Tag: personal (Page 3 of 7)

Holiday Weekend Wrap Up With More Big News

May 29, 2018 / DB

Our summer is off to a very hot and hectic start.

Remember back when I was bitching about how cold it was in April? Mother Nature was paying attention and has punished me, and others in Indiana, who complained about her April offerings. This month is almost certain to clinch the hottest May in Indianapolis history. Yesterday was the hottest May day here in 107 years. It’s stupid. I’m assuming June is going to be wet and in the 60s.

We began the summer as we normally do, heading down to the lake. We went Saturday, taking one of our young nephews, and were joined by other family on Sunday. So the girls were super annoying Saturday without friends to keep them entertained. They were slightly better when aunts, uncles, and other cousins showed up. We had a second birthday party for one of the cousins. The rest of the time we just sweated in the heat.

Each of the past two summers, as we’ve closed down the house for the season, S and I have had a very brief conversation about whether the lake house is worth it. We really only spend six or seven fun weekends down there every season, but we’re paying a mortgage, insurance, taxes, and utilities for 12 months. We always talk about spending a weekend down there in the fall or winter, but never do it. Each of the past two years, the answer has been yes, it is still worth it. That math has changed.

We’re getting ready to sell the lake house, too.

It’s partially because we’re getting busier and it’s going to be tougher to get down there as the girls continue to get older. But it’s also because our new home in Indy is stretching us out more on how much money we’re spending on properties each month. It’s tougher to justify the lake house when it’s no longer in the comfortable financial zone to keep it.

We told the girls a couple weeks ago, and they weren’t happy. One of them cried for an hour. Too much change at once, I think. We explained our reasoning, but also pointed out that this will free us to do other things in the summer. They can have friends over more often. We might get to take some more, bigger trips. Eventually that logic has taken hold, but I still think they are, overall, disappointed.

When they were acting like being at the lake was a chore this weekend, when I spent 90 minutes in the heat working in the yard, when I thought ahead to all the prep for lake weekends and all the clean up after, I was ready to put a sign out when we left Monday morning. I’m sure I’ll be in a better mood in two weeks when we have friends down. But after six great summers, I’m kind of done with it.

We are just full of bombshells lately, aren’t we?!?!

Our home here officially went on the market today. We already have one showing scheduled. It’s been a hectic week or so to get the house as ready as it can be to start letting people walk through it. I believe I mentioned one of our next door neighbors had two offers the first day they put theirs on the market two weeks ago. That sets kind of a high expectation for how quickly things could happen. We also pushed our price up a decent chunk since they got more than their asking price, and we have more updates and a much bigger lot than they do. We could get an offer in a week, which would be pretty good, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be all stressed out since the neighbors were done so quickly.

We went over to meet the builder at our new house today. Even though we bought after it was 95% complete, we still had to run through some bullshit marketing surveys to satisfy their execs. They were putting in all the landscaping today, which made the house look better. Only problem is it is hot and dry, as I mentioned above, and they’re waiting on some final piece of paperwork to get the water line connected. We’re supposed to have a pretty good dose of rain over the next 36 hours as the tropical storm remnants pass us, but if the water isn’t hooked up soon, I worry we’ll have to start over in the fall. Oh well…

I hope all of you had safe and enjoyable holiday weekends free of major, life-changing decisions.

The Family Project Reveal

May 22, 2018 / DB

I have been struggling with insomnia lately. Several nights a week, despite often being absolutely, physically beat, I will go to bed, fall asleep for 30–45 minutes, and then wake up and be unable to go back to sleep for hours.

This is mostly because my brain has been working overtime of late. I’ve been teasing you with references to a big family project for a week or two. It is that project that has my brain unable to shut down at night.

At last I can reveal what it is that has been dominating my life and keeping me from sleeping.

After almost 15 years in our current home, we have purchased a new house. The B’s are moving!

It’s a long and likely funny story, but I’ll cut to the chase for most of you. We are moving ever-so-slightly south into the Nora area of Indianapolis. We purchased a spec home that was built on a 3-acre property that has been split into three parcels. Our house was built first. On the opposite side a house is currently being built and has already been sold. And in the middle is a third lot that will likely break ground any day.

