Oops....

I took a phone call today, and it went something like this:

Man: Yes, I received a subpoena to appear in court as a witness for the State, but can't remember when I was supposed to be there. I do know the defendant's name.
Me: Okay, let me check for you. (so I find the case in question)
Me: It says here that the hearing was yesterday and now it's been reset to May.
Man: Oh....it was yesterday?
Me: Yes, the hearing was yesterday but it has been reset. You might want to call the Prosecutor's office and let them know why you weren't here.
Man: Okay, I will do that.

What I didn't tell him was that in the entry made by the court, it actually said that the hearing was reset due to the material witness NOT SHOWING for court, and that the State promised that their witness would be there for the next appearance.

OOPS!!! Maybe next time he will put the subpoena in a place he where can find it!

Okay, I guess I should let you know what our 'surprise' was to our co-workers on Administrative Professionals Day. We made them little 'goodie bags' with assorted chocolate candies, and some of those pnut butter crackers. Yeah, I know...not exactly a free lunch, but we had already done pizza the week before. I think most appreciated the token.

My funny phone call of the week - a lady calls me and says that she had just talked to someone in our office that gave her a Jefferson City phone number and she must have wrote it down wrong. I asked her what office she was trying to reach, and she said.."You know, the one where you can get your moles checked for free." Um....so I'm thinking....you want to have someone look at the moles in your YARD??? Of course, I didn't actually SAY that to her....then it hit me that she was actually talking about her SKIN moles!! I asked, "you say you got that number from US?" and she then asked me..."isn't this the Health Department?" Okay guys.....CIRCUIT CLERK and DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH aren't even CLOSE to each other in the phone book. I truly think that some people write our number down, and ANYTIME they have a question about ANYTHING, we are the ones they call. It's like next to our name the words "INFORMATION DESK" appear. Kind of like the person that called one day and asked what the price of beef was. If we ever get 'video-phones' I will be in BIG trouble.

I did look up the correct number for the Health Department and gave it to her. I hope she found her 'free-mole-checking' number.

We are doing better with the new computer system, and there are SO many different reports you can run, I bet there's even one that tells you how many times someone gets up to go to the restroom.

First I'll start off with a few random pictures:

Sydney's feet (she had the camera once again...)

Annabella just being Annabella.

I was sitting at my kitchen table the other evening and looked out to see a cardinal in one of our trees; it immediately made me think of my grandfather, who passed away 2 yrs ago on the 16th:


He loved to put out stale bread pieces on his driveway for the birds to eat, and he did have one particular cardinal that he named "Fred". (The mascot for the St Louis Cardinals is named "Fredbird" and I also have an Uncle named Fred, so not sure which one he named him after.)

Fred had lost most of his tailfeathers I suppose in either some sort of fight with another bird/animal, or perhaps an unfortunate accident of some kind. So you could always pick him out from the rest. Not sure what eventually happened to Fred, but I bet he liked those stale bread crumbs!!

On another note....(we'll call it middle "C"....)

Billy & I discovered a video store last night that was going out of business with all their movies 70% off. So we went shopping, and about 45 minutes later, we had purchased 21 movies. Here's my list:

Waitress
Music and Lyrics

So the other 19 were Billy's choices. Here they are in no particular order:

Von Ryan's Express/ Collateral/ Netforce /Random Hearts/ Letters from Iwo Jima/ The Four Feathers/ Shadow of the Sword/ Stargate SG-1/ Color of The Cross/ The Nativity Story/ K*19 The Widowmaker/ The Sum of All Fears/ Bad Boys II/ The Legend of Butch & Sundance/ One Night with The King /I Am Legend/ Stargate - The Ark of Truth/ Slowburn/ Conspiracy

Total cost was around $36.00. Not bad, huh? He was able to check for scratches on the DVDs before he bought them and ended up putting a couple back that he was going to buy, but did notice that the "Christian" movies had the least amount of scratches. I guess I'm just not a big movie-watching person. I wait until someone has seen a movie, then if they said it was good, I might go see it. And even then we usually wait until they are playing at our $2.50 discount movie place.

Tomorrow is "Administrative Professionals Day", better known as "Secretaries Day". I guess that covers anybody from the mailroom-sorter-dude right up to the assistants to the presidents. Our Prosecuting Attorney's office closes down every year on this day during lunch I guess to honor those 'administrative professionals'. We've never really done anything special in our office, just because there are so many of us that would fall in that category. The managers/supervisors did get together this year and.....well....I can't say yet because it's a surprise and I might actually have co-workers that read this and then it wouldn't be a surprise anymore!

