cindy's world

This is lame, but because I’m still laughing at it, I’m gonna post it.

Mass email to all courtrooms from my supervisor this morning:

Please let me know with the hour whether or not you have an “imperative” case set in your Courtroom tomorrow.

P.S. I arrived late this morning. Sorry for the short notice. I will use mare common sense the next time.

My email response back to him (yes, within the hour, as requested):

Wow, mare common sense? Neigh, you have the common sense of a stud!
Sorry, couldn’t resist. No imperative cases set tomorrow unless we get a trial from F today.

I saw him in the elevator after lunch and he was too emphatic in his hello to me, so I knew he’d read the email. I asked if he was offended, and he said that he’s “unoffendable” by now and admitted he did enjoy my email because I didn’t just write “You wrote ‘mare’ when you meant ‘more,’ you idiot” like most people would’ve done if they wanted to call someone out on something. Hee hee!

Saturday morning, a bunch of coworkers and I attended the funeral service of the father of our presiding judge. It was at a Baptist church, and so far I think I like Baptist services better than Catholic ones. I’ve been to two Catholic funeral services in the past several months and found this Baptist priest’s words to lay more smoothly against my personal soul. I found his words soothing and they touched a nerve of truth within my own heart. He reminded us that death is not something to fear but something to celebrate as a return to the place from whence we had come. It is not so much an end of life, as the beginning of eternal life. I especially liked a poem (I think it’s a poem) he read, and I’m not sure if it came from the Bible like a psalm, or was written by a God-loving poet, or maybe he wrote it himself for the occasion. Anyway, it went something like this, although I’m sure I am not doing it justice:

To reach up and grab a hand, and find that it is God’s;
To breathe the air and find it celestial;
To awake healthy and happy and find immortality;
To see endless beauty and find that you are home;
To leave the maelstrom of hopeless end and find endless hope;
Such is our fate, and our hope, as we come from and return to God.

Amen.

I was doing my usual dry delivery of a quirky silly train of thought yesterday when someone in my trusted circle made a sarcastic remark to the effect that it was a good thing I don’t find myself in that situation a lot. Okay, that made no sense unless I actually explain that I was talking about a paternity case we handled in the family law court I was put into yesterday. The case where the court established that a divorcing woman’s child is the offspring of the guy she was having the affair with, and not the husband, which was proven up with a DNA test. I said about that, “Why do people want to make their lives so complicated, so that I have to go through all this strange stupid paperwork because of them?” She chuckled. It was my first paternity case, and I had struggled through all the unfamiliar paperwork and computer entries involved. I continued, “And these people always make us do their work for free cuz they get fee waivers [claiming they’re indigent and can’t pay for legal proceedings]. I pay my taxes, and I don’t use any government services for free cuz I don’t qualify for them. These people don’t even pay taxes and get all this free stuff. I should go and do something stupid with my life so that I can take advantage of welfare-type services, like have a kid out of wedlock. But no, I wouldn’t get welfare cuz I’d be employed. So maybe I should commit a CRIME, get into the criminal law system, cuz everything THERE’s provided for free and then I could really make my taxes benefit myself. But then with my income, I’d probably be required to pay back the services of the public defender, so that wouldn’t work, either.” I mean, it was a non-serious, goofy stream-of-consciousness I was saying aloud because I recognize the ridiculousless of the nature of the thoughts and therefore shared them for the possible entertainment value. It was a joke. I wasn’t really upset about not having and wanting indigency services. She said sarcastically, “It’s a good thing you aren’t in family law much.”

It’s not that she made a comment, it’s that it’s the third or fourth such comment she’d made fairly recently that implied I thought and/or talked too much about nothing. And it’s not that I DON’T overthink things, cuz apparently I do, as this post itself proves. It’s just that I feel she misunderstood me and the point of my words when she made that comment, and for some reason that’s still bothering me. It’s either because I think so highly of her that I don’t want her thinking badly of me, so that right now I feel like I exposed myself trustingly and got made fun of to my surprise in return; or maybe it’s because since early childhood, I’ve had a sensitivity to being misinterpreted, misunderstood, wronged in a sense. When someone I don’t care about doesn’t “get” me and misunderstands something, I just roll my eyes irritably and move on. But in someone I do care about, it just really bothers me when someone’s got a wrong impression of me or something I said.