Exactly a month ago we went and looked at the spec house. We loved it, but were not totally sold on the location, so we kept looking. We also had our eyes out for empty lots where we could build exactly what we wanted. The area we’re looking in is pretty much saturated. We realized that it might take us months to find a lot that both fit our budget and construction needs. So about 10 days ago we began seriously looking at the middle lot I mentioned above. We toured a model home of the design that is slated for that lot and absolutely loved everything about it.[1] So a week ago we were reasonably certain we were going to bid on the lot and build that house.

But after going over the builder’s pricing sheets, we realized that building the house of your choice is often a budget killer. The spec list they gave us was already beyond our means, although our realtor claimed we could make some easy changes to knock the price down significantly. Problem is we wanted to make some other changes that, unfortunately, would have wiped out those savings and added plenty more spending.

So last Wednesday we changed approach and decided to go after the spec home we looked at a month ago. Saturday we walked through, made a list of things we wanted to have done, and submitted a bid. The builder had an open house scheduled for Sunday, so we knew we wouldn’t hear back until after that was done. Sure enough, 15 minutes after the doors closed, we got a pretty reasonable counter. We countered right back and just after noon on Monday we received the builder’s acceptance.

We looked at our first house on April 20. We are set to close on June 21. That’s some fast real estating! We are hopeful we have the same luck with our current home as our next door neighbors just had. They listed their house on a Tuesday and had two offers that night. Our house will likely go on the market a week from today. The area we live in is super hot right now, so we’re hopeful for a quick resolution.

So that’s the big news.

Why has this been keeping me up at night? Because when I hit that magic moment after 30–45 minutes of sleep and wake up, I start running through lists. I admit I’m a little overwhelmed by all that is involved in moving. So I start running through what all needs to be done to get our current house ready to sell. I mentally pack. I mentally purge old belongings we don’t need anymore. I think of all the changes in address that need to be made to utilities, etc. Then I think of all the work that will go into setting up the new home. And so on. Next thing you know it’s 2:00 AM and I finally give up on sleeping and come downstairs to have another beer and read for a little bit to try to re-set my brain. I think I’ve been averaging 4.5 hours of sleep over the past couple weeks, with an hour or so up front, and hour in the middle, and then two-plus hours of exhausted sleep before the alarm goes off. Luckily the excitement of all this keeps me going during the day. I figure I might start relaxing and sleeping again sometime in July, assuming we get this house sold promptly. If not, I may not be able to sleep at all.

Which is kind of the point of model homes, right? ↩

Scott

May 11, 2018 / DB

Normally on Friday mornings one of the first things I do is start combing through my playlist of newest music to put together the Friday playlist.

I can’t do that today.

News I had been fearing for several days was confirmed just moments ago: the body of Scott Hutchison, lead singer of Frightened Rabbit, was discovered in Edinburgh overnight. Hutchison sent out some cryptic Tweets Tuesday night (our time) and then disappeared. Those tweets were not unusual; Scott battled depression and would occasionally go off the rails with late night Tweets, only to apologize the next day. Wednesday did not bring apologies but rather appeals from Scott’s brother Grant, FR’s dummer, for anyone who knew of Scott’s whereabouts to ask him to contact his family.

The last two days passed with more pleas for help finding Scott from both his family and authorities. And now he is confirmed as gone.

I feel terrible for his family and loved ones. I feel terrible that Scott had so much pain that he was unable to find a way to manage.

I also feel terrible for finding so much joy in his songs about his pain. Over the last 10 years, since I first discovered Frightened Rabbit’s music, I’ve listened to and enjoyed no band more than them. I often found that a little odd, as his songs of romantic failure, depression, and internal pain came at a time in my life when I was happily married, having kids, and generally leading a placid suburban existence. What about late 30s/early 40s me connected with these songs of deeply damaged 20-somethings? Hell, even in the brief periods of my 20s when my life wasn’t going the way I wanted it to and I felt aimless and unhappy, I never reached the depths of what Scott sang about. So there was no connecting dots of my previous life with his.

