croquet and bocce for all

i kept meaning to say this, and it is nearly too late now, unless you think croquet and bocce can be played in the cold and the snow, and i say they can, but anyways, the point of this sentence was that those who want to utilize the cheapest ever croquet and bocce sets are welcome to use the ones in the blue cases under my carrel, #125 in the tax alcove, and please just replace them when you are done. community of trust and all that. i know you wouldn't fail me. also, i want to get my $12.99 worth.

another day of good old fashioned laura time use

9-10:15--skip trusts and estates. i have now not been in over a month, ever since the day i was called on. saunders is starting to make me worried about the 80% attendance requirement. there's really no way they'll fail me, right? unless i actually fail the exam? right?

10:30-11:45--go to class. understand none of what is going on, per usual. realize that if you give me slides, i'll just frantically copy those off the screen in the front and pay no attention to the words coming out of your mouth. i hope that is not a problem. tune in for another two distinguishing characteristics about nachbar's home--it has a chimney, and today there is a plastic skeleton hanging out front. IM molly about touring cville this evening to find houses that meet these criteria. figure that we'll look less creepy in our usual nachbar-stalking facepaint b/c it's halloween. well that's something.

12-12:45--force eli to join me for lunch, so i don't suffer the indignity of looking like i have no friends. figure this will be very good b/c this way, i will not waste this hour, then waste the next hour with all the people who have class at this time and eat at 1:00. somehow make this take way longer than it should.

12:45-1:00--screw around until those friends get out of class.

1:10-1:10--wander around law school looking for those friends, deciding that i have eaten, but now i can have the 12:00-1:00 hour of just screwing around and not eating. everyone has other plans.

1:11--get the idea of bocce in my head.

1:11-1:20--run all over the law school, from the library to scott commons to the law review office to find matt madden. coerce him into bocce.

1:20-1:45--play perhaps the best game of bocce ever played. well, with balls that cheap and an utter lack of skill. the three of us manage to lose the ball that you're supposed to throw for. i threw it, we couldn't find it. the 3 of us spend literally 5 minutes walking in circles to find it. this is pretty comical. eventually give up and just start using one of the yellow balls for throwing. this works way better, as it is far larger and harder to lose. how did we even lose the ball in the first place? begin game with first throw, which happens to land w/in about 6 inches of the first ball we had lost. we are clearly all morons. blind morons. madden scores the first three points, spott scores another three to tie, i am being relentlessly mocked until i score the next 6 points and we have a real game going. of course, i lost, but the score was 7-6-6, so no one was embarassed and it was a good partial use of a mid-october day with that much sunshine and highs in the mid-70s.

1:45-2:00--try to upload pictures of dogs in halloween costumes on my blog. feel deep sense of shame.

2:01--open telecom book.

2:02-2:10--post detailed account of my day. feel more shame. no one else even cares about my day! oh well.

and if you care about the rest, it is quite a doozy! lex and i are using the beautiful day and are walking over to the lawn to watch the kiddos trick-or-treat from 4:00-5:15 which could be the cutest thing ever witnessed had i not been so adorable myself on saturday night (i actually saw a toddler in a dinosaur costume at the LS earlier today and concluded that he had nothing on me), then going to the gym, then having aaron pick us up and i'm headed out to dinner at flaming wok. i have about no fondness for flaming wok, but i have much fondness for my friends and so yay for dinner at flamking wok tonight!

oh, then i am returning home to screw around on the internet and panic about the fact that i have all of about 4 free days b/f my 25 page paper is due and i have not started it.

is there a profession where time management skills like these are an asset? i have a sinking suspicion that it's not a profession where you have to account for every 6 minute block of your time. crap.

i can't believe i'm doing this

i might as well just turn this into another cute puppies site. but basically, if you put human arms or legs on a dog, well i'm going to find it too adorable to resist. i'm sorry, but it's true.
i also probably shouldn't admit to how many attempts it takes me to put up pictures, every time i put up pictures. but i can't help it. i would estimate that this took me about 12 attempts and it's still not in the right order. but they're there, and that's all i can hope for.
if you want more, b/c you can never have enough dogs in halloween costumes (ahem, lexi) (i can't even believe i'm accommodating this request), you can go here.

happy halloween!

so i feel a bit like i'm edging over into lexi's territory, but my dad sent me this forward, and for like one out of every 800 forwards he sends, there is something pretty cute and a few of these made me laugh. of course, my blogger capabailities only allow me to upload three pictures per entry, so here are some of my favorites to wish you a happy halloween.




god i love how they gave this dog "legs." how hysterical is that? i'll tell you how hysterical--very hysterical. glad we cleared that up.

god bless the community of trust

once a year, i manage to lose my purse. last night was that night. fortunately, this year i decided to make an extra key to my apartment and give it to lexi, so that when i do this, i have easy access to an extra key, rather than having to call the ivy man and get him to let me in and question why i am wearing a child's dinosaur costume at noon on a sunday and all that.

even more fortunately, i am very pleased to report that charlottesville's community of trust works flawlessly. see, people were trying to appease me by telling me that i had left it on a counter at the party (i had taken it off to wrestle someone. now, i don't remember this, but that sure does sound like something i would do, doesn't it?) and that's ok, b/c i trust the community of trust at law school houses.

