Accidental Felon

I'm thinking about changing the name of my blog to The Accidental Felon. I keep breaking the law, sort of accidentally, and just barely missing being sent to the Big House.

You might remember that I blogged about my experiences on jury duty a couple of years ago. Well, apparently, that was a Gigantic Potentially Felonious Mistake (GPFM). Even though I did not give away any details about the case, and did not consult any outside sources, once the case was over, the defense used my blog as one of their reasons for appeal. They wanted to interview the jurors to see if my blogging had in any way tainted them. The judge said no. They appealed, and the appeals court said no.

I got a call from a reporter at the Chicago Tribune wanting to talk to me about the case and my blog. I said, sure, dude, just call me back over my lunch hour. Meanwhile, being completely ignorant about what had been happening on the case, I started googling it.

Holy friggin' crap. I discovered my name and the name of my blog and quotes from my blog in the appeals court documents. They used words like "juror misconduct" and "tainted" and "contempt." I immediately called a friend of mine who is a lawyer, and said, Perry Mason, I think I might be in trouble. I explained the sitch to him, and he said, "Do not talk to any reporters. Do not talk about the case. Do not mention my name. Just shut up." He also told me that, had the judge found out about the blogging during the case, he could have cited me for contempt and tossed me in the clink for six months without a trial. "You put your fellow jurors at risk," he said ominously.

Crap.

The story appeared in the Trib that weekend. "E. Peevie, freelance writer and mother of three, ..." it read--only it was my real name, thank you very much.

A couple of weeks later, I got a direct message on Twitter from Channel Five asking me to call or email Phil Rogers. I ignored it. The next day, they DMed me again, saying that Phil wanted to talk to me about the Metra case. I ignored it. Perry Mason would have been proud.

But then I got a phone call on my office phone from...wait for it...Phil Rogers. "E. Peevie," he said in a friendly voice, "This is Phil Rogers from Channel Five News. I've been trying to reach you."

"Um, yeah, Phil, I know who you are. I can't talk to you."

 

"Well," he said, "I'm doing a story on the Metra case, and I'm going to be mentioning your name and talking about your blog, and I wanted to give you a chance to respond."

"Thank you," I said. "You've given me a chance to respond, and I have declined it. I can't talk to you."

 

"But E. Peevie," he said, "We both went to Oklahoma State! Isn't that worth something? I just want to ask you a few questions." He had done his homework.

"Yeah," I said, "I knew that. But I still can't talk to you."

 

He asked me a couple more questions which I declined to answer, and finally I steeled myself to do the right thing. "I don't like to be rude, Phil," I said, "But I am going to have to hang up on you now." And I did. Perry Mason reminded me later that I should have just said "No comment" and hung up.

That night, on the five o'clock news, there was my giant face on the small blue screen. They had taken my photo from my Twitter account--which BTW is not a lovely photo AT ALL--and attached it to the story. And they showed still shots of my blog, and highlighted key portions where I had written about the trial. My friend Phil Rogers used phrases like "in defiance of a judge's admonitions not to discuss the case."

It went to the Supreme Court of Illinois, who thankfully decided that my blogging did not influence the outcome of the case.

Now that the Supremes have finished exonerating me, I am finally able to say that there was no intentional defiance or contempt. I thought I was being very careful to obey the judge's instructions--I was not discussing the case, just writing in general terms. Phil Rogers inaccurately said that I discussed specific testimony--but I only discussed the effect of the testimony on the witness, and did not quote specific testimony on the blog.

I am a story-teller, and I told a story. Yes, it's true that we occasionally lapsed into very brief discussions of the case while we were in the jury room--but every time, one of us would remind the group that we were not supposed to be doing it, and we stopped. I am confident that this happens in every single trial--and most importantly, my blog described it, but did not cause it.

And guess what? Sometime after the verdict against Metra was reached, the instructions that judges give to jurors were revised to include specific references to social media. That tells me that they are admitting that their instructions were previously inadequate. (My friend Officer Friendly likes to call this The Peevie Rule. I am not amused.)

I guess the state won't be calling me to jury duty again any time soon. Rats.

Toothless

My tooth fell out when I was chomping a piece of Red Vines licorice. I was all, chomp chomp, and then something hard was rolling around in my mouth, and then I was like, hey! what's this? and then I tongued it away from the masticated Red Vines and pulled it out, and it was a tooth! Weird. I felt like an Appalachian.

So I called my dentist, Dr. Frank (the one I love because she is very understanding about my complete lack of tolerance for even minor discomfort) and left a message.

"Should I put it under my pillow?" I asked her. "Maybe the tooth fairy will bring me the thousand bucks it's probably going to cost to fix it!"