I said to Mr. W after the trusted person had left, that I need to remember to stop thinking out loud around her because I don’t think she gets me so she thinks I’m being overdramatic over nothing. He laughed and said that he got me, and that he did think the absurdity of what I was saying was amusing. It reminds me of his proposal, how he said most people don’t get me but that he’s one of the lucky ones who do and he gets to laugh. I guess that’s what’s really important, anyway. I just wish I didn’t have to watch my step so carefully around someone I want to comfortably be my off-colored self around.

Today is day 3 since the scary phone call from my doctor’s office. I’m pretty much back to normal, which is a good thing because they pulled me out for my courtroom to handle a (blech!) Family Law courtroom where the supervisors failed to arrange for a relief clerk for the regular clerk’s vacation. The cases were horrible. Restraining orders against former lovers, paternity tests establishing biological parenthood between a divorcing woman and her affair guy, anger, tears, lies, accusations. Criminal Law courtrooms are so much more peaceful.

My mother, however, is just wigging out more and more. The day after finding out, she emailed me all day asking how I am and telling me not to worry. Then that night, she freaked out cuz she called my cell and I didn’t get it and didn’t call her back. She called me at home early this morning before work, upset that I “went missing” the night before, and claiming also that her mother “went missing” as she didn’t return my mom’s calls either. I told her to stop worrying about nothing. And then 45 minutes ago, my house phone ringing woke me up from my TV nap and I tried to ignore it, but on the 16th ring I finally skulked upstairs and picked it up. My mom was in a flurry because she had apparently found my grandmother, told her about my current health “crisis”, and they both agree that October 1 is too far away and they want to know what’s going on sooner than that, so they want to pay for a private doctor to get the procedure done earlier before my appointment. I told her I wasn’t going to go thru a colposcopy/biopsy twice and my appointment is only 3 weeks away, I’m not going to pay extra money for curiosity, and a week’s difference isn’t going to make the difference between life and death. (She also wanted to know whether the lab results are posted online yet, I told her they’re not, and she told me to call my medical provider and see if they could arrange for a printout that I could go pick up myself. I told her they’re not going to do that.) She finally relented, sounding defeated. I told her if she’s going to worry like this I’m not telling her about this stuff next time. She said quickly, “You can’t do that!”

Now I feel worse. The fact that my mom’s now getting clingier is cramping my lifestyle because I don’t want to explain where I am at all hours of the day and night, and I already feel guilty enough about not wanting to. On top of that knowing that she’s feeling worried and helpless, and that she hadn’t slept well the past few nights and was up imagining all sorts of horrid scenarios and panicking about her only child, I’m feeling some of the worry vicariously and I don’t need to stress over something I have no control over. This worry at this time is totally unproductive and pointless, because assuming the worst case scenario and I have terminal cervical cancer or something, I’m gonna feel pretty crappy upon finding that out. And I will feel crappy at that future time no matter WHAT I feel like right now, so I may as well enjoy the 3 weeks of activities I have until the colposcopy. I have a week in Hawaii for Wilco’s wedding at the end of the month, I have a coworker’s house party right after that, and I have the Marine Corps 5K obstacle course run a few days after the colposcopy (presumably before I get lab results back for any biopsy). And I have a funeral to attend tomorrow, for gosh sakes. Heh.

All through childhood, I stood in confusion and upset watching my mom’s strong emotional reactions to things, teaching me by sight that I’m SUPPOSED to freak out when my dad’s a little late, when my dad doesn’t call, when some small family gossip trickles through the grapevines, when there’s a hair on the ground, when I don’t flip down the visor to shield the sun from my mom’s eyes when she’s driving, when my dad makes my mom the butt of some goofy joke. All through adolescence I rolled my eyes in irritation when watching my mom overreact at what I thought were things she should’ve just chilled at, and hoped that I wouldn’t turn out like her. And then as time wore on, she did chill. She opened her mind, she acquired an incredible tolerance for things that went beyond my ability to follow suit but envied. But when it comes to her baby, it appears she’s still reactive despite her attempts to not be overbearing.

It’ll all be nothing soon.

You don’t want to turn 5o around HERE, man.