I think it was always the utter, brutal honesty in his songs that kept pulling me back. Plenty of people sing of heartbreak and sadness. There was something unique to his lyrics that dove right into the uncomfortable bits, as he might call them, and made it impossible not to find some connection with them.

And there was always that glimmer of hope in even his saddest, darkest songs. There was the feeling that Scott was going to bash his way through the pain by strumming his guitar just a little harder, while his brother beat the hell out of the drums behind him, and through communion with his audience, find a way to get through another day.

All week I’ve been thinking of “Floating in the Forth,” the final full track on FR’s 2008 breakthrough album The Midnight Organ Fight. The song, which begins with a low moaning that sounds like a tug pulling from harbor, works through the process of a man stepping to the edge of a bridge – in this case the actual bridge that crosses the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh – and then deciding he’ll “save suicide for another year,” before exploding in a glorious, angelic closing sequence. “Take your life, give it a shake…” was the line I kept repeating to myself, hoping Scott had found the strength to do that one more time.

Initial reports say that Scott’s body was found near the Forth Road Bridge he sang about 10 years ago.

I was worried about Scott two years ago, as much as a fan who briefly met and shook hands with him once can be worried. The band’s 2016 tour had several “off the rails” moments, they may have broken up briefly two different times, and 2017 dawned with some real questions about their future. But they toured heavily through that year, released a fine, three-song EP in the fall, and 2018 dawned with optimism. The band did a small club tour for the 10th anniversary of The Midnight Organ Fight. Scott and Grant recorded with two other Scottish brothers as Mastersystem. Scott spoke with several publications about both where the band had been and where they were going. He seemed positive about their future, noting that several songs were already in the works for FR’s next album. Just a week ago he told a writer, when asked about his health, he said:

“Pretty fine. Middling. On a day-to-day basis, I’m a solid six out of ten. I don’t know how often I can hope for much more than that. I’m drawn to negatives in life, and I dwell on them, and they consume me. I don’t think I’m unique in that sense. I’m all right with a six. If I get a couple of days a week at seven, fuck, it’s great.”

So much of the best music comes from pain. As a music fan, you hope that the albums you buy, the digital tunes you stream, the tickets you buy, and the positive vibes you send back to the artists you love can ease their pain and help to sustain them. I’m very sad today that all of us who loved Scott Hutchison and his music could not help him keep his demons at bay.

Twenty

February 22, 2018 / DB

After you have a parent die, you think of them in odd moments and ways.

Example: one day last fall I was shaving. As I stood there, scraping metal against skin and stubble, for some reason my brain jumped back 31 years to the night my stepdad taught me how to shave. I remembered him showing me the proper amount of pressure to use, how to avoid nicking the edges of my lips but still get the area around them cleaned up, and his amazement at my ability to shave with either hand. He kept his razor in his right hand at all times, reaching across his face to shave the left cheek. I, on the other hand, just swapped hands and used my left hand for the left side. That seemed perfectly normal to me but blew his mind a little bit.

I chuckled at this memory and then did the math trying to recall how old he was that night. Thirty-six. Which, you know, wow.

I also thought of my mom’s age at the time, 34. Then I thought ahead to her age when she died, 46. That’s when my mind was blown a little. As I stood there, shaving on a warm, late fall morning, I, too was 46. I did some more math and figured that if I made it through the upcoming weekend, I would have lived more days than she had. Which was utterly amazing.

We’re at the age now that, unfortunately and sadly, several of my loyal readers and friends have lost parents. I never pretend to have all the answers that will help ease their grief, but I also have always felt an obligation to provide some kind of comforting words based on my experience. I usually say two things:

1) There is no right or wrong way to grieve. Whatever feels right to you is the correct way. As long as you aren’t being destructive to yourself or your loved ones, never feel guilty about crying too much or not enough, being too sad or not sad enough. Do what you need to do.

