Not much time to tell you this great story, since I have missed two and a half days of work and am down to only 88 new e-mails in my inbox, BUT...

I am a third-string juror. Yes, after reporting to the jury room at 8:30 yesterday morning, I watched a video on Civic Duty and proceeded to sit for a total of six hours before being told I am a "juror on call." Basically, I have not been asked to serve on any panels or actually serve any jurorial duties, but my ass is theirs any time between now and Friday at 5. Now how do you like that? I am the government's bitch.

However, they did give me a nice certificate. It reads: "This is to acknowledge the above-named citizen of Jackson County satisfactorily served as a juror the week of August 30, 2004 thereby materially contributing to the maintenance of liberty under the law through the fair and impartical administration of justice." Find the subordinate clause in that bad boy! Makes sitting in a room for six hours sound pretty important, though, eh?

Also, one other thought on government buildings - since when are they Harbingers of Inappropriate Footwear? I saw more stiletto heels in the City Hall than I have ever seen in my life. Who told these people reporting to court means masquerading as a streetwalker? I am so confused...

I have been summoned to report for jury selection on Monday, following a weekend spent watching my dear friend L. finally get hitched in Omaha. I don't have the actual selection card with me today, but as I was perusing it yesterday, I noticed several facts worth noting:

* There is no parking provided in downtown Kansas City, urban boscage devoid of parking lots.

* You may bring your own food. Gee, thanks.

* This taken from the 16th circuit Web site: Federal and Missouri laws prohibit an employer from penalizing you while performing jury service. However, the laws do not require your employer to pay you wages while you are on jury duty.

Oh, and there's more. If you're interested, read all about it.

So why am I not thrilled with my opportunity to perform my civic duty? How could I not be excited after learning I will have to truck my business-casual rear downtown to sit all day, mentally counting the e-mails racking up in my in-box after missing two days of work while some attorney decides if I look malleable? Can't imagine why.

I like court television. I even like CSI, though I don't often admit to watching it. Somehow, though, I doubt I have been selected for a murder or arson case. No, I will probable get to try someone who had too many speeding tickets or didn't pay his plumber. Or maybe They (whoever "They" are) will decide I look a little bit too dumb, too smart, too happy, too sad, too blonde, too young, too old, too rich or too poor. That's the glory of our criminal justice system: it's completely random. Long live America!

Yesterday, my friend K. shared an alarmingly long list of personal facts her work traveling companion told her on the plane on the way to their destination. I'm not sure if it was worse that she said all of that stuff, or that K. could actually remember each and every fact. My first reaction was, "Good Lord. What an annoying woman." Then I stopped to think about it...

Every day I log in and share every little annoying idiosyncracy of my life, here, just for you. I also have a bad habit of sharing meaningless factoids with co-workers, elevator companions, strangers at the gym and people waiting in lines. I have done this since I was four years old and told an entire department store that we were buying a cover for the couch because we couldn't afford to buy a new couch. I never stopped to think that MAYBE PEOPLE AREN'T INTERESTED.

Hmm. Perhaps I should curtail my running commentary. It could be that I do this because all the child-development books say to talk incessantly to your little angel so that she develops good language skills. Nah, I found that part to be easy, because I've always been a motormouth. I am one of the few people in the world that has to make an effort to be quiet when in a class. If I know the answer to the question, I want to say. If I read something interesting, I want to tell you about it. If it is raining, I will probably comment on that, too, even if the person standing next to me is dripping. What is wrong with me?

I'm reading in a wedding this Friday. All of my friends who are in the wedding are the sorts of people who develop a deep, bronzed body after approximately 30 seconds in the sun. I, on the other hand, am German. Germans are not known for their tanning abilities. They are known for a fondness for dark beer and their bad decisions in the '40s, neither of which are things I particularly care to brag about. Anyway, when I go to buy make-up, I buy the second-lightest shade, the lightest shade being reserved for albinos. I am as white as white girls get. However, despite knowing this, I still bought a pale-yellow dress for the wedding, which makes me look horribly pasty -- maybe even sick -- but it was on sale for $25 and it had pretty beading.

So, self-tanner.

I haven't attempted to apply self-tanner since my junior year of high school, almost 15 years ago. Silly me, I suspected they might have idiot-proofed the product since then, so after showering on Friday, I had my husband do my back and then sort of hastily slathered it on before going to attend to the little angel. Mistake. Bad mistake.

The next day, I awoke to a pleasant shade of just-golden-kissed on my skin. I specifically chose this product because it built a tan gradually. I didn't want to end up looking like an Oompa-Loompa. THANK GOD FOR THAT. Somehow I had missed huge swaths of skin, ending up with a self-tan that looked somewhere between "dirty" and "melanoma."

After sporting a SWEATER IN AUGUST to my husband's 31st birthday party on Saturday, I resolved to try again on Sunday. This time, I donned surgical gloves and spent about 15 minutes rubbing it in with circular motions. It looks fabulous, just in time to wear off by Friday. I'll have to try this whole routine again on Wednesday.

Why did I buy a yellow dress? The things we do in the name of fashion.

