Neglect

That's what I've done to our little blog. So since it's too gloomy for me to take a walk on my lunch break... here I am doing an update.

So the week we got back from Utah I had to call in for jury duty. I call in Sunday night - call back Monday night. I call back Monday - report in at 9am. Crap. So I go in, spend 15 minutes trying to find a parking spot only to find that 2/3 of the parking (that jurors don't have to pay for) is in another section, get in line to go through security, and start reading in the jury room. After a while, the lady in charge says she's going to do our orientation soon. So 1/2 an hour later she does her speil then tells us she's giving the list to the judge and will find out what he wants to do. After much sitting around, we get sent to lunch and told to report outside the courtroom at 1:30 (courts take 1.5 hr lunch breaks). Come back, sit around for a while, and we eventually get called in. Swears us all in then tells everybody to come back the next day. All 63 of us. So there's a lot of sitting around in the morning, calls us in shortly before lunch and he excuses a couple people for hardship or close friendship with involved officers. So we have to come back after lunch. We sit around for a while and we finally go in and start jury questioning. The jury selection took the next day as well. They had "legal issues" come up at every turn which is why we sat around so much!
In the end, I got selected on the jury. Boo. There were 3 defendants for an attempted murder with gang and firearm allegations. It was horribly prosecuted, the evidence was shaky at the least, and we would have to speculate all over the place to convict. Once we went into the jury room (with only 15 minutes left before we went home), we all agreed on not guilty pretty fast. In the morning we talked and had a conviction in about an hour or 2. The plus: I got a lot of reading done. I finished a series I had been reading, started a new book, and started re-reading another. I still got paid - that would suck to donate your time for that! And I got some entertainment! One of the defense attorneys was a crack-up. We could all see right through his attempts to act out to discredit the prosecuters case. I know it's his job, but, man, I could not stand that guy!!

One cool thing I got to do last month was Lockheed's Space Day. I'm in the Lockheed group at work (a group of people that primarily work on projects for Lockheed) so I was included in the group that got to go. They hold it at an elementary school in Riverside and just moved it to my elementary school this year. There's a bunch of stations set up on all sorts of science, math, engineering, and technology that the classes rotate through. I helped with some Tetra Tech employees from the Irvine office at the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) station.

Who wouldn't want to try on a tevlar suit, hard hat, safety glasses, vests, and gloves??

Some of the Tetra Tech employees there

The next day, with my slightly red face (I had never even gotten pink from being in the sun all day in Riverside before Space Day!! 4 years of band camp with no sunscreen! I must be getting old!), we had a swim party with almost the whole crew! Grandma Patton had been in town for the last month and was at Doug and Nancy's with Janie. KK came down and Jeff and Sarah were in town with Jackson. Greg and Chelsea drove up so we had a real party going on! It was a lot of fun to have all the kids playing in the pool!!

Mackenzie was having her own party on the swim step!

It was Zoe's first time in the pool and was happy as long as she had shade!

Jackson was a little sleepy but otherwise happy and smiling!

One thing I missed out on in May was my good friend, Leilani's wedding in Manti. At least she had an open house in Riverside (even if she didn't wear her awesome dress!).

It's hard to get a picture without bunny ears with my dad and Lani's dad around!

While Jeff and Sarah were in town, we babysat Jackson one night. So we made some use of the slide in our backyard:

In other news...
-We got called to be the Webolos leader so that will be a learning experience for me since I don't know anything about Scouts!
-I'm working my application to take the PE. I've also started studying and am planning on taking a review class. Which means I will have no life at all from mid-August through October. So if you're in town visiting and want to hang out... good luck!
-My dad finally got a job! Unfortunately, it's in Salt Lake City. So just when I thought I was done going to Utah every year... John is excited to have an excuse to take a snowboarding trip every year!
-We both got hiking shoes with the intent to do it more often. We went to a trail area within walking distance of our house on Memorial Day. They were good, nice and easy, ease back in to hiking trails.
-We got a beautiful new range!! We hated the crappy one that was in our house, so we decided to get a new one instead of a grill. We absolutely love it so far. Even though we tried to burn it down within half and hour of having it installed... yeah, look under the screwed down pieces of the oven for pieces of paper!!
-We had a little hockey night at our place. Yummy burgers, snacks, strawberry daquaris, and Stanley Cup finals hockey!!
-We go to Lake Powell next week!! I'm so excited!! John is just happy he actually gets to wakeboard this year (no cast)!! Can't wait!!