"Where is it?" she asked, when she called me back.

"Well, that's kind of a weird question," I thought to myself, but out loud I answered, "Upstairs on my dresser."

"No," she said patiently, "where in your mouth did the tooth come from?"

Aha. That made a lot more sense. From my description she was medium confident that the tooth was actually an old crown which could be re-cemented without too much trouble.

"Put the tooth in a zip-lock bag and bring it in," she instructed. "We'll take care of it." I made an appointment for the next day, and obediently put my tooth in my purse.

The next day I got ready to head out, checked my purse one last time to make sure the crown was in there--and suddenly, I couldn't find the damn thing. Gone! My tooth was gone! I checked every pocket of my shiny green purse. Then I checked every pocket one more time. Then I turned the shiny green purse upside down and dumped everything out.

Still no tooth.

OK, ok, ok. Calm down. Think. I put in in my purse, right? I know I did. I checked the lost purse again, but it was still empty.

Aha! I know! When my tooth fell out, M. Peevie asked me, "Mom, can I put your tooth under my pillow tonight, and see if the Tooth Fairy gives me money for it?" I'll bet that little stinker took it out of my purse and put it under her pillow! I raced upstairs and checked her bed. Nothing. I checked under A. Peevie's pillow for good measure. Nothing.

Think. Think. Aha! I remember! I took it out and showed it to C. Peevie when I was in the kitchen! I ran downstairs and rifled through the three-foot pile of crap on the kitchen counter. Nothing! I checked in the office: Nothing. The bathroom: Nothing.

I called the dentist and cancelled my appointment, and then I started looking again. I called Mr. Peevie, who said he saw the zip-lock bag on the bed the night before--so I ran upstairs and started tearing apart the bed. Nothing. Under the bed? Nothing. (Well, nothing, if by "nothing" you mean two-and-a-half pairs of shoes, three socks, lots of used dryer sheets, and a coffee-table-size book of Bruegel prints and commentary in German, published in 1932. But no tooth.)

Frustrated to point of Resorting to Colorful Language, I jammed my hands into my pockets. Lo and behold--there was my tooth! Right in the zip-lock baggie and stuffed down into the linty bottom of my pocket where I had put it THAT VERY MORNING.

I'm an idiot.

So then I called the dentist back, and she still had time to re-attach my crown.

"At least you didn't swallow it," she said.

"What then?" I asked, joking, "I'd have to wait until I pooped it out?"

"Yes," she said--and she WAS NOT JOKING. Apparently this is a not-uncommon occurrence in the disgusting world of dentistry.

But now my tooth is back where she belongs, and all is well again with the world.

Special Ingredient

I was starting to cook dinner for my family plus three guests. On the menu: corn and wild rice chowder with smoked sausage. I've written about the corny, smokey goodness of that soup before, but this time, I added a special new ingredient: my fingertip!

I started chopping the first ingredient of the first course, the sausage. I'm generally very careful with knives, and I teach my children proper knife-handling techniques in the kitchen because I want to avoid trips to the emergency room. I was in a teensy bit of a hurry because I had gotten a late start on the soup. I was hurrying--and yet, oddly, the slicing of my finger seemed to happen in slow motion.

I could see the knife approaching my finger-tip, and I almost had time to scream at my finger to get out of the way before the skin fileted. A bright red stripe opened up above the first joint on my left pointer, and then blood started flowing in real time.

"Aaaahhhh!" I hollered, because it rilly, rilly hurt. I quickly made a field bandage from a paper towel, and applied pressure, while walking in circles and grunting. Meanwhile, C. Peevie arrived on the scene.

"Mom," he said, all sweet and worried, "Are you OK? What happened? What did you do to your face?" My face? I was holding a bloody bandage around my finger, and he was asking about my face?

Apparently, somehow I had smeared some sooty black gunk from I-don't-even-know-where on my face, along with a gory swath of blood. I looked like an extra from the set of The Towering Inferno. (Ooo--remember that movie?! I LOVED that movie! And talk about a towering cast! "Don't you think you're suffering from an edifice complex?" Heh.)

Anyway, I gave C. Peevie the short version, and he went running for Mr. Peevie, who immediately started panicking. Not because of my mortal wound, mind you, or because my finger was hemorrhaging, but because we had people coming over and WHO WAS GOING TO COOK NOW?

Mr. Peevie leapt into action, madly typing away on the computer.

"Um, sweetie?" I said, checking my wound, which immediately started gushing again. "What are you doing?"

"I'm trying to find the Amishes phone number," he said. "I need to call them and tell them not to come over." It was 4 p.m., and the Amishes were set to arrive in about an hour and a half. He dialed their number, but got no answer. (Even though they're practically Amish, they do have a phone--but apparently they're still using dial-up internet access.) The third guest did not have a listed phone number.

