STILL BUSY

PA is done!

...ok it was done a while ago. We turned our assignments in on Monday but I've been so busy since then I haven't been able to blog. After turning it in, I took a full afternoon to recover (I was a mental zombie afterwards).

Tuesday through Friday consisted of reading for class, attending meetings, holding office hours, attending class and organizing my brain. SO much going on. I have to take each day separately, planning and scheduling each hour as I go. If I look too far ahead, I get extremely stressed and overwhelmed. I make sure that I know the week's deadlines (of course), but I still have to take my schedule in baby pieces.

This applies to my weekends at well... tomorrow morning BRIGHT and early I'll be driving up to school for a three-hour workshop for moot court. I'll also be doing some legal research this weekend - research for my Law & Society class, research for my Law Review comment (to be written in the spring), and research for my Evidence professor for whom I am a Research Assistant. ALSO my goal is to send out a bunch of resumes for summer jobs this weekend. I know it's early, but I figure it's best to do the work now, while I'm somewhat less busy (that's a joke).

Sorry the posts are less frequent/redundant. I'm SO much busier now than I was last year... in a good way. I know I'll survive this stressful semester, but only if I stay on top of/ahead of my deadlines. 

More later, as things progress! 

K

BUSY

OK so I've been busy... school started this week. Because I haven't been able to keep up every day, my week went something like this:

Sunday: Law Review meeting - received first production assignment, due in eight days.

Monday: went to the library, worked on PA all day

Tuesday: went to the library, worked on PA all day

Wednesday: went to class, worked on PA, class, class

Thursday: went to class, office hours, worked on PA, class, PA

Friday: went to class, library for 6 hours, Moot Court meeting, home at 9pm

Saturday so far: woke myself up at 6am by dreaming that I had overslept. Up at 7am and started reading/briefing for next week. More PA work to come.

Short explanation: The law review is my school's scholarly publication. The law review staff, of which I am now a member, is charged with editing, cite checking, and polishing each article for publication. For this first assignment, I was assigned 40 footnotes in a particular article - my job is to cite check each footnote. This entails finding the cited source online, printing the relevant information from the source, highlighting the passages cited, putting the printed sheets in a binder with a tab for each footnote, then using the Bluebook to correctly format each citation. Additionally, I need to edit my section of the article and footnotes for proper grammar... it really is a lot. 

I've worked on it every day since Monday and I'm not quite done. I still have 4 or 5 sources to locate, I have to finish highlighting and stapling my tabbed sources, I'm halfway through the Bluebooking but I still have some sources I'm not sure about, and I haven't red-lined my draft yet. Ahhh! I also have to prepare readings for the next week of classes... and apply for jobs for next summer on top of that.

ALSO I was selected to join my school's competitive Moot Court team (yay!). Last night we were told our team assignments and our competitions. Fortunately I don't compete until the spring, so Moot Court work won't add that much to my current workload. Unfortunately, this means that my spring 2010 will be a perfect storm of Moot Court brief research/writing, preparing and practicing oral arguments, competition PLUS Law Review Comment research/writing PLUS classes PLUS getting summer job... I already know that my spring will be crazy.

More to come... work now....

K

never-ending cycle

This past week has been a blur of house-related activity. LOTS of painting - the office, kitchen, entryway, master bedroom, and half of the rec room are painted (yeah!!), which took the majority of every day since Sunday. As of tonight, we have purchased a washer/drier, a fridge, and a stove, all of which will be delivered this week. I have packed probably 75% of our belongings in boxes, and probably 50% of those belongings are in the house already. 

Tomorrow EARLY we are getting the fridge, then will be moving the bed and couch. This means (fingers crossed) that tomorrow night will be the first night we spend in the house!

C and his dad are out paying for the stove as I write this, so I'm blasting classic rock (CCR right now) and am packing what remains of our kitchen. It's getting tougher because all of the things that fit neatly have already been packed. Now it's down to all the odd-shaped left-overs... like the pointed glass drinking vessel and the large sword C brought back from Spain, and the various bowls, dishes and vases we received as wedding gifts. Ah well. 

