So, no jury duty after all. I had to report back to the court house to find out that there were no trials happening today after all.

What a waste of time.

Glad there's gonna ba an impartial jury!

Wow, so I got summoned for jury duty, anybody know how that works? They send you a letter and a crappy little questionnaire that you have to send back. Then they wait two weeks or so and send you a letter that says "just thought we'd remind you that we haven't bothered to tell you if you're actually needed for jury duty or not."

Then you have to call and the phone call tells you everything your need to know, should your "panel number" be requested. Except it doesn't really tell you everything. They let you guess at some of it.

Then there's the dress code. "Dress for a job interview." I'm in management. To me, that means wear a suit. However, upon arrival and seeing how everyone else was dressed, I remembered something. Construction workers don't wear suits to interviews. A significant portion of the potential jurors were wearing jeans and workboots with their preppy little oxfords.

Then we actually get there and we're left to sit a half hour, spoken to briefly, shown a video that looks like it belongs in a Jr. High Street Law class, given another crappy questionnaire and left to sit some more, while the initial prescreening of our paperwork happens.

Except that it didn't. It's now 10:20, a full 2 hours after I first arrived at the court house. The jury coordinator comes in at this point and proceeds to admit that while she thought it was strange that a judge who never does jury selection on Monday morning would want a jury at 8:30 Monday morning, apparently it didn't strike her as strange enough to actually check with the judge. She just took the clerk's word for it.

At this point, we're all thinking, thank god, they're going to send us home. If the judge doesn't like to start trials on Monday, that means they'll pick from the people who were summoned for tomorrow, right?

WRONG! That means go find something to do for 3 HOURS and come back at 1:45 for jury selection. Which will take not less than an hour and probably not more than an hour and a half to two hours.

So basically, I got up early, got dressed up, drove 10 blocks because I can't walk that far in dress shoes, parked in a crappy, poorly lit parking garage, walked 3 blocks to the court house (because the parking garage in just past 6th and Linden and the courthouse in at 4th and Hamilton), sat for two hours and then was dismissed for a long lunch and 5 more hours of wondering if I have to serve on a jury or not.

They'll only be picking 14 of the 45 of us, which is basically a 1 in 3 chance, which with my luck probably means that I'll get picked. Oh, and did I mention, I"m not missing work for this, I'm on vacation! Because my manager didn't tell me that the company does jury duty pay and I can't afford to only get paid the piddly $9/day that they pay jurors in order to fairly compensate us for fulfilling our civic duty.

Way to pick an impartial jury! Piss everybody off, then ask us to decide someone's fate. Because this if for a criminal trial, which could last anywhere between 4 hours and 3 days.

I can't believe that there's no better way to do this. Phone interviews or something. I mean they plan the docket ahead of time. Somebody had to know that there was no trial today. Oh, wait, the judge did know that. Apparently it was just the woman in charge of when the jury actually had to be there who didn't bother to find out.

But I'm not angry or anything. Not me. I enjoy it when bureaucratic red tape destroys my vacation. That's my big thrill in life.

Almost forgot

We may be losing some of our very first tomatoes this year. We have a birds next in the awning over our back door. And there's at least 3 babies. The other day I stepped outside without realizing and mommy bird flew away and didn't come back for hours.

Hopefully the little ones grow up and fly off soon, because there's a lot of work to be done in the yard. Plus the cat is very agitated about not getting to play outside.

Age

Yay! Pictures!

So, Sarah stopped by and finally remembered to bring the camera with her. So, in no particular order, here are the dolls I've been working on this year that haven't already been posted. I warn you, I'm kinda prolific.

This is Domokun. As cute as he is, unfortunately, there will not be a pattern appearing on Age's Crochet Pages as he is a licensed monster and I do not of have copyright permissions.

This is the girl version of the Dammit Doll. Her pattern is already on the website, this is simply a pic of the new sample which will be getting posted to the proper pages shortly. This is the only doll in this batch which has a posted pattern.

**edit** Her picture is now posted to Age's Crochet Pages. **edit**



This piggy was made at Dan's request. Hopefully the pattern will be posted before long, with a slight modification to the tail. On this one the tail is needle tatted.



These lovely ladies are my kitchen dolls. Red dress is a bag holder. The blue and green ones are currently sitting on very tiny display shelves, hence the floating look. The green ones short sleeves were originally intended for her hands to be stitched together to hold a towel and the blue one was supposed to sit with a soap dish in her lap. I love them so much and I'm afraid of ruining them, so they've ended up on shelves and out of the way of my cooking messes.

The pattern for these three may eventually get posted to the site, I haven't decided yet. It's really long.



This is my simplified version of the Kadoma from Princess Mononoke, complete with his own cherry branch to perch on. He is not fastened in any way, he really just does balance that well. In case you are not familiar with the story Princess Mononoke is one of Hiyao Miyazaki's films. The Kadoma were trees spirits who granted passage into the forest when asked nicely, but didn't contribute much to the action other than looking on with curiosity.



Lastly and possibly leastly, are my "girls." They are basically three dimensional doodles based around three things.
1) I really wanted to make a doll wearing Chuck Taylors.
2) I really wanted an excuse to give a doll a burgundy streak in her hair.
3) I couldn't think of any other way to combine girly pink with camo.

Thanks for reading,
Age

Age's Crochet Pages Update

I just finished uploading a huge update to the Crochet Pages Site, which among other things, includes (finally) a link to this blog.

Things to expect from this update:
- lots of new patterns
- a few new pictures
- the newsletters are all posted in an archive
- a new link bar at the top of the pages
- a link to this blog!
- error correction to the plain English granny square pattern (Thanks, Sam, for giving me the opportunity to find that!)

A few unfortunate things with this update:
- there may be some unavoidable bugs
- there are still tons of Tripod ads (sorry, can't afford to upgrade the membership right now)

I hope that this update goes over well and hopefully some of you will find your way here.

Thanks for reading,
Age