Jury Duty and South Lake Tahoe

Well the past month has been busy.

Jury Duty

At the end of February I was called for Jury Duty. In Santa Clara County they make you call in (or check online) each day of the week you're "on call" to see if you need to actually go in to the courthouse. In the past, I've never actually had to go in and this time I thought I was going to be lucky again, but Thursday night I checked and they said I had to be in on Friday at 8am. No big deal (I thought), as I figured I'd go in for the day and then get dismissed. Unfortunately, it turned into another 7 day ordeal. On Friday when I got there, we were taken into the courthouse where we were told the trial was the De Anza Case, which was well known by many locally. I rarely watch or read the local news so knew nothing about it. To make a long story short, there were 120 potential jurors and over the course of the next 7 days we'd go in, they'd call up a handful of potential jurors, ask them a bunch of questions, keep some, let some go, call up some more people...rinse and repeat. They finally chose the 12 jurors and 5 alternate jurors on Day 7 at which point there were only about 25 potential jurors that hadn't been interviewed (one of them being me). The interview process took so long largely because if a potential juror had heard or read about the case, the judge and lawyers would question them one on one to ensure anything they said was not heard by other potential jurors that might not have heard about the case. It would have been a very interesting jury to be on, although probably very emotional, but the case was expected to go through the end of March which would have meant a lot of time off work for me.

South Lake Tahoe

This weekend we headed to South Lake Tahoe with some friends. I'm a true Southern Cali girl, so cold/rain/snow isn't really my thing, but I figured I should get out of San Jose for a weekend and enjoy a trip with friends. We headed up Friday afternoon and got home today (Sunday). It was a great trip filled with layers of clothes (weather ranged from 32 to 44 although it didn't rain or snow until we were leaving). We stayed at a beautiful cabin which was at an elevation of 8,000 ft. Here are some pics from our trip.

View from our cabin

Me trying not to freeze on our balcony

Banana enjoying the view while staying warm on the inside