Officium iudicum habemus

Day one.
The same movie which we saw five years ago starring the now deceased Ed Bradley. Many urgent pleas for understanding how they understand how inconvenient this whole process is and many heartfelt thanks in advance for being here.
Long wait. Borrowed a pen. NYT crossword.
First selection process.
Judge has laryngitis.
Talks anyway for twenty minutes about how they all understand ... .
No one sitting on the end of a row is ever called, persons in the middle are always called. Exits for lack of English, Dr's confirmation of inability to sit for an hour and one person claiming inability to be fair considering the charges.

First break
11:30 - 2:15
Freezing. Wind chill must be in the teens which must it really hard for the guys to stand in the fish shops. The wind is blowing in from the North. Woman arguing over the price of a box of snow crabs. Huge shrimp for $6 a pound. Live crab, beautiful fish... Went to the Chinese Bank for cash and then walked to Mulberry to grab some Italian. One sign that the restaurante is Italian is if the waiters are grousing in Arabic. I went down to La Bella Ferrara for some pizza.

The waitress was a clone of the actress in My Cousin Vinny, a New York Italian girl. I had a glass of what they called Merlot Borgate.... Not good,.... okay... good after the second sip, but really, not good.
=
Very glad in be in out of the cold.
I ordered the Napolitana with a little pepperoni. Very nice REAL pizza. Nothing fancy, just pie.
The radio is playing over the PA, some station which only plays hits from the seventies.
One glass of wine has made me glassy-eyed.
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I walked back to the courthouse by a different route. Exploring, trying to remember if I had ever been on a certain street before, looking for a seafood shop with lobsters. Found one. Three lobsters $10.

A blast of ammonia in the men's room (the cleaning kind, not the uretic acid knd) helped to wake me up, not that the walk back to the courthouse in the brilliant clear frigid sunshine didn't already.

We sit in the hallway waiting for 2:15.