Four nice things happened this past week:
1) I finally finished primary revision for Part II of Silver Circle and sent that out; and
2) I also finished secondary revision for Part I of Silver Circle and sent THAT out; and also made a proofing copy for my mother, with a warning that there is a cliffhanger of sorts and that it may be a few weeks before she gets a chance to go on with the story. And
3) I got excused from jury duty in St. Louis.
Those of you with good memories may be saying, “Wait, wasn’t that a thing last winter?”
Yes, yes it was. Apparently whoever handles this, whatever bureaucracy it is, thought maybe my mother might have gotten younger over the past eight months, so I got summoned again. This, I will remind you if you have forgotten, is for a courthouse in downtown St Louis, which is 80 miles away. I have no keen desire to have to fight through downtown traffic and deal with downtown parking. At rush hour, no less. I’m not at all familiar with downtown St L, though I know some bits of St L rather well. The only good thing was this time there was no chance of ice storms. Oh, and I didn’t have a pregnant dog who might suddenly encounter a dire emergency. So it wasn’t as bad, but it wasn’t great.
Anyway, I did an online excuse request, and that got turned down, which I didn’t mention to my mother because I didn’t want her to worry. So FINALLY, not quite at the last minute, the online excuse thing reopened — I just happened to check, they don’t notify you — so I did a second excuse — all of this with my mother’s doctor’s updated letter saying “Are you insane?” except more politely and with a few more words like “frail” and “elderly” and “requires her daughter to be reachable” and so forth. ALL OF WHICH IS TRUE, would you idiot bureaucrats PLEASE summon people IN ST LOUIS if you want them to be on a jury in St. Louis city? I would basically be fine, or at least not horrified, at the idea of being on a LOCAL jury.
ANYWAY, that finally worked and thank heaven I can now cross this off my list of things to worry about. The excuse approval looks different, more formal, so maybe it’s a more permanent approval than last time. I can hope.
Anyway, that means that Silver Circle and everything else should continue to move forward on schedule. Which did seem likely. But I couldn’t be sure, because after all they did turn down my first online excuse request. Those people are insane.
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ALSO
4) As a reward for zipping through secondary revision of Part I of Silver Circle, I took off a few hours and read Aral Vorkosigan’s Dog, which as you may know or recall from the Fanfic post, is the one that retells the back half of Shards of Honor from Simon Illyan’s pov. It was great, the moment when Illyan makes a silent oath to Aral is especially great, and I’m really glad I did that post, because otherwise I might never have known that fic exists.
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I’ve just finished the last Black Dog stories and am therefore very much looking forward to the next volume (even with a cliffhanger!).
Yay for progress on the Black Dog saga! Looking forward to it.
And congratulations re Jury Duty! I feel your pain. Or rather, my pain, but it was similar.
San Mateo County insisted that my mother had to come in for jury duty.
I pointed out that she’d been living in a different county for over a year. Didn’t matter.
I mentioned that she was 100 years old. They didn’t care.
I told them that her dementia had progressed to the point where she couldn’t manage her affairs. They still wanted her to come in.
I finally had to get her hospice doctor to write them a letter, which managed to avoid using the phrase “Now listen, you @#!$%s” so more power to him for his restraint, and that got them to accept that she couldn’t serve.
That really does take admirable restraint. What I wonder is, are these petty bureaucrats just stupid, or deliberately malicious? We may never know.