but this morning, once i was able to secure my extra keys from lexi, i return home to an email. someone had found my purse. SITTING BY THE SIDE OF IVY ROAD. yes, i am a winner. i managed to just leave my purse sitting by the side of a major road. don't even ask.

fortunately, jon miller is a stand-up guy and my newest hero and i had my purse back by the first Bar-Bri MPRE break. and because of this, we are now able to provide you with the most adorable photo ever taken of a person. the possible loss of this photo was distressing me very greatly last night. perhaps even more than the possible loss of the camera, the purse itself, the bank card and driver's license. i mean, look at this face!!

poor charles craver

so negotiation institute is taught by just another one of these older, gray-haired white men that we all find so adorable. this one is even more adorable b/c as a fringe benefit, he looks a bit like the farmer from babe, that pig movie. also, b/c unlike some law professors, he is not a jerk and he is a really nice man. (i say most of them are, tho i am a terrible judge of character, but some of them are not.)

anyways, it is so sad b/c this is a one credit pass/fail class taught over two saturdays. i mean, can you imagine how little attention people are going to pay? there is no need to take notes, or to have a computer, but they're all open and EVERYONE is sitting there, totally engrossed in their computer screens.

i even mean EVERYONE. last weekend, when i would look up, there were people paying attention. today, anthony pointed out that the thing to watch for was the moment when not a single one of the 120 students were listening to what he said. and it happened. i thought the LLMs and the usual gunners would keep us from that goal, but even they couldn't do it.

i will admit that the clump of my friends and i were being pretty egregious. we were all playing games on our computers, but also all watching one anothers' screens. oh, but unlike usual when we're doing this, we had given up on IM and were just talking aloud. so that if someone couldn't find the 6 letter word or figure out the lingo word (nerdy law school word games), we would just sit there and "whisper" the words in very insistent tones. across three rows and a group of about 8 people. and this was in addition to our general tittering and giggling and pointing at one another's computer screens. oops.

well, at least we didn't play the drinking game. i mean, yes, we did all drink over lunch, but no one actually returned with a pony keg and drank every time he used a word with the root "negotiate" or talked about a story from his book or told us that the answers to our exercises would be confidential or referred to the emotional intelligence survey or told the same story he told last week. oh, it would have been good. then again, my guilty conscience can hardly handle how disrespectful we were when not all hopped up on booze, so that’s probably just as well.

good wholesome fun

so i have been meaning to go apple picking for three years. and every year, we all bail at the last minute b/c we are just too busy and lazy. but this year, i was not going to be dissuaded! i have been planning for weeks, and i was very committed to the apple picking! we were going!

only when i woke up yesterday, it was raining. but still, rob and i were not to be dissuaded! it was only a light rain. except the rain became harder and the forecast for the whole day was rain and alas, the gods had thwarted all my plans and best of intentions. i was very upset.

but i decided that rob and i could still have good wholesome fall-time fun.

so we carved pumpkins! well, more accurately, lexi and i carved pumpkins. i carved for both rob and i, while he made cider, pumpkin bread, and cleaned the apartment. guess who the gay man is in this relationship, and who is the girl with rage issues who really enjoys wielding a large knife?

no no no, just kidding--i don't have anger issues. turns out, however, that i do wield a mean pumpkin-carving knife. i did the first one using the pumpkin carving kit and the second one totaly freehand and this is not a good story, but as soon as i get pictures taken, they're going up and you can tell me what a great pumpkin carver i am.

laura and the terrible horrible no good very bad day

so i was just in a really bad mood today, for a number of reasons, but probably mostly b/c i was just in a very bad mood. but i get really unpleasant when i am in bad moods. and i think that i am generally pleasant and upbeat and whatnot, but ooooooh, woe unto you when i am really grumpy. i am hoping this is over by tomorrow. it had actually subsided, but then reared its ugly head again at bar review, but tomorrow is apple picking and how could that put you in anything other than a great mood? but none of that is the point of my story, which is about the worst haircut EVER. and not that the haircut is bad, but that it was one of the worst experiences ever. fie on this woman!

so i went and the woman who wound up taking me was neither the first nor the second person who was supposed to get me. which is fine, but this woman had been standing about the receptionist area, so i don’t trust her too much. and then she asks me a bunch of questions that give me no confidence in her expertise, after i have made it quite clear that i am just a girl who occassionally uses a hair dryer on my hair and i am totally willing to defer to her expertise. and then she proceeds to just complain about my old haircut. fine fine, but it was done by that woman we see standing right behing us. and then she cuts my hair in like 4 minutes. which is saying something. b/c while it may not be difficult to cut my hair, well that's a little ridiculous. then, she starts to dry it w/o the use of any styling products. now this is fine, sure, except that isn’t part of the whole point of going to get your hair cut, that they’re going to make it look as good as it's ever going to look until you come in the next time? in the end my hair looks much like my hair always looks, only she has managed to jerk my head uncomfortably a number of times and in the end, the sides look totally uneven. bad enough i say something. which is pretty bad. well she gets all upset with me and proceeds to dry the hell out of it for another 10 minutes, to curl it evenly. this involves scratching my neck with the wire bristles of the brush a number of times and hitting me in the head with the hairdryer once or twice. and then, while she stands immediately between me and the mirror, so that all i can see is her, she tugs on my hair, in that way they do to make sure it is even, pulling it together at my neck and pinching the skin of my neck between her fingers a bunch of times, telling me, “see?” to prove that it is even. OF COURSE I CAN’T SEE! YOU’RE STANDING RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. oh, and we never go back and do any other cutting after it's dry. none of the shaping and refining and double checking or the sculpting shaping scissors. none of that. just four minutes of straight scissors and a bunch of physical abuse.

worst. haircut. ever.

yick.

so here's to a better mood tomorrow. keep your fingers crossed.

