Spanish Phrase of the day: Honest to God, one of my students just asked : "Miss Mathis, te gusta hombres sin ropas?" - "Miss Mathis, do you like guys without clothes. Como Chip'n'Dales?"

My lunchtime has been invaded by a horde of girls who like to shout "Hola Miss Mathis quite loudly when they enter my room. They apparently missed me while I was gone.

Just as I was hoping they wouldn't call me in for Jury Duty, I get the call. It said to report by 7:45 and including getting lost time, I was at the door at 7:20. There was a line of people waiting to get into the courthouse. The people in the line told me I needed to start another line for jurors and lawyers. So I became the official start of the line. whoo hoo.

A lawyer dressed in white, who I think had just had plastic surgery or something, cut in front of me. She looked like someone had torn her face off in pieces and then put neat little stitches around the rims of her eyes and her cheekbones. She talked to the guy in the wheelchair cart selling newspapers. He told her the missing fender on his cart was due to running into a street sweeper. "It was my fault," he explained.

"No," she replied. "It's never your fault. Trust me. It's always the other guy's fault."

Took the elevator up to the 5th floor and the escalator up to the sixth then the doors open. The security guard made a big deal of dumping a huge pile of heavy chains into a wooden bookshelf, which he then faced toward the xray machine. It was rather odd.

I got up to the jury room and staked out a table, pausing to scoff at the sign saying we'd receive directions at 8:10. That's the last time I arrive to jury duty on time. I pulled out my papers and began to grade. The lady in charge was actually quite affable without being blatantly perky or obnoxious. We watched the obligatory videos about how wonderful and painless civic duty was, and then waited for them to call out names for the first group (after a half hour coffee break). At 9:45, (15 minutes into Period 4, school time) they called the first group of about forty names. Sometime before lunch I got tired of grading and decided to get Lost in a Good Book... literally. I made a "jury buddy," a lady who could watch my papers and spot at the table while I went to the bathroom, and we giggled about my student who's translator seemed to think that the word for madre in English was breast.

At 11:30 they called the second group of names, and 75% of them went down to a court. Not me. They dismissed the rest of us for lunch. Now I'm not complaining about an hour and forty five minute lunch... but it's no wonder they can't seem to get anything done. I drove down to Open Sesame, my favorite Lebanese place and got a chicken tawook pita since they were out of my favorite, the chicken sharwama.

Back at the courthouse, I lightened my load and only brought my book and a book.

At about 2:40, I made a comment to my jury buddy (whose name had also not been called) that school was going to be out in ten minutes. It was then that the Jury Lady announced that everyone needed to gather for a special announcement. We were excused. Yeah. So I headed home and spent a nice quiet evening recovering, watching Survivor, a new CSI, and a Without a Trace. ER was still preempted by another Princess Di special. Gag-o-rama... "because everything with Rama in it has to be good."