One of my dear friends and college roommates had her baby today, twelve days after her due date and after apparently 24 hours of labor. We have been anxiously awaiting his arrival, as we do the arrival of all friends' little angels. This one I awaited with especially baited breath because I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT IT WAS. Well, that's not true. I did know that it was human, obviously. But I didn't know the gender. He's a boy.

Which brought me to the subject of "finding out." It always drove me nuts when people would ask me while I was pregnant if I was going to find out if my baby was a boy or a girl. What a silly question. I mean really, what mother is walking around with her adult child thinking "Is it a boy? I really just can't tell." We all find out. And guess what? Unless you're psychic, it's also always a surprise. Sometimes the surprise happens, oh joy! In the doctor's office. Sometimes it happens, oh my! In the delivery room. But who really knows ahead of time? God. God knows. And not you.

Another funny thing I noticed was my dear friend's husband's surprise at HOW LONG IT TAKES TO HAVE A BABY. He said, "You know, I thought it would take five or six hours, but it actually took more like 24." I've heard stories about those women who have a little gut-gurgle and ten minutes later are giving birth in a New York taxi, but I tend to mentally lump them with teenagers who "didn't know they were pregnant" until they went into labor at the prom. If you are that out of touch with your innards, you have issues much larger than pregnancy to deal with.

However, I will stop my ongoing rant against Strangers Who Ask Stupid Personal Questions to say Huzzah for the new baby! Hooray for Libertyville! Thank you, God, that everything came out okay in the end! Another miracle happened today.

A co-worker of mine recently said he was having a "No Joy" day. I guess it has something to do with the military (which doesn't surprise me), but I thought it was an accurate summary of how I feel when I have way too much to do. That has been happening a lot lately. No Joy occurs for me when I find that I am skimming along the surface of my life, never really paying attention because I'm too worried about the next meeting, the next class, the next bath for the baby, the next party to attend or for which to buy food. I'm not the sort of person who thrives on or enjoys this lifestyle, though I'm sure this will shock those who know me. The happiest part of my life came during my maternity leave, when for the first time since I can remember, I started noticing things like dust motes in the sunlight and the smell of grass again, even though I was up to my ears in dirty diapers and deaf from screaming-child syndrome. I only really had one thing to concentrate on - my baby - and it bowled me over how happy that made me.

For some reason, I thought once we had the little angel that our social calendar would die down. I even mourned the thought a bit. I'm sure it still will in the future, once the little angel doesn't WANT to sit in a restaurant on Friday night like she does now, or once she goes to bed at 8:30 p.m. in an actual bed. Of course, at that point, she will probably start having her OWN social calendar, which I will get to manage in addition to my own. I anticipate that far from encouraging her to take flute lessons, dance lessons, soccer lessons and learn three foreign languages by the age of five, I will ask her to please PICK ONE and stick with it for at least a season before tossing it aside.

Don't get me wrong - I'm relieved to still have wonderful friends calling me to get together. I really enjoy the social part of the calendar. But trying to balance my full-time job, seeing my husband, my part-time teaching gig, my social life, exercise and the tiny sliver of what I used to have to spend with the little angel has left me feeling a bit discombobulated. I have been trying to remember if my mother and my friend's mothers seemed this frantic when I was growing up. They probably were, if not in exactly the same way, then in different ways. It certainly can't keep up, though.

So I ask you, is it possible to not feel this way? If I cut out everything in my life, would I actually feel any better? Or is this self-reflection and judgement just a necessary step in adjusting to motherhood? I do find that many people in my life who have kids fall into two camps: those that fought the change and those who sank into it like an overstuffed chair. Those who fight still get pedicures on a regular basis, clothe their children in outfits involving stiff collars made from delicate-cycle materials and purchase outdoor Pack-N-Plays. They look really good, though. Those who wallow in the change too much end up disregarding grooming altogether, dressing to match their children and talking in four-word sentences, even to adults. Where's the happy medium? Is there such a thing? Can one be a hip mom without encouraging smoking, drinking and new babies when the first one is still in middle school? Can one stop the child from working a forty-hour, extracurricular week without crushing their hopes for playing varsity basketball? Can one really shape the child's reading ability by whether or not one points out syllabic functions in "Goodnight, Moon"? Why is the world so different now? Does my baby need her own cell phone? Will the other preschoolers all have Blackberries? Will she speak in acronyms by the time she is eight?

HELP!!!!

The little angel recently learned to yodel. It started out when she realized that no matter how hard she tries, she can't actually grab her tongue. She will attempt such tongue-grabbing for hours, but she never seems to catch it. She does succeed in covering everything around her in saliva and twisting her tongue in new shapes. One afternoon, she was innocently trying to grab her tongue when she laughed at the same time. She looked so shocked and amazed - it was as though she'd been told about unicorns. She tried it again. Same yodeling sounds, so easy to change! Just squish the tongue and make different noises! And you can try to grab the tongue at the same time, with different fingers! I have fingers! Callooh! Callay!

Now this yodelling is handy for phone conversations with Grandma and lifting me out of my post-office funk, but annoying at 6 a.m.