T minus 1

well, it is exactly one year from today that lexi and aaron will be getting married. and i am very glad b/c that means that i can tell you what lexi and i have been doing the last few days.

at the gym the other day, she mentioned that she wanted to make aaron a card for the "negative one anniversary" as they are calling it. and i jokingly replied that she should make it like a ransom note--cut letters out of magazines and have it say something like, "just one more year until you are mine. all mine. forever." and whereas most people would look at me and wonder why the hell i would have said such a thing, lexi squealed with delight and immediately set to putting this plan in action.

only lexi went a bit overboard and proceeded to spend hours cutting letters out of magazines. aaron didn't ask questions for the first few hours, but after a few, he asked if he should be worried and if she was planning on kidnapping anyone. all she said in reply was, "never you mind." and that's not a very reassuring response. i thought she should have added that everything was ok b/c this was a laura-approved plan. obviously that would appease any concerns.

then of course, this got the wheels in my head turning. also b/c last week, while i was heavily under the influence of alcohol, lexi asked me to be her maid of honor. normally the thought of planning things with lexi's mom would have scared the bejeezus out of me, but i was drunk enough that i just squealed, "yes!" and hugged her. she's wily, that lexi. anyways, even tho i have no idea how to be a maid of honor, i do know how to be a weird friend who does odd craft-y things commemorating a relationship. turns out that pretty much means i know how to be a maid of honor. so i set my own plan of action in motion. it involved glitter pens and birthday hats and tulle. lots of tulle! (speaking of which, i have many many extra yards of tulle. if you need tulle for anything, just give me a holler.)

anyways, i decorated their door with wedding bells.
and made aaron a lovely bowtie, that says "groom to be" down the one side and "lexi + aaron" down the other. it is also fully functional b/c i put a safety pin on it. i fully expect to see him wearing it tomorrow. (i would say that men might should keep this in mind when considering marrying any of my good friends, but i suppose the fact of the matter is that my expecting you to wear such a bowtie will not really come as a shock if you've asked lexi to spend the rest of your lives together.) and the piece de reistance is lexi's hat, complete with a veil! well, two veils b/c i couldn't decide if it would be better for it to stick out the top, or to flow off the back. so i figured, more is better and did both. why make decisions when a lack of making decisions just gives your project more oomph? that's what i always say.
so just let me know if you have any craft-y projects that need completing in the next few days. or if you're looking for a maid of honor for your own wedding. tho i have a suspicion that i may have a niche market in this sort of thing.

an old passion made new again

well i had finally managed to get over all of the computer games that had plagued me in the past, and i was down to just solitaire, which i didn't really get much joy out of and which takes less than 2 minutes to play a game. only in the span of 3 days, i saw a number of people playing text twist around me. AND I WILL NEVER FORGIVE THEM. perhaps you recall my slight problem with text twist from last year, around finals time. well, if not, the short version is this--i am too good at text twist. it is a problem. b/c if i start a game, it may be two hours b/f it is over. i just lost on serifs, at 140,520 points. and now i want to start again. to avenge my loss. only it is nearly 2am and i don't want to be playing text twist! i want to be sleeping!

negotiation institute

so yesterday was negotiation institute, which i'm really going to recommend as a way to get one credit, as pass/fail. there are many beauties to a pass/fail class. for me, it's nice to know that they can't give you a B-. for other people, it's pretty much a ticket not to have to pay any attention and to not worry about taking any notes.

yeah, so it's two full 8 hour saturdays, and that's not ideal, but it's also not so bad. first of all, misery loves company, and it's 120 hungover 3Ls, all of whom know they don't have to take notes and nearly all of whom make no effort to conceal the fact that they're reading the internet and IMing one another (i do feel bad for the prof.) and you have to do exercises, but when you know everyone in the class, it's not really difficult to pair off with someone you know and just make it easy on yourselves.

so i had paired off with tiff for an exercise about a law prof who had sexually harassed a student, who wanted the prof to change her grade, leave the school for a year or two, and also make financial compensation. i represented the student and tiff was the prof. we finished in about not time at all, concluding with the money. i had looked at the point value on the exercise--for every $1,000 you got, you were awarded 3 points--and figured this meant we were looking at a low monetary figure. so i say to tiff, "$15,000?" and she goes, "ok." well this is not a negotiation! that was easy! sweet! i am quite proud of myself, furthered by the fact that when tiff looks down at her book, she is fairly dejected, saying that she did not do well.

so i'm the first person to turn in a sheet with our outcomes. i skipped down to the professor, telling him, "i'm very proud of myself" and handed him the sheet. he looked at it, asked, "oh were you the defendant?" and i replied, all sing-songy, "no, i'm the plaintiff!"

