Maybe you’re reading this at 1:30pm, Pacific Beach Zone Time. Aloha, from Sunny Santa Cruz.

If you are, then I’m in court. That’s right. Today is judgement day.

Prepared my statement.

Borrowed some clothes.

Took some advice from my attorney. OK, my friend. But she is an attorney. An IMPORTANT one, you guys. She is good. We had to give her wine and play with her kids to get her to advise me on this. Usually frying, like, slightly bigger fish. What did Laura go and do this time?

She said, after an exasperating evening with me, rendering me tongue tied at every look from her, “Laura. I think you have to decide what you’re trying to accomplish here. Do you want to get your fine reduced or community service, or do you just want to go in there and be a political activist, and just do that and be done with it? Knowing that you are going to lose, and it might be ugly.”

She looked at me over the top of her judge glasses when she said that. One word from her looking over those glasses reduces me to a puddle of decomposed caracass. I think I was supposed to pick the fine reduced and community service option.

I thought for a second. “I just want to do what’s right. I don’t want to make up some weird thing about canine good citizens and exercising the therapy dog and pleading remorse. It’s f**ked up that we are getting tickets for walking our dogs and rangers drive around the field now and there’s tire tracks where there used to be grass and that I’m a criminal now and I am not guilty.”

She’s like, “Yeah, but you are. You broke the law.” We’d been going around in circles on this all night. She looks over the top of her glasses at me. “You are aware, Ms. Hartwick, that it is against the law to walk your dogs without leashes out there?”

Shit. See you in court.