did most of my taxes. It was a very productive evening.