well he must have thought i was like the dumbest thing ever. turns out i had missed the tidbit where the lawsuit we were trying to settle was for $250,000. other people settled for $100,000 and one guy (or girl) settled for $400,000, tho that seems pretty absurd. (tho, to be totally fair, some settled for $0 and one of the negotiations on the tape we watched settled for $7,500, so my completely uninformed negotiations weren't a total loss, but still.)

best law weekly article ever

ok, maybe not ever, but i got quite a kick out of it. check it out.

also, josh's mel the 3L was great this week. i laughed aloud while waiting for my bagel at bodo's for like two minutes. i think people thought i was weird. also, i adore richard balnave.

random tidbit of the day

so last week i got a blister on my thumb while at the driving range. it turns out that once the blistered skin starts to, and then does, come off of your hand, it leaves your thumb with that odd, moderately dead sensation like when you have super glue all over your skin. which is one of the most annoying feelings ever.

related to this, is it wrong to wear a glove on each hand while playing golf? (and please don't tell me i should loosen my grip. that point has already been made. more than once.)

ask me about my exploding toilet!

as my piece de resistance of my cleaning adventure, i was going to put a vanish drop-in tablet in my toilet tank, to keep my toilet water blue for months. mmm, so pretty.

well, after i had done this, i went to put the lid back on the tank. this is the point at which things went horribly awry. somehow, the lid hit some thingamajig in the tank loose, and that thingamajig seems to the the crucial thingamajig that keeps an 8 foot geyser of water from spraying all over your bathroom at all times. (as a bit of trivia, the tube that refills your toilet is about 4 times as large as the tube that fills your bathroom sink and can shoot up to 18 gallons of water out of it in a minute.)

it's not really much of a story b/c it took me all of about 2 minutes to turn off the water (it took me about 2 minutes b/c the first two spigot-like things i looked at had no piece on them, b/c they were the wrong pieces of the to turn the water off (what are those things that just sit at the base of the toilet and are usually hidden, only not in my kinda run-down apartment, so there are large rusty screws projecting out of the base of my toilet?), so i freaked out momentarily before finding the right piece) and call the maintenance guys. of course, it only took this two minutes for me to look like a drowned rat while hanging out in a 2 foot square of bathroom with a geyser of shooting toilet water.

props to the maintenance guys for being so quick and handy. props to me for knowing how to turn the water off. and props to the cadre of towels who sopped up the inch of standing water in the bathroom before it seeped into alexis' apartment, and ruined my own rug. and another props to me for trying to bring back the word 'props.'

i cleaned my apartment!

i know that none of you really needed to know that, or care, but i am very proud of myself, so i am tooting my own horn.

the thing is that i never actually clean my apartment. i clean pieces of my apartment. or more likely partially clean pieces of my apartment. today i would say that in sum, i mostly cleaned the apartment. and i nearly completely cleaned all parts of the apartment that are open to the public. so that’s a big deal. if you can figure out at all what i’m saying.

here’s a good way to put it—i would not be embarrassed if people i did not know came into my apartment right now.

i also found one of the balls to my eyebrow ring. i used to lose those things all the time. but i have not worn my eyebrow ring in over a year. why would it choose now to reappear out of the recesses of my kitchen flooring? oh well.

oh no!

except it turns out that this week's episode is not up yet and i just watched last week's episode. only it was 30 minutes in before i realized that and then i was too invested to stop.

also, the whole system doesn't really work flawlessly, so when they say that it's "presented with limited commercials," what it means is that you will have to re-open the window and watch the same two remax and shower scrub commercials about a dozen times. it's not an ideal situation really.

oh, and now i'm watching the episode from two weeks ago.

i need help.

best idea ever

so it turns out that tv shows are putting their whole episodes on the web. so hypothetically, if you see 8 minutes of "ugly betty" before you need to switch over to the office and then to grey's anatomy, then you can just go to the internet later and watch the whole episode. hypothetically. which is brilliant if you're looking for a way to really get NONE of the reading you were supposed to do this evening done.

also, in hindsight is 20/20 news, the tv makes it quite clear that there is rain at the game. i am molto glad i did not go.

Cavs football

well of course i didn't go to the game. earlier this week i was all excited to tailgate and maybe go, but my enthusiasm waned today and it wasn't a great day and it turns out i have a 9am makeup class in the morning and ajeet won't be there to take our notes, etc etc. so i didn't go.

and i'm not sure which is funnier--

the tv commentators who are making no bones about the fact that both of these teams suck.

or the fans who are really seriously waving their "#1" fingers in the cameras.

buyer's remorse

why did i buy that thing? drat.

i'm a moron

i did it. i bought the bean. i knew i shouldn't, and i knew it was silly and probably a scam and that i'm just throwing my money down the drain. but i did it anyways. it's not a very fulfilling purchase when you don't really have any enthusiasm for the buy you just made. but somewhere, deep in the back of my mind, i'm still convinced that it will give me rock hard abs and that it'll be a great addition to my fitness regime. in the end, it was the 100% money back guarantee (even shipping) that made me do it. i'm sure there's a scam in there too. but if the scam in that is that they're pretty sure people won't go to the effort of returning it, well they're not getting me on that one! i hereby declare that if i am not satisfied with the bean, i am going to all the hassle of shipping it back and getting my money back, no matter how painful a process that is. (it's a good thing i publicly vowed this b/c i hate painful money-getting processes and am exactly the type of person who would normally give up. but not this time. no indeed. i mean it.)

but i had the best of intentions...

remember back in august, when i laid out all the things i could do now that i was a 3L and i would have all the time in the world?

well, things have not gone so well. as a matter of a fact, i am now freaking out about all of the things that i have to do. car fixed, teeth cleaned, eyes checked, plane reservations booked, christmas plans figured out, etc. etc. etc. and that's not even counting the school-like things. MPRE studied and taken for, paper researched and written, understanding any of what has happened in communications law this semester, worrying if the ABA really enforces the attendance policies for classes as awful as a certain one i am taking, etc. etc. etc. you get my drift.

so in the absence of having volunteered at the SPCA, or done any pro bono work, or eaten healthy food, i would like to congratulate myself on the things i have stuck with.