Today is a court reporter’s 50th birthday. Everyone knew it was her birthday, but she didn’t know that we knew it was the big 5-0. A few of us waited around after hours yesterday until she went home. And then we busted out some decorations and got busy.

I would say we “trashed” her desk, but it’s so much more FESTIVE than trash. The clerk of that courtroom said that when the reporter came in this morning and walked into the courtroom, she screamed for about 10 minutes.

Aside from the obvious large decorations of the black desk covering, balloons, signs and streamers, there are also AARP magazines on the top of her desk, 3 cans of not just Ensure, but LIGHT Ensure, stacked at the front edge of her desk, a diaper, Tiger Balm medicine pad, and “Over the Hill” sparkly confetti sprinkled everywhere. I even put some in her desk drawers and cubbyholes. She’ll be finding sparklies for weeks. Some more details:

Even as I was having the best time doing this yesterday, I was secretly glad that these people with the crazy decorations will be retired when *I* turn 50. Whew!
And yes, the judge took the bench and went into session with all the decorations in place, conducting business as usual. The litigants were delighted at the decor, I heard. Who says Family Law isn’t light-hearted?

You can just barely see the top of the court reporter’s hair over the top of the cards on her desk.
(I don’t know if this happens on your computer, but for some reason on these photos, about 15% is cut off on the right margins when I view them on the site, so all the photos look off-balance. In the full photo, you can actually see a litigant’s arms on the counsel table in the last shot. Roll mouse over each photo for caption, as always.)

One thing about being in a heavy multi-defendant gang-related shooting murder case, is that we get big-time attorneys with great stories.

This morning, one of the defense attorneys told me about a recent case in which he had to defend a man who was drunk driving. And it’s not just that it’s a DUI, it’s that he was so drunk that he plowed right into another car. And it’s not just that he caused an accident, it’s that whom he hit, was a 19 year old Marine who’s a month away from deployment. And his 18-year old wife. Pregnant. And it’s not that he injured these young people full of promise for the future, it’s that he killed them. And it’s not a freak accident, it’s his third DUI.

This defendant is apparently just beside himself, and is accepting of whatever maximum punishment the law sees fit. He keeps replaying the accident over and over in his head, and how absolutely preventable it was. If he’d just stayed home. If he’d just not gotten that drunk. If he’d just had a friend drive him home. If he’d simply left later, when he’d sobered up. But everything’s different now, so many lives have vanished and changed because of one decision in which he really did know better. The first two DUIs were warnings to him; he was charged, convicted and punished, but he’d never injured anyone else. If you ignore the early warnings and chances fate gives you, sometimes the road you walk down has irreversable, irrepairable effects.

That’s my public service announcement today. Be careful out there, especially now that Mr. W’s two kids are baby drivers on the road. Nothing had better happen to them.

Another week is over. My judge is now in New York hanging with his family and in-laws. I’d been pulled out of my courtroom all week to handle Master Calendar (specialized courtroom). Next week, when my judge is still out prancing in the Big Apple, I’ll be in another courtroom. But before THAT…is this weekend.

This weekend, Mr. W plans to take me to sunny Las Vegas to visit his parents and brothers, and to make the engagement announcement over yonder in that department. I’m a tad nervous about his family finding out, because we’ve deliberately kept it from his kids (I’d remove the ring when his kids are around) so they don’t go back to tell their mom, who is not on good terms with Mr. W right now due to a heated and court-involved disagreement about child support issues. I just don’t want to be caught in the cross-fire where all of a sudden I’m collaterally damaged cuz the kids’ mom assume I’m controlling or meddling in their child-rearing business, or that I’m manipulating Mr. W’s position for personal financial gain. Cuz I’m not doing any of those things. Those custody/support issues? They can keep ’em.

*looking down* I’m really liking this ring. Shiny.

I was reviewing a divorce case assigned to me yesterday and noticed something interesting. The case was originally filed 5 years ago in 2002, with the wife petitioning for a legal separation against her husband. They had 3 minor kids, and according to documents filed at that time, the husband made over $5K a month and the wife was unemployed. Because the three kids would be with the wife 80% of the time, the temporary spousal support and child support orders, according to computer-calculated formula, came out to be $1600/month for all 3 kids, and $800/month spousal for the wife. The judge signed off on that order, and a wage assignment was sent out to start deducting the husband’s paychecks for those amounts. (Both the husband and wife were at that hearing.) But they didn’t submit a Judgment to finalize anything in that case to close it out.

