Busy Busy Busy 

The last week has been extremely hectic. I'd thought I'd kind of caught up on life in general last weekend and early last week: getting a bunch of laundry done, paying bills, getting the brakes in my car fixed, grabbing some cheapish plane tickets out for my friend's bachelor party.

The looming proverbial monkey wrench, however, was my Tuesday visit to Cambridge for jury duty. I've been called once before, ended up sitting in a room in Fitchburg for a few hours before getting sent home. I was hoping that Tuesday would be similar--grab the T over to Kendall, hang out for a few hours, get sent home and have a quiet day.

All pretenses that I might have a quiet day were scuttled when, within an hour of being there, I was in a courtroom being asked if I was fit to serve on a double-murder trial that would last approximately a month (if you've been paying any attention to the news, you know which trial it is). I didn't get impaneled on that jury, but an hour later, I was in another courtroom, and sitting in the jury box for a trial expected to last a week long.

At first, I was a little annoyed, but I sort of realized that if I was all that upset, I was no better than all of the people I scoffed at as they repeated lame excuse after lame excuse to get out of sitting. Somehow their time is more valuable than mine. That's just generally douchebaggy.

So I don't mind sitting so much. The only tough part is that I'm working half-days so that I don't have to burn any vacation time (though that might change this week, since I'm getting run down). Mornings in Cambridge, back on the T, drive to Burlington for work. It makes for long, somewhat stressful days, but it also means I haven't had a whole lot of time to work on some of the projects I've wanted to.

I have started playing around with the layout of the blog a bit. If you notice, the right sidebar is reorg'd a little bit, with a little widget that lets you see my shared items from Google Reader. I've slowly started formulating the layout for the new and improved ryantoohil.com (I'm playing with CSS as a bit of an experiment). I also revamped my little basketball statistics tool with a nicer layout and look.

The MacBook Pro has come in handy recently, as I can sit comfortably, get inspired, and quickly whip something up, rather than having to overcome the inertia and walk into my somewhat cold office. It's also going to come in handy for jury duty, should I end up as an alternate, because I'll have a bunch of time to kill while my fellow jurors deliberate.

Hopefully, I'll have some more time in the next week or so to play around with some of my ideas (the home page, maybe another podcast, some posts here). The trial is expected to wrap up mid-week, so hopefully I've only got a couple more days of back and forth.

There's some fun news: Ben Folds is playing with the Pops orchestra on May 9th. Tickets go onsale tomorrow, which means I'm going to have find someone to buy me tickets since I'll be listening to testimony and not near a computer to get a couple of seats. Since I missed on The Arcade Fire (who are playing the next night at the Orpheum), I'd like to get a seat. I'll have to work my mojo tomorrow.