1. the golf. we have completed our four lessons, and i was planning on playing my first game this week to celebrate, but it seems that i have a fear of actually going out on the course. but i have been very good about going to the driving range, and i am very proud to say that at our final lesson, our instructor was giving us each individual advice about what work needed to be done on our backswing. he looked at me for a minute, nodded his head, and said mine was perfect. yay! perfect! i'm doing my pink clubs proud!! (ok, so there are any number of other things i need to work on, but i'm focusing on the positive here.)
2. the gym. lexi and i have been putting our gym cards to good use and we are still going, three or four times a week. we even moved from the water aerobics to land-based classes. (of course, this was right after i spent $80 on water aerobic suitable swimsuits.) this entailed days worth of pain afterwards for the first couple of weeks, but i think we're even past that for the most part. fall break slowed us down, but now we're back and better than ever. interestingly, i am pretty sure that i am actually gaining weight, but i do feel better than i used to and have more energy and we're now at the point where we really enjoy them. so yay for that. plus, i think that the instructors really appreciate the joie de vivre lexi and i bring with us to the classes.
3. being a generally lazy 3L who doesn't bother going to a 9am class that sucks (ever) and who doesn't stay on top of her work. ok, so i still do the reading, and i go to my other 3 classes, and i haven't yet made it to not worrying about grades and classes, and yes i am panicking about everything that needs to be done....hm, ok, i haven't mastered this one yet.

well two things isn't bad.

reminiscing

so earlier today i was trying to figure out what tailgate to go to this thursday night. one of the problems is that most i have been invited to are BYO, which is only less-than-convenient b/c i'll be walking a mile or two to wherever i wind up going. and when you're planning on drinking enough to be drunk (i'm sorry, but i am), it's a bit of a hassle to carry that many beers.

until it dawned on me--a backpack! ahhh, that brings back fond memories of filling your backpacks with thirty-packs of busch light and smuggling them into your freshman year dorm.

which reminded me of the time one of my friends borrowed my backpack to smuggle a couple of bottles of alcohol into the dorm. only they clinked together and the bottle of peach schnapps broke open, spilling peach schnapps all over my backpack and my biology notes contained therein. so for the rest of the semester, i would smell peach schnapps every time i sat down to study for biology.

which reminded us of the good old days of taking notes on paper! with pens and pencils! in notebooks! you remember notebooks, right? they had lined paper inside and were bound with spiral-shaped wire? remember how little the books were back then? (i was an english major, after all.) ooooh, it was crazy stuff.

best picture E-VER

that is all.

such a letdown

so i just got an anonymous post:

Long time reader, first time commenter. When I first read your blog title, I
thought it said (appropriately), "I'm not stupid, I'm just female." It turns
out that I was wrong. In any event, your title is pretty funny too.

well i was very excited! a reader! someone reads my blog! and it isn't lexi! (no offense lexi, but someone else!)

also, the post is kinda funny. tho maybe a bit offensive, but i'm willing to overlook that! i mean, they said they read my blog!

anyways, all of 2 seconds after the email arrives in my inbox, i get a call from one of my friends. he is asking about the post. it is very clear that he has posted the comment. my heart breaks a little. he's not someone new and exciting. i already knew that he read my blog. (not to say that old readers are not important readers. they are. i cherish all of your readership.)

typical laura

so i woke up on my couch at 5:52, panicked b/c i had a 6pm class. i mean, how awful would it be to sleep thru a 6pm class?!?! so i hop in my car and dash over to the law school and barrel thru the hallways (you know how time compulsive i am), and make it to the classroom. which is empty. hm. so my mind starts racing. maybe we're meeting in a different room this week? maybe we're watching a movie? so i turn my email on. no email. none of my classmates are on IM. this is all verrrrry confusing.

then it dawns on me. the class ends at 9. and it is two hours long. 9-2=7pm! it starts at 7!

well that explains it. oops.

on the plus side, they needed an extra moot court judge and courtney says that that counts as her birthday present (happy birthday, court!), so that was the cheapest gift i ever gave. and very fulfilling as well.

oh dear god, i'm hyperventilating

so lexi just sent an email that mentioned that negotiation institute was this saturday, which i had totally forgotten about. and it is sad b/c i had already been composing an email about apple picking this weekend. well so much for that.

BUT THAT IS NOT THE PROBLEM!

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS?!?!?!

