Five years ago, Bill Schmalfeldt was chaffing under the first of the many restraining orders lodged against him, the first of the peace orders granted to protect me. As spring was ending, the Circuit Court granted my appeal and issued the order, and the Cabin Boy™ filed an appeal with the Maryland Court of Special Appeals which was improper. Maryland has a four-tier court system. At the bottom are the District Courts which handle petty cases such as traffic tickets, simple misdemeanors, and small ciivil cases. And peace orders. There are no jury trials. Those are handled by the next level, the Circuit Courts. The Circuit Courts also hears the appeals of case originating in the District Courts. Maryland law grants a right to one appeal for all cases. The Court of Special Appeals exists to handle those as-a-matter-of-right appeals from the Circuit Courts. The guaranteed appeal of a case originating in a District Court is exhausted in the Circuit Court. Like the U. S. Supreme Court, the state’s highest court, The Court of Appeals, doesn’t have to take cases, except for a very few types where the State Constitution gives it original jurisdiction.

Because the Cabin Boy™ was proceeding pro se, the Court of Special Appeals didn’t simply reject Schmalfeldt’s improper appeal. Instead, they kicked it upstairs (literally, from the second floor to the third), converting it to a petition for a writ of certiorari to the Court of Special Appeals. The Cabin Boy™ claimed in his appeal that the peace order violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because Parkinson’s. He also filed a motion to amend the order with the Circuit Court citing … um … because Parkinson’s.

And because of his pro se skills, I was supposed to be facing the direst of dire direness. Five years ago today, I responded to one of his silly threats with this post about #Bill Schmalfeldt and Landmarks.

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The Cabin Boy has a scary post up over at Old Uncle Bastard (No, I won’t link to it.) titled Whistling Past His Own Graveyard. He advises me

Nothing to worry about, Hoge. Just keep telling yourself that. Nothing to worry about.

while posting a countdown clock for The End of the World (As They Know It). The clock times out at noon on Sunday, 15 September, so I guess I’ll have something special to pray about at church that morning.

In a typical example of his lazy, shoddy research practices, Schmalfeldt used some generic picture of a cemetery as the illustration of his post. If I’m supposed to be whistling past my graveyard, he should have used a picture of the Hoge Cemetery. It’s a landmark overlooking the Tennessee River just southwest of Jasper in Marion County, Tennessee. And it’s not that hard to find via Google. FWIW, the group of headstones in the upper right of the picture belongs to members of my immediate family. I have a spot reserved among them.

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Nothing proceeded as the Cabin Boy™ had hallucinated.

And I misforesaw something as well. I had planned to move to my reserved spot in the Hoge Cemetery ahead of Mrs. Hoge.