Thursday morning … mostly cloudy with big thunder predicted for the afternoon. I’m up earlier than usual as I have to be at Deseret Industries for a Church assignment at 8 a.m. this morning. In order to maintain their tax status, Deseret Industries needs a certain number of volunteer hours. So each Stake in the region gets an assignment, that gets passed down to wards, and then passed down again to people who “aren’t working”. The latter happens because the assignments are always during the normal work week, so normal people can’t do this assignment, only abnormal ones. Because I’m now officially retired, I fall into the abnormal class. I was kind of carping about it this morning in the bathroom. “All in all,” Nina said, “I’d rather go to jail.”

It’s Thursday morning. She goes every Thursday morning down to the Bannock County Jail to visit an inmate who is awaiting transfer back to the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center. Once that happens, the Thursday morning visits (along with the Saturday morning visits and the occasional Friday morning visits) goes away and Nina will see the inmate in the normal course of Nina’s volunteer work at the prison. So, we joke a bit about her going to jail two or three times a week. And it’s not just the Bannock County Jail … she also goes up to Idaho Falls to visit an inmate incarcerated up there. The State Prisons don’t have enough beds, so inmates get farmed out to the County Jails, some of which have built jails larger than needed so they can be paid by the State of Idaho to house inmates.

Nina will be home from jail about 9:30 a.m. I’ll still be at DI, doing whatever, so they can rack up the volunteer hours. For me that’s still preferable to going to jail….