THIS MEANS THAT THE NEXT TWO WEEKENDS ARE NEGOTIATION INSTITUTE AND THEN IT IS THE MPRE, AND THEN IT IS PILA AND THEN IT IS ALREADY HALFWAY THRU NOVEMBER AND THEN THANKSGIVING AND THEN IT IS FINALS AND THEN IT IS TRIAL AD INSTITUTE AND THEN MY PAPER IS DUE AND THEN IT IS SECOND SEMESTER ALREADY AND THEN I AM GRADUATING AND THEN I HAVE TO TAKE THE BAR AND THEN I'M A LAWYER AND THEN I'M DEAD!!

i thought all those things were like 3 months away, or years away, but it turns out that THEY ARE TOMORROW!

this is not good.

i want to crawl in a corner and cry.

[UPDATE: well f*$! me. i forgot that we needed a draft of our paper by november 20. so i'm even more screwed. rather than the paper being 2 months away, it is now one month away. i suppose the upside is that i've been having lots of problems motivating to research and work on a paper i thought was due in three months. in one month, i should be able to motivate. well, other than my general motivational problems. hm. i hadn't accounted for those. crap.]

Jim Ryan addendum

I decided that I should have posted just a few of the things we learned about JR that made us decide we all loved him unwaveringly. I mean, there’s the obvious fact that he’s adorable (we wish there were more pictures), and that he clerked for Rehnquist, and that he’s an amazing prof with a great sense of humor, poking fun of himself, students, and the law itself, in a way that doesn’t hurt or upset anyone b/c he’s so balanced in his viewpoints.

Then there’s the fave story about him and Smith playing in the Pong for PILA tournament my first year. They decimated their official opponents so quickly, and there was so much time before the next match, that they offered to play some of the bystanders for fun. Well, Tiff and I, neither any good at all at beer pong, kinda thought the opportunity to play our prof would not be one we would soon forget. And it was not. We fared even worse than the first team, and the highlight of the game was when JR started mocking us. Nothing like your Con Law prof taunting you, “we’re getting thirsty over here,” to know you really lucked out when you got your professor assignments. Trash talking is pretty hot.

Another of our favorites is the story of how he met his wife, which he told us over one of those “take your professor to lunch” lunches and had the four of us in tears we were laughing so hard. All I remember is that it was at Barrister's, he was very drunk, and it was hysterical. I'll have to fill this in once someone with a better memory reminds me, but so far no one is replying to my requests for details. [UPDATE: he had had a crush on her all first semester, but she had a boyfriend. rumor after xmas break was that she was now single. JR decided he would make his move at barrister's and was very excited. only he showed up and got very drunk. then, he made his way to her and some guy she was dancing with, and proceeded to say something very inane to the guy, while ignoring her completely. somehow she figured out that he was interested in her and asked him out. and to that, i say good move. b/c she managed to land JR. not bad.]

But all of that pales next to what I find to be the best tidbit ever about JR, and maybe about any law professor—he played rugby (i want to say professional, but i doubt that's right, so i'll just say semi-pro, and even in the absence of that, it's still rugby) in Australia and New Zealand in his time between undergrad and law school. I’m sorry, but there’s no denying that that should get your vote for hottest law school dean.

And finally, all of this talk of JR and how much we loved him, just makes me want to post the pictures of T-Mil, Rada, and I in the shirts we made to take our Con Law final--

Not only is people making t-shirts in which to take their finals hot (c'mon, don't even try to pretend it isn't), but surely it says something about how much we liked the class.

i love this commercial

well yay for you tube b/c i have been watching football all day, which means i have seen this commercial a dozen times and i have come to love it love it love it, and i didn't know how to share it with you. but then i remembered--you can find anything on the internet!

you can tell better when you see it on tv, but the post office box has some great inflection. peace out.

congrats to me and to a.pai!

so it is still unclear to me if we have the whole year, or just this semester to complete our lexis passports.

of course, this is irrelevant, as it is only mid-october and everyone who is serious about their lexis points has already completed theirs.

ajeet finished his this morning, and all i still needed was 3 tutorials, and i did not want to be shown up by ajeet, so i dedicated myself to the task at hand and that's another 2000 points. well, if you add up all the points total, it's 3500 plus the 1000 for the daily fact or fictions.

of course, i still have no idea what i actually want to get.

other things i accomplished today included some terrible shots at the golf range, consuming approximately 8000 calories (including a bag of chex mix in under 2 hours), and renting two movies i'd never heard of, and then getting home to have the internet tell me that they sucked (i've only watched one, but thus far, the internet does not lie).

SOS!! VOTE VOTE VOTE!!!!

thank god tj's doubleplay keeps abreast of these things, b/c i would have never discovered this otherwise, but you all know that the stories of my love for jim ryan are numerous. and if you don't know, well they are. I LOVE JIM RYAN! well, pretty much everyone does. it was the only class i've taken in law school where you could see love written across the face of every student in the room, male and female.

anyways, since our own jimmy r. is losing to some loser from michigan (who is not even that attractive), it's up to us to vote him into the lead!!

i would tell you to vote early and vote often, but it only let me vote once. however, even tho the percentages seem like it's an uphill battle, it also seems like the numbers of voters are very low. meaning that YOU can make a difference!!

seriously people, this means a lot to me. please?

