Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, eventually my work life was going to interfere with my fun life and it was a difficult dose of reality I had to endure this morning.  Yesterday I received a text from a client wondering if I was going to be in Grand Haven at 10 in the morning today.  I haven’t had to be anywhere but on my phone doing zoom calls  when it comes to court appearances since the Rona sent everyone into an overblown panic back in March.  (ok I have had a couple in person appearances but 95% of the have been via zoom).  The odd thing is that most people dress up in a coat and tie as if we are attending real court.  I”m not saying don’t look good, or don’t wear a suit, I”m saying there is always a phone in option, and that’s the option I take.  First of all, I have no need to see the people I am dealing with and second of all, if they can’t see me then what does it matter what I am wearing?  Well, unfortunately, Grand Haven, as much as I had hoped it would be, wasn’t a zoom sentencing meaning I had to actually drive there as well as wear a suit.

The in person appearance was problematic for a couple of reasons, the first being I had a Zoom sentencing in Allegan at 8:30 and one in 63rd District court via zoom at the same time.  What made it even worse is my client from 63rd called at 8 asking if I was going to be at court with him, he overlooked the explicit directions attached to his notice about how Zoom works.  I told him to drive to my office and we could do the call together.  Even in a suit I still prefer the phone vs video, the video is way to glitchy for my liking.  I logged on to the zoom call at 8:25 and was put in the waiting room until the judges clerk took me out to verify who I was and then put me back in for….roughly an hour.  At 9 I made the executive decision to have my client get on his own zoom call and headed to Grand Haven.  The good  news is Allegan gave me a slot of 9:30 to 9:40 for my sentencing so I still had a window to get that out of the way if my 63rd sentencing was completed in the next half hour.  I’m quite certain if there is hold music in hell that it is the hold music reserved for Zoom calls.  The music cuts out every 15 seconds making you think you are being taken out of the waiting room only for it to pipe back up leading to what seems like never ending disappointment.

Well, I was late for my Zoom sentencing in Allegan, which seems worse than being late in person, but since I was on the phone I couldn’t fully determine how angry the judge was about it.  Besides, I won’t get into the details, but Allegan jail is on lock down and I was unable to see my client and discuss his sentencing with him so the sentencing was adjourned out two weeks, not sure what will change between now and then with the Allegan County Jail but Tanger and the Casino are now open so it won’t be a wasted trip when I try to visit him and get turned away.  I made it to Grand Haven in time and when my client walked through the metal detector they offered her a mask, which she took and wore into the courtroom.  I on the other hand declined the offer of a mask and went into the courtroom unprotected from a virus that has a .02 % infection rate in Ottawa County.  The judge immediately told me I had to stand six feet away from him, which I was because I was at the podium and he was on the bench, but he wanted me six feet to the side of him instead of six feet in front of him.

On my way back to Grand Rapids I realized that under normal circumstances I would never been able to pull off 3 court appearances in three different counties in that time span, thank the lord for the over reaction to the virus, it has blessed us in so many ways.  In my mind I had put in the equivalent of a full day, driving to 63rd then to Allegan and then to Ottawa County so after getting a few things done at the office I headed out to the river to ski.  When I got off the river Shirley had texted me to find out if I was skiing or golfing, she has the find my friends app on her phone and can tell where I am at all times, but she typically is too busy to care.  Damn you find my friends!  The sad thing is I have no idea how to disable the app.  My only option to avoid detection is to leave my phone at my office or one of the local courts while I engage in my various hobbies and activities.

My next destination was Cornerstone college for hoops, we had been playing in Byron Center but Cornerstone had the ideal set up with glass backboards and a full college sized court.  However, on my way there my buddy called and informed me there were 15 black guys already playing, we only had one black guy joining us so we got next probably wasn’t going to work out in our favor.  That morning I decided to swing into cascade township park to see if the rims had been put back up just so I had a back up if Cornerstone didn’t pan out, sure enough they were back up, a fact that would change life as the Jansmas would know it moving forward.

Midway through the third game Shirley showed up with the kids and dumped them off (damn you again find my friends!) so she could go back to work from home without the guilt of them being on their devices.  The text about skiing or golfing was to try and get me to come home to watch the kids since the girl who watches them leaves at 3.  However, I was not phased by this and had my mind set on hoops even if it meant two hours of screen time for my kids.  Besides, I had spent roughly two hours with them over the weekend and felt entitled to a much needed a break.

Shirley ended up heading back home to work and once hoops was done I headed to Starbucks with the kids.  I had a text from Shirley that read “Come home right away…don’t buy those kids anything.  They are in huge trouble (I would have put huge in all caps if I was writing the text, but she didn’t) I came home to a disaster.  ( I would have used an exclamation point, she didn’t).  This struck me as odd, Shirley rarely puts any type of restrictions on what I can or can’t purchase for the kids and the term disaster was a bit ambiguous.  I immediately asked the kids what they had done and Aiden said he dropped a stick of butter out of the fridge, no way this is what she was alluding to, she wouldn’t even notice a displaced stick of butter if it bit her in the toe since she doesn’t even see us half the time as she “works from home” when we are in plain sight.  I decided to call Shirley to find out what the deal was and it was much worse than I could have even imagined.  The house had been set on fire, yes that’s right our house had been on fire.  When I got off the phone I started grilling the kids, I wasn’t fucking around anymore now it was serious there being property damage and all.  Aiden immediately started crying, that’s his go to now when I start yelling  at him, which only makes me yell more. Parker indicated that he had been playing with matches but that was in the morning and they don’t remember what happened before they left for the park (roughly an hour prior to their interrogation).

Flashback to Sunday.  I had a project going that in my mind was only going to take a couple hours but wound up taking most of the day.  I bought a sprayer and sprayed our new doors both exterior and interior paints.  By the time I was done ( I also had to make dinner) Shirley was out with the kids teaching them how to use matches.  This was a WTF moment for me, but I rarely come off the top rope when it comes to parenting, especially when it comes to Shirley’s parenting, so I kept my mouth shut.  When we were kids we had no choice, matches were everywhere and it didn’t take much to figure out how to use them.  However, as matches were as available then as porn is today, the opposite is true now.  No one uses matches, Aim n flames are where it is at but for some reason Shirley decided to bust out the matches and teach him how arson was done back in our day.  Maybe she thought they would some day be forever in her debt when they wound up stranded on an island with nothing but a pack of waterproof matches.  Regardless, this tutorial coupled with the fact that they were put in our motorhome (we just bought a motor home) where they were easily accessible to Parker led to what could have easily been a catastrophe as well as us spending the summer living in our new motor home.

We made it home from Starbucks and began to flush out what actually had transpired.  Aiden had very little to do with the actual arson, possibly nothing but here is how it unfolded.  When Shirely got home the house was on fire and she rushed to put it out with the garden hose.  Our neighbor works for a fire protection company and came down to assess the damage.  He indicated that 3 to 4 more minutes and our house would have been in flames.  It turns out Parker was playing with matches and threw one into the wood chips right before they left for the park.  Shirley asked Parker where is the only place that it is safe to play with matches.  No where would have been my answer for a 7 year old, but he responded by the firepit, which is what she actually told him in her tutorial on Sunday.  Again, WTF?  But my amount of guilt from my many hobbies and minimal amount of work combined with the fact that I deal with people who regularly do much more egregious things than teach their 7 and 9 year old how to play with matches left me shrugging my shoulders and heading to the store to buy a new 50 foot extension cord so that we could plug our motorhome back into the house (the one I previously bought was a casualty of the match tutorial).