On a different note, I have my first Law Review meeting on Sunday... which is when we get our first production assignment. I am supposed to have all my readings done by Sunday (I have done most of Con law, most of Evidence, none of Professionalism). I definitely need to schedule some dedicated book-time tomorrow... so much to do, so little time!

Starting to get stressed (already)... trying to breathe and remind myself that life is so much bigger than this moment, this day, this week... My friend told me to sing "just keep swimming... just keep swimming" from Finding Nemo... I think that will be my new mantra for the month :D

Swimming on,

K

It's official!

As of this afternoon, C and I own our first house! We've been working on it for the past several days, but now it is officially ours!

Even though we really have spent every day since Saturday there (father-in-law is in town as well, so we've had extra hands), we still have lots to do before we actually can move in. We still need to finish painting several of the rooms (though the office, kitchen, entry way, and master bedroom are all close to being done). We still need to buy appliances (hopefully doing some of that tomorrow). We still have to physically move over all the boxes, the couch, the bed, the dresser, etc, etc. 

I *hope* that we can get everything (at least everything important) moved in by this weekend. Odds are that won't happen, but that's my goal. Sunday we have our first meeting for Law Review, then Wednesday is the first official day of classes... thus, I'd like to have at least some sense of permanence in the new house before I have to blow off house work for school. I also want to get as much done as possible so that I don't leave C to do it all or have to put it off until I have the time "free."

In my "spare" time when not painting, I've been trying to squeeze in some reading for classes. So far I've made it through half a week's Constitutional Law assignments and that's it. As it gets closer to school time, I'll make that more of a priority. 

For now, we're just happy to own the house and to get our stuff in it!

More later, and possibly pictures as well, if I remember to take some...

K

House countdown

OK the house buying is getting close... the loan should officially close on Tuesday (8/11), which means that we'll "officially" own the house on that day (we signed the docs with the title company yesterday). Until then, though, we have the combination to the lock box so we can get into the house and start working on it now. I just got back from letting in a cleaning service to give us a cleaning quote... after talking about it, we decided that it's probably a better use of our time to pay someone to do a deep cleaning of the entire house so we can get right to the spackle and paint and installations.

I've been packing up all our junk in boxes which we'll start moving in once the house is clean. It's amazing - in such a small 1br apartment we do have a surprising amount of heavy things. Hopefully with the help of our friends and of C's dad, who is flying in tomorrow, the move won't be too painful.

Additionally, more of my books are arriving in the mail. All but one of my syllabi are posted as well... which means that it's just about time to start reading. We were instructed to finish our first week's assignments early because Law Review will give us our first assignment on the 16th which will be due a week after that. Good thing I enjoy editing and writing!

I'll write again this weekend and keep my reader(s? hi mom!) posted about the house as things develop. 

K

Mini vacation

The good thing about not having work is the freedom do do things that are unscheduled and out of the ordinary. 

For example: this weekend C and I drove down to San Diego to witness the wedding of a college friend. We were two of five witnesses to this wedding which took place on a large ship, conducted by the ship's captain. The wedding itself was quite short and amusing (the bride's mother called in the middle of it so she could hear the vows - so C stood between the captain and the bride holding out her iphone stiff-armed with the speaker pointed at everyone's mouths... ALSO the bride couldn't quite understand what the captain was saying, so he had to repeat some of the lines a few times over, i.e. "for richer or for poorer"). Definitely a fun/unusual weekend.

Further, we just purchased a huge mess of cardboard boxes from a nice lady on craigslist. Thus, starting tomorrow I'll be packing and boxing much of our less-often-used household paraphernalia in anticipation of the move next week. We have yet to close, but I figure it'll be easier in the long run if I do the bulk of packing and prep beforehand. The amount of time between now and school starting is so limited... and I already have starting piling on extracurricular activities for the next semester.

OH things are happening so quickly! We really don't do things halfway...