Endless Summer

TigerBlog may have jury duty this week.

He won't know until after 4 each day if he'll have to go in the next day. The website gets updated with the numbers of the potential jurors who need to report the next morning after 4.

TB checked it yesterday, and there was a pretty good distance between the numbers called and where his is. It'll be interesting to see what happens as the week goes along.

Does it stay in the order that it's going in? Does it start randomly at some other number? How many numbers are issued each week?

TigerBlog has had jury duty twice, though he's never actually been on a jury. His first time around was back when he is the newspaper business. He came close to being seated on the jury then, in a civil case, but the lawyer for one of the parties dismissed TB without even asking him a question. 

Does TB not look impartial? 

His other experience saw him head into the courthouse at 8:30 am to watch the video they show the potential jurors. Then it was sit around until they call numbers, only no numbers were called - or going to be called - that day, so they sent everyone home around noon.

They also said that those 3-plus hour satisfied the jury duty requirement and that nobody would be called again for three years. When TB got the summons this time around, he was a bit confused at first, since he thought he didn't have to go back for three years and it wasn't three years yet.

Only it was. In fact, it was June 19, 2017. How does he know this? Does he have a diary, or a calendar? 

No. He wrote about it of course. You can read it HERE if you're inclined to go back a little more than three years.  

Now it's August 2020, so he's eligible again. Will he have to go? He'll keep checking every day at 4.

What if he gets picked for a huge case and gets sequestered? Will they allow him to ride his bike and blog? 

Hopefully it doesn't come to that. 

TigerBlog was speaking with men's lacrosse coach Matt Madalon last week, and they both remarked that the summer of 2020 feels like it's lasting longer than other summers. That's where the college athletics calendar piece plays in to things.

TB has always thought - and written about here - the notion that the seasons all have their own unique feel to them, as work is wildly different from one month to the next. In fact, TB could tell you the date with relative ease based solely on the feel of how work is going.

It's been that way ever since he started in the newspaper world, which come next month will have been 37 years ago. Each year around this time he'd say he was going to do it for one more 12-month cycle and then get a "real job," only he never did. 

Come June, the academic year would end. Come late August, it would gear up again. That's 37 straight years of that.

This year, there will be no fall sports, and there will therefore be a much different feel than he can now remember.

Seriously. The last few weeks, when he's thought about what the date is, he's been off by weeks. It's felt like July, not August. Early July at that. 

Only it isn't. It's late August. 

And that would usually - always, for the last 37 years, actually - have meant that this would be game week.

The first athletic events of the 2020-21 academic year (by the way, that is so ridiculously hard to say) would have been this coming Friday. And it would have gone from there.

All of the fall teams would have been back on campus, practicing, getting ready for their season openers. And now, because of the virus, that won't be the case this time around.

When the spring season was first shut down, TB got caught up in the whole "what would have been going on now if it had been a normal season" vibe. He gave up on that after a short while. It's not important what might have been, only what is, and what is in this case requires a lot to handle. 

He won't be doing it this fall either, with a few exceptions. One of them, for instance, will be Oct. 10, when Princeton would have been at Army in football.

And another one is this week. It's eerie, how it just feels so much earlier than it really is. 

The athletics clock is stopped, back in July. For now, it's an endless summer.

Hopefully, though, it's the only summer that will ever be this way.