[i'm actually thinking about going in to school tomorrow and voting from every computer lab computer. brilliant.]

oh yes, and

the scale has to be on a hard floor, and there is not enought space in my bathroom, leaving my kitchen as the place to put the scale on a not-carpeted floor. so the scale is now sitting right in front of my cupboard, b/t my stove and my trash can. this can not end well.

t-r-o-u-b-l-e

so my westlaw scale came today! it measures my body fat weight, body fat percentage, body water percentage, BMI and BMI levels. (i thought it would somehow do this by analyzing my toeprints. rudy said something about the body's electrical signals, a theory that is bolstered by the fact that the instructions tell you not to use it if you have a pacemaker. and eli is convinced that the whole thing is a scam.)

also, it has already told me that i am fat.

it probably would have been good to know how much i weighed before i started the gym regimen, so that i would know if this was progress, but i'm fairly convinced it is not.

but this is ok.

b/c the other night, i saw an infomercial that appealed to me. i am always very tempted by infomercials, but i think the few beers i had had earlier in the evening made me even more susceptible to the charms of this particular infomercial. still, i did not cave. but now! now the scale! it is pretty much telling me that i have to buy the bean. they're teaming up against me!

it says i'm going to see results in just a couple of weeks! and that i'll lose inches! and i can do it in front of the tv! in only minutes a day! and i'll be able to wear something cute to PILA and look pretty! (seriously, that's what the infomercial says.)

plus, it is cheaper than most of these exercise infomercial things, and so even if i'm getting suckered, at least i'm not getting suckered for as much as i could be.

but the BEST thing about the bean, is that even if you don't use it as an exercise device, it is shaped PERFECTLY to be a great chair! you can’t go wrong!!

anyways, i'm sitting on it for a couple of days, but do not be surprised if in a couple of weeks, you're reading about me and the bean and our new exercise regimen.

i love UVA law!!

in the past week, when people around cville have asked me about school, i have said that i'm in law school here. to which they have replied something along the lines of, "oh dear god, i am so sorry!" which gets me very upset, so i reply that it's been the best three years of my life. now i'm not really sure if that is true b/c i have had a pretty good life and i sure did love college too, but the thing is that these people don't seem to understand that this is NOT a miserable 3 years. what i can't figure out is if they have any reason at all for thinking this in an informed sort of way and if their impression is based on law school in general or lawyers in general. and if it's about law school in general, then i'd be interested in knowing if it is as miserable as we've all been led to believe at other schools, or if it's just not like that anymore and we've all got pretty good lives.

b/c let's be honest--we at UVA law have got really good lives. and i think we've got it better than most, but based on how good this is, i can't imagine that it would truly be miserable elsewhere. maybe not as good. maybe no dandelion and no foxfields and no feb club, but don't you still have the best group of friends you've ever had and parties and camaraderie and a community where you know just about everyone [i appreciate that this isn't something that everyone enjoys, but i really do] and [this isn't the case for me, but i imagine that what most people like about law school is] the fact that you've finally gotten to an educational experience that is really what you want to be learning about and you're excited to finally have found that topic and to be in this intellectual environment where the people like to delve into the same questions you do [i am terrified of such situations, but like i said—i think others dig it]?

hell, i think that the reality is that i am very poorly suited for this. it’s the first time in my life that i’ve been really truly bad at something academic, and i am still not convinced that this is what i want to do with my life (and it’s even harder to buy into that whole ‘you can do anything with a law degree’ idea once you’re actually getting the law degree), but i wouldn’t have missed this three years for the world.

anyways, i would really be interested to know how different our 3 years are than that of students at other law schools. but no matter what the answer to that is, YAY for UVA LAW!!

i love chicago!!

so everyone has always told me that i should go to chicago, and i didn't have anything better to do over fall break, and i figured that would be the ideal time of year to go, so back in august i booked my flight and a hotel room and i just went to chicago for the first time ever.

i loved it.

back when i was considering where to apply for jobs, rudy told me i should do chicago b/c it was the best place in the whole wide world. well, i thought he was a little biased and i thought that it would be silly for me to interview in a city i had never even visited (i tried it with seattle, it didn't go so well. i think most people lack credibility when they do this, but i lack all credibility b/c not only can i not lie, but when i think that people think that i am lying, i sound like i am lying) and i needed to narrow down cities, so chicago was out.

well, within about 2 minutes of being there, i decided i wanted to hop on board the chicago bandwagon. of course, this decision was made in typical laura fashion--i was in the corridor between the airport and the el stop, and there were all these banners and flags hanging, proclaiming all these cities to be sister cities of chicago. there were dozens of them. or maybe a dozen. or six or something. whatever it was, i think it was more sister cities than most places have. and they were good cities! toronto and prague and the such. i figured that was a good sign.

anyways, it was an awesome weekend. i bought some new clothes, spent a good deal of time with molly, her sister and brother-in-law, had some good meals, saw wicked, did a fair amount of sight-seeing, saw rudy and his new place. all in all, great times.

but that does not explain what i love about chicago. so here is just some of what i love about chicago--