Chocolate is still my friend this week, but if I'm not careful, Slim-Fast will be my next friend very fast.

Boy has it been a long week. I was refreshed this evening by getting to fellowship with some really neat ladies at our church, eat some great salad and peach cobbler, and watch the movie 'Saving Sarah Cain'. If you haven't seen it, I would recommend it, but have your kleenex handy!

Back to the past week; it went better than I thought, but my poor brain is tired from having to actually think about how I do things in our new system. And our new clerk is still hanging in there and doing a nice job of keeping us all thinking positively. (which has been difficult some days) I have definitely learned this week that chocolate IS my friend. God bless Mr. Hershey!

I don't have a lot planned this weekend; our weather will be more spring-like and the sun will be shining. Might head to the mall; perhaps my Mom will be there giving out free samples of chicken at Chik-Fil-A. Yum-Yum!!

Well, I made it through another "manic monday". sigh. And it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. And I got a free lunch of pizza and some yummy desserts. Yep.

For the last time on Friday afternoon at 3:00, our office logged off from the only computer system we have known since 1989. It was the program that officially got us started down the electronic freeway and since that day we've never looked back. A few years ago the State introduced their 'own' system and slowly started getting other counties to join that system. Some counties had never been on a computer system at all, so this was a welcome sight to them! While others, (like ours) wasn't too sure and just wasn't ready to change. Why fix something that wasn't broken in the first place? Our system was meeting the courts needs as well as the needs of the public. Unfortunately the State Courts Administrator's Office did not agree.

After several years of fighting against joining the rest of the counties, our former clerk finally agreed to let the State have their way. We had been hearing horror stories from other counties about the inefficiency of the system; how hard it was to learn, etc. Why would we want to join them? I think our waiting paid off however, for most of those early 'bugs' have now been worked out. I'm sure it's still not perfect, but our system wasn't either.

Monday morning at approximately 8AM, we will all log on to this new adventure. I'm looking at it as that, just because I don't handle other people's stress very well!! Eventually our records will be available at a site called "CaseNet" along with all the other counties in Missouri. It will definitely look different, but we'll get used to it.

Last night was "Jazz Night" at the BSU and featured brothers Jacob and Kane Hiser. You can visit their website at: http://www.thehiserbrothers.com/home.htm

They are 2 very talented young men and we enjoyed almost 4hrs of very sweet jazz music. They were joined by Paul McKee who played the saxophone and tenor sax and drummer whose name I can't remember!! I have a feeling they will be famous one day. They know me, don't they??

April 8, 1990

Wow! 18 years ago our youngest child Christopher was born. And although at times it's been rocky, Billy & I continue to be very proud of the person Christopher has become.

As I write this he is at a concert featuring the Christian bands Skillet and Thousand Foot Crutch. He actually got in free because he was asked to help with set up during the day today, and then was asked to be a part of the concert 'staff'. So I hope he has had a great birthday so far.

In a month he will graduate, and then hopefully be working this summer before attending MSU this fall. You always look forward to the day when your kids graduate and move on to bigger and better things. But I think you also wish they were still that little boy just starting kindergarten.

HAPPY 18TH BIRTHDAY CHRISTOPHER!!!

You know, I've had a headache all week. I tend to get rid of it overnight, only for it to reappear the next day. I think it's the weather, however, work has not been the funnest (is that even a word???) this week either. I won't elaborate only to say "....we are all adults here, peoples!!"

Okay...enough of that. Billy went to a meeting on Wednesday of all the campus ministers on the Missouri State University Campus. This includes the Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, even the Catholics. They had agreed that officers should be elected for their Campus Minister's Association (or CMA for short...but not to be confused with the Country Music Awards). So for President, it was down to Billy and another guy; they sent them to another room while the others talked about them...er.....casts votes for them. "And the winner is.....BILLY!" So Billy is the new President of the CMA for MSU for the next 2 years.

In other family news....Christopher will turn 18 next Tuesday. Yes, I said 18. Can you believe it?? He's gone from this: To this: Sigh....he's all grown up....sniff....just seems like yesterday he was learning how to climb stairs....wait....he STILL has trouble climbing stairs. Graduation is just around the corner. And just a few more years....and Billy and I will be ALONE!!! WAHOO!!! (sorry Chris....no offense.)