When I didn't meet Weird Al Yankovic

On the Late Show with Stephen Colbert the other night, the actor Thomas Lennon told the story of how he met "Weird Al" Yankovic (in an office supply store), which, along the news of a biopic of Mr. Yankovic starring Danielle Radcliffe being in production, reminded me of this:

A custom Lego mini-fig my wife
got for me a few years ago,
not from the event chronicled here.

Back on November 9, 2018, my wife and I took our then-pre-school-aged child to Disneyland. It was not the first visit for any of us, but this was the first time any of us went there on the first day of the park having its Christmas decorations up (or, at least, having the big tree on Main Street; there were parts of the park where the decorations were still in-process). 

Unsurprisingly, it was a warm autumn day in Anaheim, so it didn't really feel like the holidays but such is often the case in Southern California. Being a Thursday the park wasn't super crowded, which was nice, but being Disneyland there still were thousands of folks there with us.

At one point in the middle of the day I noticed that one of those people also at the park was "Weird Al" Yankovic. Yes, the Weird Al. Or just "Al" as I'll refer to him for the rest of this post; even though we aren't friends I feel like he wouldn't mind.

Jury Duty in the Time of Covid (a case for pessimism)

When I received a jury summons last March, it was particularly unwelcome. It's not like most people look forward to jury duty, but in the middle of a pandemic where we'd spent a year working from home, where our son spent all of first grade on an iPad in his bedroom, and where we'd not gone pretty much anywhere, the thought to going to a courthouse and being around a bunch of strangers in an enclosed assembly room was worrying. This was prior to vaccines being widely available, and way before our child would be eligible for that.

So I postponed my service as far out as I could (five months) to August.

By then my wife and I had been fully vaccinated. While the state of Covid in our area wasn't as bad then,  again, our son was not yet so I postponed it a second time, again the five months I could. By the first week of February 2022 we were hopeful he'd be vaccinated and the pandemic should be in a much better state. 

Oh, how quaint we were. Well, at least our son got his shots, but Omicron made February arguably worse than August would have been.