2) You will think about your lost parent every day for the rest of your life. This one has always bothered me a little. I don’t mean to tell people who are in deep grief that that pain will never go away. No, the message is that every day something will remind you of your lost parent. You may be going about your day normally and hear a song they loved, come across something you have from their home, or just see a particular kind of late afternoon light that reminds you of riding to practice together and laughing at their bad jokes.

Or shaving and remembering how your stepdad, who is now two years gone, bought you your first razor and how you have almost passed your mom in total days lived.

I share this today because it is the 20th anniversary of my mom’s death. And I still, honestly, think of her every single day. The memories aren’t often sad or of her death. Just little things here and there.

Over the years I’ve had plenty of regrets of the things she missed – my marriage, being a grandmother, her not being there for my stepdad in his final years – but those, also, are fleeting. Most days it’s just a quick thought of her in the midst of other things. I keep the last picture we took together here on my desk, and although I don’t look directly at it very often, she’s always right there in my peripheral vision. Kind of like those fleeting thoughts each day: always there, but just out of focus.

There are a few days I think of her, and miss her, a little more. Mother’s Day. Her birthday. And February 22. In the first few years after her death, on Feb. 22 I would constantly check the clock and count down until the time of her death. When the time arrived, I would often go somewhere on my own, and both think about it and try not to think about it at the same time. Weird, I know.

More recently, I’ve just acknowledged the day early on and then gone about things as I would any other day.

As the 20th anniversary approached, though, I’ve been thinking more back to that day she died. I’m astounded at how strong my memories are of the first 12 hours or so after she died. Honestly, I think I remember everything about the period from the moment I got the phone call from my stepdad until I finally passed out on my grandmother’s bed early the next morning. After that, the following week is a blur.

As many of you know, S lost her mom in 1993. So we talk a lot about the Dead Moms, as we call them, in our house.[1] We often wonder how they would have changed as they aged. Would they have mellowed, become more strident in their ways, or some combination? Would they get along with each other? Would the four of us all get along? I’m pretty sure my mom would have been the one we had to tell to stop buying the girls so many presents at Christmas, for example.

And, to be honest, we use them to make fun of some of our closest friends. When someone tells about a crazy mother or father in law they have to deal with, we will always chuckle to ourselves. Later we’ll laugh together about how we never have to worry about St. Carolyn or St. Marie pissing us off, ignoring our instructions for the kids, or meddling in our business. They are forever frozen, all their rough edges softened by grief and two decades of them being memories.

The coda of our famous First Date Story revolves around telling each other our moms were both deceased. ↩

Old Man

February 1, 2018 / DB

I have passed another milestone of the aging process: last week I picked up my new pair of glasses, my first with progressive lenses. If there was any uphill left in life it is now certainly in the rearview mirror.

My eyes are still adjusting, which is kind of always the case with me. I have a nutty prescription – both bad nearsightedness and serious astigmatism – and have weak corneas. Combine all that and even in the best of circumstances it’s tough to get perfectly corrected vision. If the angle of the lenses or the correction is off by just a hair, it can throw either part of the prescription off by enough to be noticeable to me. And my weak corneas mean my prescription is always in flux. I’ll see great for awhile then suddenly everything is out of whack for a few weeks before it returns to center.

In other words, I’m a pain in the ass. Or at least my eyes are.

Anyways…I’m still getting used to the new lenses. I will say they’ve gotten better over the past two days, so hopefully I’m getting locked in. But there is still a chance I will need to go back and have the lenses checked and, perhaps, redone.

The one big win is the whole reason you get progressive lenses: my up-close vision has improved dramatically. I had reached the point where it was impossible to read anything that was in tiny print, because that meant bringing the object near my face, where my eyes just didn’t work anymore. I had become one of those people who took a picture of, say, the directions on a bottle of medication with my phone and then looked at the image on screen to figure out the proper dosage.

Sad and pathetic.

But now I can read that shit!

For those of you not in the progressive world, it has been a little tricky getting used to the “tunnels” of vision these lenses offer. It’s frustrating to have to move my eyes or head a few degrees up or down to bring something into clear focus. That’s the one area where I worry about whether these lenses are correct, because at times it seems like I’m working too hard to find that perfect spot. And I don’t know if that’s just something I need to get used to, or only happening because the lenses are off by just a hair.

