Saturday Fun: The Shawano County Courthouse.

Wednesday, I had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to drive up to Shawano County for a hearing on a motion to reopen a consumer replevin case. While the judge had said I could appear by phone, I try to appear in person on substantive matters, mostly because I talk fast and it's hard to talk fast and argue intelligibly over the phone; reporters and judges keep missing things and I have to go back and repeat my arguments. Who can be brilliant two times in a row? Well, me, but I'd rather not have to.

The drive is a 3-hour drive for me, made tolerable by the presence of my iPod, and by the fact that I got to drive through Seymour, "home of the hamburger." The drive was less tolerable at the end because the Shawano County Courthouse was built, apparently, in what must be called, in architectural history, the "Era Of Making Things Look Like My Elementary School."

You can see the front of the building above. It's a square, boxy building that, while okay, isn't anything special. The wording over the door might as well read "Hartland North Elementary School" and have a parking lot with a rusty basketball hoop in front of it. (I'm speaking from memory, here.)

Here's a hallway:
And I took only one picture because the two hallways the public can get to are identical. That one's the second floor, but you have to remember that you climbed up a flight of stairs to know that, as it's indistinguishable from the first-floor hallways.

The Courthouse also bears an uncanny resemblance in layout and feel to the Columbia County Courthouse -- although it's a little smaller, both are from the same mindset.

Here's the courtroom where we argued the motion:


And it actually looks better in that picture; in the courtroom, in person, the overwhelming feeling one gets is... tan. There's a lot of brown in that room. I felt like I'd been packed in a shipping crate.

I only took the 3 pictures (plus one of an interesting cloud formation on the drive, but I'm not posting that because the cloud formation wasn't inside the courthouse) because there really wasn't anything else to see there.