#100

So this is my 100th post, and I was trying to think of something fun to do for it, but life has been just plain weird lately and I'm in kind of a funk, so this will just be what I am feeling in hopes that it will help me move on.   So I wrote a post about the whole jury duty thing last week and I have been following the trial online and I am SO HAPPY that I do not have to be on that jury.  This kid is a train wreck and I can't imagine that the jury will find him anything but GUILTY!  The defendant is Benjamin Hamilton in Flagstaff is you are interested in the story you can google it to find the articles in the AZ Daily Sun.

Then Thursday my co-worker who I share an office with gets a call from his significant other who works at the local hospital and says there has been a shoot out in my town.  Ok, I live in a tiny little town that you could say is sleepy at best.  We don't ever lock our cars and didn't even worry about locking the doors to the house until we had Austin, and only do it because it seems like we should.  Everybody knows everybody and most besides us are related somehow.  And the vast majority of town are conservative Mormons, so good God fearing good human beings.

So it turns out this local guy has been breaking into the school to steel random stuff for a couple of months now, including a box of burritos.  I also remember hearing that the clinic got broken into a couple of months ago, so it makes me wonder if he was connected there too, but that is just my thought.  Anyhow, he pointed a gun at the school janitor on Wednesday night so the cops started pursuing him.  On Thursday afternoon he shoots a Deputy who was pursuing him in the head with an assault rifle, who later dies from his injuries, so now there is a full scale manhunt for this crazy 23 year old who is hiding out in the rough desert terrain east of town.  It is on the national news, so you may have seen it.  The shooter is a Navajo man named Scott Curley.  It seems like from what we have heard he had this whole mess planned out for a long time and has stocked supplies out in caves in the desert and is prepared to survive out there for a while.  There are like 300+ cops here in town and about 5-6 news satellite vans, CRAZY!

Thursday night I was of course worried and could not sleep.  When I would fall asleep I would wake up from a dream that I had heard something and was in a total panic.  Then last night I was a little more secure about this guy since it seems like his beef is against the cops, and I doubt he would come into town since he knows that the people here are conservative red blooded Americans who love to hunt and therefor have guns and would not hesitate to pop a cap in a cop killer.  But then dear Austin wakes up at about 5 minutes to 1:00am and decides he is uninterested in sleep.  I am up with him until about 2:30am.  At which point I decide that this seems like a night we had right before Christmas where he would not sleep and did not go down until some Ibuprofen.  It turned  out then he was teething his first molar, so I'm wondering if this is the first 2 year molar.  I think it's that it hurts enough to keep him awake, but not enough to cry out in pain.  At any rate I am a tired wreck today, and I did take a two hour nap this afternoon. 

On a happier note, this morning I decorated the most elaborate cake that I have done yet for a friend in town.  Her Dad's 70th birthday party was tonight and she wanted a special cake for him.  He was a lifetime truck driver so I made a whole 3-D semi-truck cake.  I was so exhausted, and Dustin had to work this morning so it was quite a challenge to decorate the cake and entertain a toddler, but I got it done.  I haven't downloaded the pictures, but I will make another post when I get to it. 

So that is where I am at.  I have never been around murderous type people, so I am not sure why God has put two in my immediate sights within the last month.  I do have to say that my momentarily involvement with the jury really opened my eyes to the whole judicial system and how wasteful these trials can be.  I used to think the system was good, and that everyone should get a fair trial, but quite honestly I now think in this case the guy is so obviously guilty of shooting the deputy, so while I still think that it is wrong of me, deep down I hope that they just take this guy out and save the tax payers the trouble and expense of trial and imprisonment.  Ugh, I hate that I have become so cynical.