BLaAaaarrgghhh.

Ugh this weather and the time change are so depressing.

I'm feeling ambivalent about going to Moab early to climb, especially because it's going to be really cold. At the very least I won't drive tomorrow, but Thursday.

In other interesting news, I went to court for the first time ever today.  It was a strange experience. First of all there were a bunch of 'certified student lawyers' standing around outside of the courtroom who were available to chat with.  I ignored them at first but then I sat down and listened to the judge give his spiel ("this is not a trial, you can plead guilty and pay, guilty with an explanation and still pay, or not guilty and schedule at trial") and decided to chat with one of them.  First the lawyer laughed at me and said "wow you got a 175 dollar fine for not getting a free permit to hike? Seems kind of steep. HA HA".

But then he got my fine reduced by half.

The judge called me up and was like "how do you plead" I was like "guilty" and he was like "you don't want to explain?" and I'm thinking "you just told like, 10 people ahead of me that this wasn't a trial and that you didn't want explanations!" but I didn't say anything, I just looked behind me to the prosecutor (who was supposed to say that my fine was going to get reduced, but he wasn't paying attention) and was like "um..." and he was like "oh yeah, the gov't wants to reduce the fine by half." And that was that.

So I texted Ethan and told him that my fine was reduced by half (to $90 from $175) and asked "are you sure your dad never got anything in the mail about a court date?".  Apparently Ethan never got a court notice in the mail, or a letter or anything else like that.  I was thinking to myself "this is strange". So I went back to the courtroom and looked at the list of names and his was there. So now he has a bench warrant out ($500).  John says this is not a big deal, and Ethan has excellent council (his mom), so I'm sure it will all work out.  Plus I got him the number for the judge's clerk and a number for one of the certified student attorneys. Hopefully he doesn't get pissed at me for writing about this....

All that to say that if you aren't proactive, you'll get screwed. And even if you are proactive, you'll still get screwed. Hopefully it will hurt less though.