Now, 5 years later, the wife submits an AMENDED Petition. She is now asking for a divorce, not just a separation. Okay, that’s fine. She’s asking for her maiden name to be restored. That’s fine, too. At the part where they list the minor kids in common, she listed just the 2 younger kids. I looked back at the first Petition and calculated that the oldest of the 3 kids is now 21 years old, and child support terminates as a matter of law when a kid reaches age 18. Okay, that looks normal, too. That’s all that’s asked for on this Amended Petition. The husband did not file any papers in response to the Amended Petition, so he went into default and the courts now are able to grant (at our discretion) everything the woman had asked for in her Amended Petition. So I turn to her proposed Judgment, which was not served on the husband.

This is what she wants us to sign off on in her Judgment:
* she continues to receive $800/month spousal support with no termination date
* she continues to receive $1600/month child support
* she gets the full deed to their house.

Wait a minute. Did she actually expect me to okay this just because the numbers match an old order from five friggen years ago?! The 2002 calculations were based on her not having a job, and him earning over $5K/month. She submitted no current Income and Expense Report, so how do I know that she’s not currently employed? Maybe she makes a lot of money now, and HE’S unemployed? Who knows?! AND…in her Amended Petition, she didn’t request spousal support! Didn’t even mention it. So as far as the defaulted husband knows, the only requests she has are for a divorce and her last name back, plus the mandatory child support for their remaining 2 minors, and maybe that’s why he didn’t bother answering the Amended Petition, cuz he was okay with that. Did she not expect me to catch that she never asked for support, and was trying to sneak that by in a permanent spousal support order? We don’t have jurisdiction to order something the defaulted spouse was never informed of. Plus, the amount of child support she wants was calculated years ago based on 3 minors, but now she only has 2 minors, so we (as the courts) have already lost jurisdiction to award child support as to the 21 year old. 3 years ago, in fact. As for the house, in the Amended Petition she wrote that there were no separate or joint assets at issue. And now there’s a house?

I ran it by the original judge who issued the 2002 order, just to be sure, and he confirmed that I was right and complimented me on my “good catch.” The law’s already unfairly on the woman’s side and she still wants to be sneaky about it. I’m not trying to be anti-woman here, but hearing about and seeing so many women milk the system for a free ride that they didn’t earn (especially since California is a no-fault state so the woman can cheat on her husband, and if he divorces her, she still gets to take half his crap and be paid for life), it just really pisses me off. Gender aside, if somebody gets half of MY hard-earned assets that I’d spent my whole life collecting just cuz a relationship didn’t work out, they’d have to make sure I don’t own weapons of mass destruction. The law may have made sense back in the day when women weren’t allowed to be educated or earn money, but these days, if women aren’t working, in most cases they’re just plain lazy and shouldn’t be rewarded with perpetual money from the ex! These women have such an insane sense of entitlement. Yet, since divorced women are rewarded by the system for not working, or for not earning top dollar, what’s gonna motivate them to get off their asses? “Hey, the less I make, the more free money the ex needs to pay me! Hell if I ever work again!”

I don’t even know why I’m ranting, really. Cuz the worse these women make themselves look, the better I look by comparison.

“Wow, the ring comes with its own drama,” my gym trainee said last week.
“Figures,” I said, “The relationship is so peaceful that the RING has to have drama.”

Mr. W happened upon The Ring in a jewelry shop while we were on our cruise some weekends ago. Once he saw it, and saw the heart through the jeweler’s loupe, there was no turning back for him and no talking him out of the extravagant purchase. And to think that I was just trying to get to the other side of the store to look at on-sale tanzanite stuff! No, Mr. W had found The Ring. To explain the ensuing drama, I’m going to change the numbers to make them more simple and understandable.

