Post Trial & The Candy Bar Hunt

Daniel Harmon-Wright ended up getting a total of 36 months as a suggested sentence from the jury. The entire trial was almost put in mistrial status by one of the jurors bringing two dictionaries and a thesaurus into the jury room. Turns out six jurors had to stop and look up the word 'malice' before deciding that Harmon-Wright was guilty of manslaughter.

It scares me that half the juror did not know the definition of a common word. How would you like to be judged by those folks. That's not a jury of my peers or not likely yours either. When did we start getting so dumb in this country?

Now there's talk about town that Harmon-Wright's sentence is too light, and it is. But it's all water under the bridge now. The Judge cannot impose more time than what the jury recommends. So much for true justice.

On to more pleasurable things,

My darling son has officially moved out, he's gotten a great internship, apartment and senior project. He sent me a copy of what he's working on for the web company he's interning at right now. He moved his stuff out and at first I went into his room after he left to do some long-neglected cleaning, like cleaning all the painted wood trim, washing windows, airing the room out and laundering all the bedding. I'd just finished dusting down the walls when Andy arrived back and took his mattress to his new place. Unfortunately it looks like Andy has shoved ten years worth of junk under his bed. This is going to be more complex to clean than I imagined.

He left his computer that his best buddy is supposed to buy. His best pal Chad has come over to use the computer a bunch of times while Andy has been in and out of the house picking through our stuff to get things he needs for his new place. Somehow in all of this something funny/horrible/bad/comical happened that I had to rectify today.

Last week Jim came home clutching a special German chocolate bar that a buddy of his at work gave him. Now Jim needs a chocolate bar like I need a tub of lard. He's trying to diet and moaning about being fat. When Jim tossed the bar onto the kitchen countertop he was groaning about not needing to eat something like that which would derail the diet. Got it so far?

Fast forward to the end of last week, say Saturday afternoon. He starts rooting around looking for the chocolate bar, asking me where I hid it. Told him I didn't hide it.

I said nothing more, let him keep looking for it even if I knew very well where it was, inside one or two young men. When I'd emptied all the garbage cans a few days before I'd come across the wrapper for this chocolate sitting on Andy's desk, all the chocolate was eaten except for two small squares, which I ate as I emptied the wastepaper basket. No biggy right? Jim did say he didn't need it and both Andy and Chad know that if food is around and about in the kitchen either of them are welcome to it. I'm guessing one or both snagged that bar off the kitchen counter and ate most of it.

Decided the easiest way to handle this without pissing off Jim any more was to engage in a little fundamentalist wife behavior, I ran out and bought a replacement. Right now it's sitting on the keyboard of his computer.

Thought replacing the bar was going to be an easy task. But it was not, I found many different varieties of this company's chocolate bars but not the exact one. Six stores and I finally found the right one. I know it's a small thing but I put a lot of effort and thought into it and I am beginning to see my reactions as the last vestiges of Fundamentalist/Evangelical submitting wife behavior. Going to extraordinary lengths to please a man acting like a baby over a chocolate bar.

I've tried to put to death most of the crazy submitting fundigelical behavior but sometimes those old thought patterns and behaviors pop up again at the most inopportune moments. I should have just told him the truth, that the kids ate his candy and to be a big boy and deal with it.

How long does it take before all this nonsense in my head from the old church finally flies my mental coop?