Statistics

I liked Math in school. In fact, my favorite class was Math because I loved my teacher and she made me feel successful even though I was only a B / B+. I never took a statistics class, and I can barely spell it. Today, I might have learned a little something about statistics.

I had jury duty this week and just last night, my number was called. I had a feeling it would be, so I had prepared lesson plans "just in case". Glad I did! I had to report to the capital this morning and I was sweating bullets just from nervousness. I prayed and prayed that God would allow me to be excused. In fact, this very morning, my devotional started: "Recently, I was called for jury duty. It meant extraordinary inconvenience and lots of lost time, but it was also serious business." Really?? So I thought God was preparing me. I changed my prayer to "if I'm selected, please let it be a short trial!" The driving was fine, as was the "juror bus" pickup and the long, long hours of waiting. The first thing we were told was: "all of today's cases are criminal cases". Oh no. How can I get out of this?? The judge explained the case to all 117 of us, introduced the lawyers, gave us a ton of scary information, and then we started the juror selection process. This took the longest time as many people had reasons they couldn't serve. We were given a stapled document of 35 questions. We started with the first 4 and row by row, jurors went to the sidebar to speak with the judge and lawyers about why they couldn't serve on this trial. Why had I picked the law row?? Over 2 hours later, I went up. The trial was going to last to Feb. 10th and so I explained that it would be very difficult for my school to find a substitute teacher for me, especially on a 6 day/week schedule. I got dismissed!! I wonder how many more hours it took to go through all 35 questions... crazy!!  117 jurors and I got excused. Boom.

When I got home, I checked my email and saw that I had won a stroller through a blog giveaway!! AWESOME!!! You know who that is going to... I was so eager to tell Sarah and had it shipped to her house :)  She had entered too and was tweeting daily for extra entries. I didn't. 1210 people entered and I won. Boom.

Then, I checked other giveaways I had entered for Shabby Apple dresses and didn't win. The pool of participants were in the 30s and 60s and I didn't win. Crazy, right?

So what's the lesson in all of this?