Fifty Eighth Visit to Taft

After last week's fiasco with Phil and Ellen being turned away from visitation for speeding in the Taft parking loft, I crawled into the lot on Friday at less than 20MPH. I know the sargent at Taft means business. Friday was the coldest day of the year, in the low 30's and rain and snow were expected. I wasn't sure how long our visit would last, as I had to be concerned about the CHP closing the Grapevine. Fortunately the weather cooperated and we got our visit in, and back to San Diego before sundown.

Ron rarely talks about the staff at Taft, but he does have a new counselor who seems to really take an interest in the inmates. Here's what she did. Ron had a legal call scheduled for 1pm one day, and the counselor went to make the phone call and the lawyer didn't answer. Often if there is no answer, that's the end of it, and the inmate will have to reschedule the call for another day. This young woman, however, tried again about 15 minutes later, and then again until she got through. She realized that this was important to Ron and went out of her way to make sure he got his phone call. Events like that are few and far between, but so appreciated when someone goes out of their way to help.

Ron has said numerous times that everything is difficult at Taft. Here's just a little example of what he means. Shopping in the commissary takes place once a week, and the day of the week you shop depends on your unit's inspection performance. Ron's unit was last this week. I guess they're not very neat. Anyway, that means they shop on Friday. Friday Ron always has visitation, so he had to shop in the morning from 6:30-8:00am, before his visitors arrived. Unfortunately the generator was out and there was no shopping until later in the day. Bottom line, he now has to wait until next week to shop because he would have missed visitation in order to shop. Luckily he has enough phone minutes left, and the rest of the stuff he'll just have to wait until next week to get. As he says, nothing is easy.

As of now Ron has a release date of July 27, 2011. That is about 6 weeks later than he was expecting, and this has put us both on edge. We are trying to find out why things have changed and see if there's anything that can be done. You get your mind set on a particular date, you count the days, weeks and months until that date, then they change it on you. It's hard not to react to these changes, but we're trying hard to stay calm. Hopefully we will know more in a few weeks. As Ron always says, hope for the best, but expect the worst.