Yes, I love Big Bang Theory (mostly pre-Bernadette and Amy, though I worship Amy Farrah Fowler to pieces), and I kiss the ground Sheldon Cooper walks on.

Forces are at work that are beyond my ken. For sure, for sure. Jury duty is over – or at least the voir dire process is, and guess what! I’ve been sworn in as Alternate Juror Number Three (of Four). Which means that I still have to sit through the entire trial, ready to step in should one of the regular jurors withdraw for whatever reason (and that reason had better be a good one, by God!).

I’ll admit that I’m actually kind of excited. I’ve never been a part of a trial before, and this would be my first time being a juror. I know of one other person in my family who also participated in the past, and he said that, despite the hassle of the process, he was glad that he had a chance to be a part of the whole thing. I look forward to my experience.

Note: We’re all under a strict gag rule regarding the case, so this’ll be the last time I’ll post about my involvement. If we’re given the go-ahead to talk about our experiences after the trial, I’ll share my thoughts about mine, but I still won’t talk about the case itself. I just feel a little weird talking about a rather stressful and harrowing event that’s affected the lives of complete strangers on so many levels. I prefer to keep quiet out of respect.

The difficulty that this poses involves my job, unfortunately. I work for a family-run business, and they can’t afford to pay me for jury duty, so I’ll have to work on the weekends (thankfully I normally work two days a week), which means I’ll be either on jury duty or at the frame shop seven days a week. *cringe* But one’s gotta do what one’s gotta do, and I guess, despite the radical change in my schedule into a super tight one, I’m also up for a pretty unique experience.

I’ve already whined – rather embarrassingly – about how I miss writing and so on. Now that I’m a juror, I’ve got another month of sketchy writing time at best. So it looks like I’ll be off writing for roughly two months total, including the previous weeks when I was totally derailed by health problems.

I’ve always been one who believes that things happen for a reason, and this is certainly one of those times – a pretty extreme one at that. Helleville is currently on hold. And I can’t seem to move forward with “Benedict”. While I was forced to wait around with the others in the courthouse, I did a little brainstorming in my writing journal (never leave home without it!), and I winced when I realized that the plot for the novelettes that I had planned might not work with short fiction.

So I don’t know. This forced writing celibacy (for lack of a better term) is also forcing me to rethink – really rethink – those stories I’ve been dying to write. I’ve no idea how things will pan out, but I admit that it was a bit of a shock to see how much I misjudged those plots. I guess I should go back to square one and take everything apart and redo them.

Or maybe this break from writing will yield something else entirely that I’ve never even considered before. I’ll have to adapt and go with the flow even though I normally don’t do well when faced with uncertainty.

At the very least, I’ve got tea and butter cookies to turn to for comfort. Yum.