Yeah, I know I haven't been posting lately, but I'm working 8-and-a-half-hour days, and with tax season coming to an end, work has been crazy-nutso. Add to that the fact that the tax office I'm working at is rather posh, with rather wealthy clients (one drove up one day in a Jaguar and talked about how his company was working on [large-scale televised entertainment event redacted due to confidentiality restrictions] and [Canadian large-scale televised entertainment event redacted due to confidentiality restrictions] and because of that had to give up on [even larger-scale televised sports event redacted due to confidentiality restrictions]), and these clients can be rather high-maintenance and frustrating. So, suffice to say, I've been working my butt off and when I get home I'm just too tired to post.

What am I doing now that I can post? Sitting in the jury room at the county courthouse. I got called in today, and they're selecting for a six-week trial. (Yikes.) So a bunch of people (myself included) filled out I-have-an-honest-hardship-please-don't-pick-me-for-this questionnaires, and I think they're still sorting through them. I missed out on the first round of excusals, but hopefully I can get excused today. I really don't want to have to call my temp job and tell them I have to be back tomorrow. They already didn't like the fact that I had to be here today with Tax Day on Monday. Praise the Lord the court has wi-fi.

Now we're just sitting around doing absolutely nothing. The jury admin guy hasn't said anything in close to an hour and a half. I've spent most of the day watching last year's Eurovision Song Contest and creating a drinking game. Give singers an international stage and millions of viewers and have them try to win a singing contest, and tropes will appear. The Fan of Added Drama and Key Change of Added Drama, to give a few examples. Gimmicky costumes also tend to show up every once in a while, as does what I call "alleged English," which is when you get non-native English speakers writing or translating songs into English to try and get a bigger international audience and not bothering to have native English speakers edit it. Belarus' song last year is so chock full of alleged English (and really thick accents) that I can't make out more than about 80% of the words. (Note the use of gimmicky costumes; also, "heartfully" is not a real word. The fun is that what they sing is only about an 80% match of the lyrics posted online. I think.)

***

Luckily, the jury admin guy started reading off names not long after I started writing this, and I got excused from the selection and released for the day. So I called Temp Job and offered to come in, but I'd only be in for 2 hours, so the office manager told me to just not bother. So I got a full day off of work in the busiest week of tax season. No, I won't be paid for it, but I needed the mental health break. I do not know how they do this every year.