This past weekend, my beloved, the little angel, my friends and one of my friend's mom (and actually the wife of the guy who gave us the boat) decided to take our little 12-foot AMF Puffer sailboat out for its maiden voyage. We acquired the boat at the end of last summer, but with the little angel and all we hadn't had a chance until this weekend to see if we could sail it.

My beloved and I were having a tense morning after I admitted that, though I did learn how to SAIL A BOAT when I lived in Chicago in 1997, I never actually learned how to ASSEMBLE A BOAT. Considering I had to repair the sails with duct tape minutes before the launch, you can imagine my dismay when I realized I would have to rig the boat based on a picture book and seven-year-old sailboat observance. Quite scary. But I figured it out.

We towed the boat out to Shawnee Mission Lake and set it in. I took my friend B., who seemed a) good-natured and b) strong if not c) knowledgeable about sailing. My beloved had to stay on the shore, because we had decided we shouldn't foist the little angel off on our sunbathing friends if not necessary. B. and I were just figuring out the jib and tacking back and forth merrily when I noticed that due to a good breeze and strong current, we had gotten out of my comfort range from the shore. I decided to turn the boat around, so to speak. That's when disaster struck. There were several things that went wrong:

* I'm not a very good sailor and probably took us around too fast.
* Neither is B., and he forgot to switch sides, thus stacking all of our weight on one side of a small, fiberglass boat.

And the most important reason:
* We didn't have a drain plug and the hull had already taken on about 120 pounds of water at this point.

The boat went over. B.'s facial expression was akin to my husband's when the little angel crowned: male shock and horror. We went in the drink, the full twenty-foot sailboat, mast and two sails laid out like a toy boat in the bathtub, with us bobbing helplessly in our (THANK GOD) lifejackets. B. looked at me, grinned, and said, "At least we both still have our sunglasses."

The surprising part about all of this was that nobody seemed to notice that we and our ENTIRE SAILBOAT were bobbing helplessly sideways in the water. A friendly kayaker tried to help us, actually pulled B. into his kayak to help "tow the boat," but this was pointless. Then someone got a park ranger to come along and try to tow us with his motor boat, but he was also unsuccessful going against the current. At one point, B. asked as quietly as possible if a person had to have an IQ over 50 to carry a firearm. I shushed him, thinking it might hurt our plight if the park ranger heard him.

The park ranger and the kayaker decided to tow us to the opposite, inaccessible-by-car shore. We found our bailing pitcher bobbing happily in the weeds. I suddenly became terrified of snakes. B. told me they don't come out in August. I didn't believe him. B. can be a liar in crisis situations. Finally, the kayaker, B. and I managed to get the boat enough out of the lake to partially drain it, thus confirming the lack of drain plug - WHICH I MIGHT MENTION IS CRUCIAL TO FLOATING - before we removed the mast, sail, keel and rudder and threw them on the park ranger's motor boat. We tied the sailboat to the motor boat, climbed in, and motored back to shore. Our friends estimated we were probably in the water for a little under two hours.

Here is what I learned this weekend:

* Always check for a drain plug.
* Take an extra drain plug with you after you have checked for the drain plug.
* Make sure the person with you has a decent sense of humor and good-fitting sunglasses.
* Duct-tape the oars to the inside of the boat so you don't have to try to hold them and swim at the same time (it doesn't work).
* Make sure the person on shore taking photos of your idiocy has a telephoto lens.
* Always wear a cute swimmingsuit (I didn't) so when scores of people turn up to laugh at you as the park ranger tows your sailboat in, at least you look good in stranger's photos. I'm sure my bad ones will end up on the Internet soon.

It's been a while since I've read any office etiquette information, but I'm pretty sure it's poor form to spit an entire mouthful of water out on a conference table. Which I did yesterday.

It wasn't my fault. We'd been having a post-meeting conversation about how our youngest co-worker S. is more mature than the rest of us thirtysomethings. How she knows how to make Excel do those stupid function thingies and we don't. How, in fact, since we didn't learn how to do anything besides type in high school, we have actually faked our way through between eight and 15 years of not knowing how to make a spreadsheet add two plus two or insert a fancy bar graph into a PowerPoint presentation.

Then the topics turned personal. My other co-worker S. said she feels silly because young S. is already married and has bought a house and she is just now moving in with her boyfriend, even though she's older than young S. Something about the way she said it, though - she kind of whined through her nose in a perfect imitation of me in middle school, lecturing my parents: "Well, my boooyfriiiieeeennndd." I don't know what triggered it. Maybe it was the fact that I've woken up at 5:30 the last two mornings to go torture myself at the YMCA before work. Maybe it was because it's the end of the week. Maybe it was a release of pent-up work stress. Something about her comment was SO FUCKING FUNNY that I couldn't hold myself back, despite the fact that ALL THAT WATER was in my mouth. It was as though a part of me floated up and was stuck to the ceiling of the conference room, watching my earthly body violate every social more known to officedom. Out the water came. It bounced off the conference table and started rolling toward our meeting notes. Then I experienced the fiery snuffle you get when you swallow water at the swimming pool. I thought in horror, Did I actually shoot the water out of my nose, or is this just afterburn from the laughing? To this day, I'm still not sure.