bktheirregular

The trip in from Athens was ... a bit adventurous. Not as bad as the time the plane started dumping fuel into the Aegean so that they wouldn't pancake it by landing on a suspect landing gear, of course, but still, longer than I would have liked.

Boarded on time, pulled away from the gate, then had to wait an hour and a half to get takeoff clearance through Brussels. (That was also the only stretch of time where I got any sleep.) Flight took ten hours and was uneventful once we got airborne, but once we landed and reached the exit taxiway, we stopped.

And waited.

And waited.

Turns out, the gate we were supposed to go to was still occupied, and we had to wait for the gate to be cleared before we could de-plane.

That took an hour.

Yep, that adds up to over twelve hours in the same seat, with about one hour of sleep.

Anyhoo. Back home safe, if somewhat jet-lagged. Anyone going to be in and around The City between now and Friday-a-week?

So what's the what?

Saw Yankees-Indians at Yankee Stadium on Sunday. Say what you will, the new Stadium is a nice place. Big, yes, without the intimacy of a Wrigley or a Camden Yards, but very well-designed. Plus, a good game was played. (Never a sure thing.)

Been wandering around The City some, sort of getting a full dose of New York before I have to return to Athens. (Flying out Friday, early afternoon. Need to start re-packing my suitcase.)

Did a bunch of less pleasant chores; got my teeth cleaned and checked (no problems, thankfully), got my eyes checked (surprisingly, my prescription hasn't changed, so I just needed to get new glasses for wear-and-tear purposes as well as a year's supply of contacts), and other things which were less pleasant, but as it turned out, not overly urgent. The upshot is, I can relax for the next three days.

Then it's back to Athens and back to work. Mitigated by the fact that the two weeks surrounding Orthodox Easter are generally slow time at the firm.

Saturday, I got a jury questionnaire from the State of New York. Given that I'm supposed to be receiving paperwork for a foreign work visa any day now, and I'm trying to gear up to head back to Athens, one might see a bit of a problem.

Still, I figured I should be honest. Which wasn't a problem until I hit the last question: have you served on a jury in the last four years?

Reviewing my LJ (hey, it's finally good for something!), I found an entry on January 4, 2006, talking about getting picked for a jury, as Juror Number Six. But that was in New Jersey, not New York, so I wasn't sure if it counted, and anyway, I'd managed to lose the letter confirming this sometime during the move to the City.

I called the number on the questionnaire, and was fed into an automated voice-mail-type questionnaire. They reached the question of having previously served on a jury, and the only answers they'd accept were "yes" or "no", with no provision for nuances. I answered "yes", because yeah, it was the truth, but I wasn't sure if they considered one day on a jury in New Jersey to count for their purposes.

At the end of that call, I got the statement that any lies that I'd told would be considered a felony. You can imagine how thrilled that left me. And when I looked up the New York County jury management help number, and got fed into another automated voice-mail-like information system, and got told that if I'd served one day on a jury, after September 2004, it didn't count ...

*headdesk*

(I called once more, and after about ten minutes, got an actual live person who said I shouldn't worry about going to prison over it, just get a copy of my papers in case there were any questions. But then the lady in the Bergen County court system said that New York wouldn't accept a letter from New Jersey. But she's sending me a copy of the letter anyway.)

(And when the lady in the New York office talked about "Jersey", I couldn't understand - it sounded like "Jur-see", and I was so wooly-headed I couldn't make the connection.)

It's snowing in New York. It's been two years since I've seen more than an incidental flurry.

I have a sudden urge to go out into it.

Er ... I didn't realize there'd been an explosion just a little bit downtown from me until I got home and heard a snippet of news. No panic in the streets, not from what I saw. Lots of emergency vehicles moving about, but that's pretty much every day here in New York.

Face it, this is a city that would make a pretty respectable nation-state in its own right. Things happen here. Life goes on.