el Cinco de Mayo flight cancelled

It looks like I may not be going to Austin, Texas, on el Cinco de Mayo, after all.

Three days ago, I got a letter in the mail from the county court saying that my legal case was on the dismissal docket. This is NOT good news, as I thought I had until September to take continued action in the case. The other party in the suit has not complied with all the orders of our judgment and has just recently had a bankruptcy dismissed. And I have been planning to visit Austin this summer to file a suit for Enforcement of the original order and one for Contempt for willfully having avoided the terms of the judgment.

Boy! Was I ever alarmed that my original case was going to be dismissed!

The day before yesterday, I took some time to go through my old orders and find all instances of non-compliance. And that same night, I emailed my former attorney to ask how much of the judgment against the other party has been paid to date. The rest of the day before yesterday and yesterday were spent online and at the library to try to figure out how to muddle through typing up a few appropriate legal documents properly. As a U.S. Citizen, I am supposed to have free and equal access to the law. But it seems virtually impossible to represent oneself, these days, with document requirements and protocals that are generally inaccessible to the public.

I never thought I would feel grateful for having been served legal documents. But I wound up copying and modifying documents that had been served upon me in January, 2009. And I actually felt grateful I had the forms to copy. By last night, my forms were (mostly) finished.

The majority of my morning today was spent calling the District Clerk for information and filing fees, and changing, copying and mailing documents to the court. Then, this afternoon, I opened my email to find... an email response from my former attorney.

The first thing my former attorney said was expected: The other party has made only one payment to her. But the other thing she said was that the case being on the dismissal docket was probably a mistake because a judgment in the case has already been rendered.

So it seems I may not have to go to Austin, after all, and I am free to attend Darryl Markette's "el Pinko de Mayo" fundraiser concert instead. The sad news, though, is that I have spent $260 on a non-refundable airline ticket. Needless to say, I am not amused!