Not being able to reach the dinner guests pushed Mr. Peevie's anxiety into overdrive. "What are we going to do?" he moaned, "What are we going to do?"

"I don't know, Mr. P," I said, "But do you think maybe I should go to the ER?"

He paused and considered. "I don't know. But what am I going to do about dinner? People are going to be here in an hour and half, and nothing will be ready!" He started hyperventilating. "You'll go to the ER, and you won't be back until 10:00!"

I think his main concern, besides the food, was how to make small talk with dinner guests without me in the room to monopolize the conversation. But my feeling is, what good is a liberal arts education if you can't even carry on casual dinner conversation?

Meanwhile, C. Peevie was hovering around me while I continued to apply pressure to my stub. I checked it a couple of times, and both times it grinned a cheerful red grin at me before the blood started gushing like that SNL skit where Julia Child slices her artery during a cooking show.

The irony of Mr. Peevie's misplaced concern was not lost on C. Peevie. "I don't know why Daddy is the one who's all panicky when you're the one who's injured!" he said loudly, his arm around my shoulder.

In the end, I drove myself to the ER at Lutheran General Hospital, driving past at least two other closer hospitals on the way. I'm giving them a plug because even though there were 50 people in the waiting room, and ten more people came in the door behind me, I was in and out of there in less than an hour.

Here's what my finger looked like while Nurse Practitioner Pat was putting three stitches in.

When I arrived home with my finger stitched and splinted, soup was bubbling fragrantly on the stove, the corn casserole was hot out of the oven, and best of all, there was a glass of wine waiting for me. There was no anxiety or distress in the air. Somehow, Mr. Peevie had pulled himself together, because, he told me later, I had picked out recipes "that a monkey could follow."

Mr. Peevie might lack all sense of proportion in the anxiety-response department, but he always comes through in the end.

99 Random Things

I hope to come up with something profound for my End of the Year post (I know my Green Room readers have high expectations), but for the moment I'm just going to borrow this list of 99 things from Elbee at Sew Little Time. Play along: bold what you've done in your comment, or on your blog (but don't forget to link back to The Green Room so I can check out your list!).

1. Started your own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii and danced on a lava cliff with the roar of the Pacific below.
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity (what is more than you can afford?)
7. Been to Disneyland/Disneyworld
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis - I remember doing this as a child, but today I'd be too scared to try it. Those suckers look menacing.
10. Sang a solo as a child in the church choir
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child - not officially, but sometimes there are so many extra kids in my house for so long, that I might as well make it official.
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you weren't ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors--England, but not Holland or Germany
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant -It was McDonald's and it was a homeless guy outside, same as Elbee
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance with the siren wailing, no less, when M. Peevie was threatening to be born 15 weeks early.
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies--but I'm going to help M. Peevie starting next week! Leave a comment and let me know what kind and how many you want!
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason from the awesome and sweet Mr. Peevie
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi concentration camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book - this is on my to-do list
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper - here's the proof
85. Kissed a stranger at midnight on New Year's Eve
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury - an experience that I totally loved.
91. Met someone famous - Oprah, Robert Ludlum, John R. W. Stott
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee

Play along!

In Which I Am Thankful and Also Make the World's Worst Mashed Potatoes

Happy Thanksgiving (belatedly)!

What are you thankful for today? I'm thankful...

...that I'm not a vegetarian.
...for pajamas.
...for a day when I don't have to wear a bra.
...for pumpkin pie.
...for Thanksgiving Day parades.
...for freedom.
...that Mr. Peevie has a job.
...for elastic-waist pants.
...for presents.
...for mental health professionals.
...for good story-tellers.
...for forgiveness.

In other news, I totally ruined the mashed potatoes this year. It's like they were cursed or something.

I had asked Mr. Peevie what he'd like to see on the Thanksgiving Day menu, and he made only one request: the hugest mountain of mashed potatoes ever seen by man. So the big day comes, and I start cooking. I pop my bird in the oven using this recipe. It turned out fabulous, BTW.

But the bird was done about an hour before I expected it to be done, and I was caught with my mashed potatoes down, so to speak. I quickly quartered a bunch of white new potatoes, skin on, and briefly debated with myself whether I had time to boil them on the stove.

The microwave won. Quick and simple, or so I thought. I pulled them out after three minutes, but they were still hard. Two more minutes later and they barely winced when I poked them with a fork. Three more minutes. By this time, I was thinking, I could have had them boiling away on the stove--but you know what they say about hindsight. It's for whiners.