The salesperson said that the ring would appraise for $16 bucks, but because we were purchasing out at sea, we were saving sales tax AND there was a discount on the ring, bringing it down to $9 bucks and some change. The ring has a full money-back warranty for the first year and she said that if it doesn’t appraise for over $16 bucks, or if we change our mind on the purchase, we can return it back to the designer/manufacturer. After some discussion, she said if we take it right then and there, her manager had agreed to discount it down to $8 and some change. Well, if we’re getting a $16 ring for $8, that’s half off, so that’s pretty decent, Mr. W thought, and plunged forth into the full commitment, pun intended. As purchased, the ring was 2.5 sizes too big, and the saleslady gave us the information to contact the designer/lab and informed us the resizing would be free, and we’d be reimbursed postage and mail insurance.

A few days later, we were informed that no mail courier service (UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS)’s shipping insurance truly covers jewelry; that they’d insure your package, but the contract has every loophole in it for jewelry that virtually makes insuring jewelry through them pointless. So we were suggested to take out our own insurance policy on it before shipping the ring off for resize (the lab is in Miami, Florida).

At this point you’re probably wondering why I don’t just get it resized locally. It’s because local jewelers resize by cutting a length of gold off the bottom of the band, and bonding the remaining ring together, forming a smaller circle. With 64 stones sitting on 3 surfaces of this band, no local jeweler could offer a guarantee that the side stones won’t pop off once the circle is reduced by that many sizes. Plus, cutting the band would remove the designer seal and signature on the inside of the band. The original designer would make a new band in my size, remove the current stones, and re-set them into the new band.

Okay, so I called my homeowner’s insurance company. They said they’d insure the ring under my homeowner’s policy for an extra $320 a year, but that policy would only cover $10 of the ring. What about the other $6? They said I can take out a policy just for the ring itself, and that’d cost $500/year. Holy crap. But first, before they write any policy, they want the ring appraised and a formal appraiser’s report submitted to them.

So off I went to find a gem appraiser. I found a really good one who has 25 years of experience, has certifications and gemology degrees up the yin yang, and met with her over the weekend. The appraiser examined, weighed, took photos of the ring, and researched by calling the actual ring designer’s company for replacement value. The 9-page appraisal report came in late last nite. The value? Not over $16 buckaroos like the store claimed. But $10 smackers. Yup. Less than 2/3 of the claimed retail value.

So now I’m ticked. I feel swindled, not by Mr. W, but by the store. And I want to return the ring and get Mr. W his money back. If anyone knows me, they know I don’t pay full price for anything, because I do my research first and walk in with a great bargaining chip or work through reliable connections. Granted, I was not expecting to go ring-shopping or get a proposal, so I’d done no homework, and this isn’t even my money, but it just doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t mind paying $9 clams for a $16 item, nor paying $5 clams for a $10 item, but I don’t like paying $9 for a $10 item. What the hell is that?! Jewelry is marked up so much already that we shouldn’t be paying more than about half of the full retail value.

Last nite, after some brainstorming with an engaged friend, I was thinking that I’d go ring shopping, and see if anything out there really grabs hold of me. Chances are that it’d be a bigger stone or better value for $9 (cuz we’re not paying designer prices for a patented cut), OR it’d be a similar item for $5 or less. And if it happens that nothing out there compares to this one and I fall in love with the one I have, then I’ll insure it, ship it off to get resized. Mr. W is okay with this plan, and it may save/refund him a lot of money.

And then all day today, people kept talking about the ring. “Where’s this amazing ring that everybody’s been talking about, lemme see!” said a male security guard downstairs that I normally have zero rapport with. People everywhere, judges, reporters, attorneys, bailiffs, people I don’t even know, have heard about it and say it’s the talk of the courthouse. Mr. W is now touted as THE man with THE best taste in jewelry. And he really did fall in love with the ring, and came up with this whole metaphor comparing me and our relationship to it in his proposal.

So the dilemma is, is my Asian thrift gene more dominant, or will my sentimentalist gene win over? Argh.
(For more examples of the Asian thrift gene, see here and here.)
What do you guys think about this situation?

People think my judge is a strict fuddy-duddy. But they’re not around when he says goodbye to me every evening, each time in a different way. “I’m off like a thief in the night.” “All right, the lazy people are goin’. See ya.” Today, it was

Judge: *door opening, poking his head in* All right, you’re not gonna have the ol’ judge to kick around anymore.
Me: *wailing* What’m I gonna do all evening, then?
Judge: *heartlessly* I don’t know. Get a soccer ball.

Fun, fun. As I sit here at my desk and divorce people.