Two other downsides to the new glasses.

1) I had to go to a bigger lens/frame size to accommodate the progressive correction. I’m not wearing 1980s Phil Donahue lenses, but they are certainly bigger than what I’ve been wearing since I went to specs full time a decade ago. I’ve also been wearing Oakley frames for years and didn’t love the ones they offered that would take progressive lenses. The frames I chose are decent, but I also don’t love them like I loved my old Oakleys.

2) Holy crap these are expensive! I already had expensive glasses because of my prescription. Damn near doubled that already significant cost. And I’m going to need new sunglasses once I’m sure these lenses are correct. We could put a couple more kids into private grade school for the cost of my glasses now. I mean, I need to see, right? But that seems a little ridiculous. I do go to one of the fancier eye places in the city, only because my doc is the uncle of one of S’s best friends. But I’m starting to think I may have to go to a less fancy place that charges 15% less for my next set. I’m thinking about braving the discount glasses world for my sunglasses, although I worry about fit and getting the prescription right at those places. We’ll see.

So, nine years old = first pair of glasses. Fifteen = contacts. Thirty-seven = back to glasses only. Forty-six = progressive lenses.

Now I shall go curse whichever one of my ancestors are responsible for my terrible eyes.

Comfort Zone

November 7, 2017 / DB

I’m not the most outgoing person in the world. Particularly when it comes to strangers. I just don’t have that gene that makes it easy for me to talk to people I don’t know in non-social settings. I’m not the dude striking up a conversation with the guy next to me while we wait in line at the deli, or the mom sitting by me at a first sports practice for one of our kids. So when I do have a lengthy encounter with someone I don’t know, it always stands out.

A week or so ago I was making my normal Monday grocery run. I went to a store I don’t normally go to, wearing a generic KC hat.[1] I was heading toward the meat cooler when I noticed a woman looking at me and making a beeline in my direction. I looked away, looked back, and she was still heading right at me. My first thought was that she had her eye on a particular package of pork chops and was worried I was going to get it first. But then she broke into a smile and I began racking my brain for if I knew her from somewhere. She was probably in her early 60s, so I’m thinking grandmother from St. P’s, parent of one of S’s friends, etc.

Anyway, she rolls up on me and kind of nervously says, “Is that for Kansas City?”

It took me a moment to realize she was asking about my hat.

“Oh, yeah, it is. Are you from there?”

“I thought so! No, but we just had some very good friends move there.”

Thus kicked off a roughly 10-minute conversation. And by conversation I mean she stood there and told me all about her friends who moved to KC, what their jobs were, how this woman and her husband used to have dinner with them, what each one of the four would make for their dinners, etc. The man who moved to KC made really good lasagna and his wife made the most wonderful salad to go along with it.

So, you know, I was totally comfortable with all of this.

Eventually she asked me what I did and what my wife did. When I told her, she mentioned that she had a friend who was in medicine. Then segued into telling me about her daughter who lives in North Carolina for about five minutes.

I kept waiting for some kind of pitch to come. The question of whether I’ve accepted Jesus. Or if I’ve heard of Amway. Or even about how she was down on her luck and could just use a few bucks to buy some groceries for the week.

None of that ever came, though. I think she was just a lonely lady looking to talk to someone, and my KC hat was just the opening she needed to corner me.

After several awkward pauses and me saying, “Well…” she finally wished me a good day and left me to finish my shopping. Which I did nervously, hoping I wouldn’t get cornered by someone else.

Needless to say I’ve not been back to that store or worn that hat while doing my shopping since.

It is royal blue with gold, block KC on the front. So vaguely Royal-esque in a late 1970s way. I got it off an ad on Instagram. It’s kinda dope. ↩

46

June 21, 2017 / DB

Anyway, I’m now officially closer to 50 than 40, which sucks big time. I know, I know, 50 is the new 30, blah blah blah. And most folks of our generation look a lot younger than I remember our grandparents looking when they were in their 50s. But, man, the body just keeps rebelling. It feels like I’ve aged more in the past five years than I did from 30 to 35, or 35 to 40. I think it’s because aging in your 30s is more subtle, where the changes are more dramatic in your 40s.