Finally, they're ready to be mashed. Or so I thought. I dumped some sour cream on them and started squishing with my hand masher thingie--but they refused to submit. I can't get the right angle, I thought to myself, so I dumped them into a different bowl and tried again. This time, the bowl was too shallow and they squirted away when I pressed down with the masher.

The beaters! I'll try the electric portable beaters, I thought. When I started mixing, the electric blades started flinging potato chunks all over the kitchen. I got out still another bowl, and tried again. The beaters chased the tough little clods around the bowl without leaving a mark. These spuds were determined not to become mashed potatoes.

Maybe they're just not soft enough yet, I thought stubbornly. Back into the microwave they went, and I decided that I just wouldn't think about what microwaving would do to the sour cream that had already turned soupy on the hot, hard gobs of potato. Two minutes should do it, I estimated.

I pulled them out, and they seemed to be in a more cooperative mood. I went back to the hand masher and started pounding and hollering, "DIE, SUCKERS! MASH! MASH!"--but to no avail. They remained chunky and hard, but by now there was also a layer of paste that had formed in the bowl from all the attempted mashing.

C. Peevie strolled into the kitchen, and offered to give it a try. He pounded until his bicep was sore, and made a tiny bit of progress. I looked into the bowl and saw what looked like chunks of quartz sitting in a sticky pool of paper mache. I gave up.

I served those damn potatoes anyway, and they were just as horrible as they looked: pasty and gluey, with rock-hard chunks. My poor family. They were so sweet and kind to me--they said things like, "That's OK, Mom; they don't taste too bad. Remember that macaroni and cheese that you made on Monday? Now THAT was bad."

Even Mr. Peevie, who doesn't ask for much, was incredibly gracious. "It's OK, honey," he told me. "Everything else is really, really delicious." And it was. In fact, I think the mashed potatoes were so bad that they made everything else taste even better--so in a weird way, I'm thankful for ruined mashed potatoes.

Sangria Poltergeist

I was driving to my friend Jane Addams' house for happy hour. I had made a delicious pitcher of sangria, and since I did not want to get thrown in the clink for driving with an open container in the car, I put the pitcher in the back of the van. I braced it against the side of the car and the back seat, and I further secured it by wedging a grocery bag of fruit soaked in simple syrup against the bottom of the pitcher.

Somewhere along the way, I heard an ominous thud from the back of the van. "Oh, no," I thought, "The sangria!" But I didn't smell wine, so I kept driving. I am nothing if not optimistic. Otherwise known as "stupid."

About five miles later, I heard a sploosh, like the sound of a water balloon hitting the car window. Instantly I smelled the sweet smell of sweet sangria permeating the car. I pulled over as quickly as I could--but it was too late. Most of the two-gallon pitcher had spilled, soaking though the carpet and into the padding in the back of the van.

I couldn't show up empty-handed, and I still had the zip-lock bag of soaking fruit--so I stopped at a liquor store and bought the supplies I'd need to re-create the sangria base. At Jane Addams' house, I mixed up a batch, and even though it didn't have time to chill properly, it was still delicious. Here's the recipe:

Mix and chill 8 hours or overnight:
Two bottles of red wine (merlot, zinfandel, etc.)
1 cup orange juice
1 cup of brandy
1 quart of Fresca or other lemon-lime soda

Make simple syrup:
1 cup sugar
1 cup water

Bring to boil; simmer until sugar is dissolved. Cool.

Cut up fruit: apples, peaches, lemons, limes, oranges.
Soak fruit overnight in simple syrup.

Add fruit to wine according to taste. Chill. Drink. Responsibly, of course.

The only problem was that the car alarm started going off for no apparent reason. Oh, and the interior lights would go on and stay on; the door ajar light remained lit; the door locks clicked randomly; and the radio started playing Korean alt hip-hop at will. Apparently, sangria does not mix well with the electrical system of a Dodge Caravan, and weird poltergeisty things kept happening for the next week-and-a-half.

Even after we Resolved and Febrezed the carpet, the car still smelled like sangria. We are an open container arrest just waiting to happen. "No, officer, I swear I haven't been drinking! The car smells like sangria because I spilled it in the back TWO WEEKS AGO!"

Finally I took it to my normally reliable mechanic, who insisted that the sangria had nothing to do with the coincidental electrical shenanigans. He sprayed some sort of magic spray on each door lock mechanism, chanted a spell, and said, there you go!

But what about the Korean hip-hop? I asked. Just a coincidence, he said. As I drove away from the mechanic's shop, the door ajar light went on, and the locks clicked in time with the radio. I heard a deep, ghosty laugh--bwah-ha-ha--coming from the rear gate.

I decided that I would change mechanics as soon as I got back from my trip to Door County.