There are all the lingering aches and pains. The back that is always one wrong movement from seizing up. My right hip has gone a little wacky over the past couple years. Knees that creak. You know, all the typical joint and muscle stuff.

But then there’s my hearing, which was always kind of shitty in crowded, loud environments and seems to have gotten a lot worse. On my last visit to my eye doctor, he said I was a year away from bifocals. I swear as soon as I got home that day my close vision went to shit. When we first moved here, I laughed at how my father-in-law got pissed when they dimmed the lights at a restaurant and he couldn’t read his menu. He was in his early 60s at the time. Now I’m doing the back-and-forth, try to get the menu under the right light and at the right distance, dance at restaurants. And I’m only 46!

Good grief.

And then there’s the medical stuff. As I shared, I got my first colonoscopy a month ago. That was the result of about a year of varying stomach issues. Fortunately, the scope was clean aside from one small polyp that they took out. But I’ve had to make a dramatic change in diet – completely cutting out caffeine – to try to get my stomach to work right again. My symptoms have finally slackened off a bit. But I know if they bubble up again, I may have to adjust my diet in more ways.

When you’re 25 and your stomach hurts, or you have a bad knee, or your muscles are just a little sore for a couple days, you don’t really sweat it. When you reach this stage in life, you start getting a little more worried when your body tells you something isn’t right.

I don’t mean this to be a bummer of a post. I have a couple close friends who are going through much more difficult medical issues than anything I’ve ever experienced. I really shouldn’t complain, and I’m not. But I do admit I’m starting to understand the wave of movies and TV shows in the 80s and 90s by Baby Boomers who were lamenting the carefree days of their early adulthood.

Anyway, thanks to all who checked in yesterday. I appreciate the words. And I’ll try to keep the complaining about my age off these pages until my next birthday!

Testing Day

May 2, 2017 / DB

So yesterday was a fun day: I got to experience the joys of having my first colonoscopy. Yep, big time fun it was.

A few of you have already been through this rite of passage. For those who haven’t, fear not; this is not going to be a highly detailed account of what went down at the endoscopy center.

The reason I was going in a little early (white folks don’t generally need to get scoped before 50 if they don’t have a family history) is that I’ve been having some weird stomach issues for the past year and a half. The symptoms have changed over time, and often didn’t seem related to each other. But they’ve persisted long enough that I went in to see my regular doc and ask for her thoughts. She couldn’t think of any obvious causes or explanations for my issues, and thus sent me off for a scope to get a look inside. I was all for it. Most of you know it was colon cancer that killed my stepfather and I have no reservations about getting tested early.

The results were a mixed bag, but in the best possible way. Unfortunately the scope didn’t show anything in the area of my abdomen where I’ve been having pain. Which is both frustrating and encouraging. It could just be a diet issue, or I may need to do some other tests if the pain continues. They did find and remove a polyp the doc said could have become problematic down the road. So that’s good.

Colonoscopies are one of those procedures that we all seem to dread. I’m guessing they used to be a lot different than they are now. I was knocked out and a roughly five-hour stretch of Monday afternoon is a complete blank to me. There was no pain after. I slept for over nine hours last night and woke feeling crazy refreshed. I would say I still feel a little off today, but more from a combination of lingering effects of the sedatives and low blood sugar than from the procedure itself.

It was the prep that is tough, though. And even that wasn’t as bad as some suggested it would be. The hardest part for me was not eating any real food for 36 hours before the procedure. I’m not a good hungry person and I was getting pretty grumpy before I began the Gatorade and Mirolax cocktail part of the prep Sunday evening. I didn’t get much sleep Sunday as the Mirolax did its work. But, still, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

I had only been knocked out once before, when I was 18 and got my wisdom teeth removed. I have moments of semi-clear memories from after the procedure yesterday, but most of it is a complete fog. Apparently I told S the same story about one of the nurses living in the same neighborhood as several of our friends from St. P’s three different times. When I mentioned it again at dinner last night, even the girls laughed because S had told them I was repeating myself.

(Yeah, the girls laughed and laughed when I told them what I was going in for. “They’re putting a camera where?!?!”)

And then there was just a tiny bit of awkwardness because I met the doc doing the procedure at a social event a couple years ago. He had been enjoying the vodka at that event. I’m glad to say he was clearly sober yesterday. We have some mutual friends, and he and his wife have a lake house on the same lake as ours. We may get together over the summer when our mutual friends come to the lake. I sense an opportunity to compliment him on his boat/house/lake toys that I’ve now helped pay for.

Anyway, it’s all done now. I’m glad the results were good but wish I had a better idea of what was going on in my belly. For those of you who get to wait a few more years before you get scoped, I say don’t sweat it. If you follow the guidelines they give you ahead of time, it’s a piece of cake. And you’ll get to take a really good nap after!

Trivia Man

February 13, 2017 / DB

Once upon a time, not that long ago, I was known as the trivia guy. Where other people mastered law or medicine or sales, my mind was best suited to accumulating a nearly endless parade of useless if somewhat interesting facts about old pop culture, sports, and history.

Some might say I had a gift.

My reputation reached its zenith when I ran a daily trivia email list for something like three years. It kicked off when I got one of those “80s Trivia Question of the Day” calendars and shared each day’s tidbit with a few friends. That list of recipients grew and grew until I think I was sending it to something like 60 people a day. After year one, I kept it going with questions I came up with on my own. Keep in mind I was gainfully employed during this span. Fortunately, my boss said he was cool with it as long as he was on the list and I got my real work done.

Anyway, some of that gift faded as I grew older, memories went hazy, and fatherhood destroyed significant portions of my brain. I can still remember a lot of stupid shit, but not nearly at the same level of clarity as I used to.

All that is leading up to how we spent our Saturday night: at St. P’s annual trivia night. This was our third year participating. Year one I went in focused and excited and was quickly humbled. Questions were all over the place – why can’t they just ask for 80s movie quotes? – and I felt stupid before we got through round two. There was some bullshit question where they handed each group ten kinds of pasta noodles and we had to correctly identify them. How is that trivia?!?! Our team finished in the bottom quarter.

Year two I relaxed and decided to socialize and drink and not sweat the questions. I believe there was some turnover in who made the questions, because they felt significantly easier. Still, our group was middle of the pack and the night was more about fun than competing.

This year we added a couple new families. I was excited about one couple, as their three oldest kids are all the smartest in their classes, always landing on the class honors list. They’re both attorneys and can both talk about just about any subject, so I thought they would really help.

I’m not sure who decided how to split our group, but it ended up being husbands against wives. Not that it mattered all that much, since we generally find a way to split spouses, but that meant the ladies table had our medical expert, who often comes in handy for a question or two. Still, we had ten reasonably smart guys spanning a roughly 20 year age range: I liked our chances.

I’d love to give you a full, round-by-round breakdown of the contest but A) there were 85 questions over 3.5 hours and B) I was drinking all night. Memories are hazy.

What I do remember was we were in the zone all night. We aced the first section, missed just one on the second section, and then did shockingly well on the entertainment question.[1] Turns out when there are a collective 18 daughters from the group, you know a lot about High School Musical and Twilight! The first time they flashed the scores, we were one of four teams tied for first. The ladies were one point behind us.

We kept nailing category after category. Each group gets a mulligan to place on one question per round. We were consistently getting nine correct and placing our mulligan on the one miss. Scores went up again after the 6th round and we were all alone in first. Amazingly, for the second year in a row I was the only one at the table who could correctly answer two questions in the “Have You Been To Mass Lately?” section. Which is a misnomer because they’re more questions about the local Catholic schools and churches rather than mass itself, and the two I knew were both related to high school sports.

Anyway, we get through all 85 questions and are feeling pretty good about ourselves. Then again, we had been knocking back beers, mules, and drunken grapes for almost four hours; it was impossible not to feel good!

Finally the final scores flash and we were the big winners! We missed only five questions for the night. Second place? Our ladies! No collusion here of any kind, I can promise you! That was awfully fortuitous, though, as only the top two teams win prizes, and both prizes are rather fat gift cards to a local restaurant. So looks like the 20 of us will all be going out again in the near future.

Our attorney friend was by far the MVP. But it was nice to exercise that part of my mind that was once so powerful and contribute.

Long a category where the wives distance themselves from the husbands in the groups that are split by gender. ↩

In The Box

August 31, 2016 / DB

I was not looking forward to this week. Not because I had a medical exam on the calendar, or because I had to deal with some other uncomfortable, personal issue.

Nope, I drew the jury duty card for this week.

Luckily, while I had to report yesterday, my service was completed in about three hours and I was a free man before afternoon school pickup time. I was sweating it, though.

I got called for a criminal case at the county court. The case revolved around a seedy tale of crooked cops, the scourge of illegal drugs, justice denied, and the general decline of our modern society. Well, not exactly.

It was actually an obstruction of justice case against a fire fighter from a small community who was charged with removing drug paraphernalia from the scene of a car accident that involved a relative of his.

This was my first time actually having to go to the courthouse for jury duty in Indiana. I’ve been called at least three times before. Once I got excused after I sent a letter to the judge saying I was a stay-at-home dad with a three-month-old at home.[1] The other two times I recall, I called the night before and heard that my entire group had been dismissed. But this time I had to roll in by 8:15 Tuesday morning.[2]

The bailiff ran through the procedure for the morning. From our group of about 30, fourteen of us – selected in order by their random juror number – would get loaded into the jury box for voire dire. I was #18, so thought I was safe.

Not so fast, though!

Not every number was accounted for. Although I was #18, I was in fact the 14th juror on the panel. So I got to stroll into the courtroom and sit in the jury box, the final person in the second row of seven. I will admit, the chairs were amazingly comfortable! We got a lengthy address from the judge, who was a former judge in private practice and filling in due to a family emergency by the normal judge. This guy was hilarious and kept all of us at ease. He rambled on through his instructions and initial questions to us for about 40 minutes. Then both the prosecutor and defense attorneys got 20 minutes to ask us questions.

I had no idea how Indiana courts worked. Could they select any seven of us from the pool, or were we considered in order? I didn’t realize until the end that those of us at the back-end of the first 14 were not getting a lot of attention. I was asked three questions, while a couple folks in the first 10 got peppered with questions. I should have figured out what was up and relaxed a little, but I was sweating whether I would end up on the final jury the whole time.

After the question session, the judge asked for the attorneys’ lists of who they wanted to strike from the panel. Wow, was it tense in the jury box! Jurors 3, 5, 10, and 13 got the boot. The judge asked the front row to slide down two seats, then for the first two people in my row to join the front row. He asked the attorneys if they approved, they both nodded, and he announced that the first seven would serve as the jury.[3]

I was free! There is no relief like the relief of not making the final cut for jury duty!

My biggest relief was that, unlike most cases that this court hears, this was expected to be a three-day trial.[4] I think the pace was going to be slower than normal because of the substitute judge. I’m all for doing my public duty, but three days seemed like a lot. I have a Google news alert set to track the case, but haven’t seen any new stories come across today.

I celebrated my freedom by eating a huge burrito and having way more caffeine than normal to counter the headache that had been building all morning. And I said a quiet prayer of thanks to the jury gods for looking out for me.

Shocked that worked! ↩
I had jury duty in Kansas City once. We had to sit around for several hours, waiting for the judge to call us for selection. The bailiff kept coming in and telling us it would be soon. After about 4 hours we were dismissed and told we had drawn a murder case, but the sides had been working on, and finally agreed to, a plea deal. ↩
In Indiana if you’re called to serve, you get a two-year reprieve from future jury duty. One poor guy who made the final jury served as a juror in a very high profile case against a state elected official 26 months ago. ↩
“A three-hour tour…” ↩