• all the people wearing their mid-western state college shirts. ohio state and iowa and wisconsin. i realized this within the first hour or so and i wanted to live there with all of these people.
• all the gardens and parks and flowers. they're everywhere! and real gardens and parks and flowers, not like what new york tries to pass off as a park (with the exception of central park. i'll give that to them. but this is about the "park" where one of my interviewers told me i should go for lunch. i knew i could never live in a city where that's what people thought of as an oasis.) it turns out that chicago's nickname is "urbs in homo" (city in a garden) and it's so appropriate and i love it.
• there are all sorts of pretty buildings. i don't care a hoot about pretty buildings, but there is no denying that the architecture there is amazing.
• so easy to get around. as rudy says, every major city should have a good ole' chicago-style fire, so it can be reconstructed on a grid.
• totally affordable. rudy has just bought a house (in the town that's the first el stop outside of the city! 3 stories! that looks out onto two homes that went for $1.8 million!) and a group of us went to a really nice tapas dinner where we didn't hold back on the food or the sangria, and it ran us $26 a person. with tip. insane.
• lots of cute stores. and not the big-name high-price stores, but lots of cute little stores that sell unique kitschy things that i love.
• and finally, it's a place where you can have conversations about baling hay with other people. i LOVED that. of course, molly couldn't figure out why the hell i was talking about baling hay and how the hell i knew about the machines that would do such things, but this may have been my favorite thing about it. it appeals to the midwesterner in me. no one (except my mom) seems to get that, b/c no one thinks of me as a midwesterner. but i contend that i am. to some degree. and conversations about baling hay make me happy.
• oh, and i saw a cab that was painted like a cow. that rocked.

things i did not like about chicago:

• people do not cross against the light. i'm pretty sure a man yelled at me when i did it once.

things the jury is still out on:

• the weather. i intentionally went at this time of year, figuring i would miss the scalding heat and the bitter cold, and i was right, but i even got a bit of both. and it's supposed to snow there tomorrow. but the thing is that i kinda really like cold weather. the question is if i really like the biting wind that blows to your bones cold that lasts for so long in chicago.

of course, this is all irrelevant since i have accepted my offer in DC and it's not like i would really apply for a job there or anything. but i have decided that if i meet a boy, and he likes chicago or is from there or something, he gets an extra star or two in my book. fine, so this isn't much of an incentive for boys, but everyone needs a system and this is now part of mine.

anyways, yay for chicago and what was the best fall break of my 3 years in law school!

big improvements!

so if you haven't noticed, i have managed to get four pictures in a single posting (not five yet, and i can't quite do what i want with them in terms of layout yet, but c'mon, it's something) and i managed to go back and embed the youtube videos in my fair post (WHAT WHAT), but i have now made even greater progress in my technological savvy!!

look what i can do!!!

pretty exciting, eh?

and no, i couldn't come up with anything better to link to. sorry.

SHOUT OUT!!

WHAT WHAT to matt madden and mike scott, who triumphed in a hotly contested moot court quarter-final round tonight.

i knew they were not to be trifled with b/c they told me that if i held up my sign, i would die.

i respect that.

unfortunately, after this victory, my well-laid plans for the evening all fell apart. my laundry had been sitting in my car since 5pm, just waiting to go to eli’s after the arguments and i was going to do some reading and some cite checking and it was going to be lovely, and diminish how freaked out i am about everything i have to do this week.

only it turns out that at the age of 27, i am still very susceptible to peer pressure. and there went another 4 hours of my life. which i spent in a bar. essentially wearing pajamas. (b/c i had gotten ready post-gym in about 10 minutes and figured i was going to oral arguments and laundry.) i felt a little silly.

so now i have tomorrow to do everything i meant to have done in the past two days, plus what i had meant to do tomorrow. plus our make up golf lesson. blargh.

but CONGRATULATIONS TO MADDEN AND SPOTT!! they rocked.

awesome

courtesy of tj's doubleplay, it's the lawyer's coloring book.

i'm going to print me out a copy. i'm a great color-er.

grumble grumble

i would like to admonish the law school community (or those who showed up and acted accordingly) for its conduct at the federal circuit oral arguments, which were held in our own caplin auditorium today. that's pretty awesome.

but we all knew that the arguments would start at 2:00. and that they would each last 30 minutes. and most likely that they would not exactly be on time.

so why did people insist on showing up late, and then having hordes of people leave every few minutes? this is VERY distracting. and ANNOYING.

THEY'RE ARGUING IN A COURT OF APPEALS FOR GOD'S SAKE! yes, it's caplin auditorium, but still! maybe we could treat them with a modicum of respect, show up on time, and only leave between the arguments. i mean, literally, there were groups leaving every 5 minutes and people coming in thru/out, of course having to file in to the seat at the very center of the row. this is not done stealthily.

if you knew you had a class, plan accordingly.

and if you just got bored and wanted to leave, two things. (1) well DUH. you didn't know that you would be bored? i anticipated being bored within 10 minutes, but i figured it was an amazing opportunity and i should go anyways. and so i planned to just stay thru 2 of the 4 arguments and picked the set of 2 i would most like to see. actually i didn't get so bored and would have stayed, only i have too damned many things to do today. not that posting to my blog is one of them. (2) even if your boredom shocked you, well you still could have waited out the 30 minute span and left between the next set of arguments.

i don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon, but i thought that we came off as a pretty disrespectful bunch.

tho you could tell the judges loved having an audience. tho i imagine they wouldn't have complained if we had stayed seated and actually listened to what they were saying for more than 4 minutes at a time.

ok, gripe over.

pigs

i'm sorry, i know my blog isn't pretty and that's b/c i'm too dumb to do things with it, and i know it's stupid that i have to post pictures in subsequent posts, but i do, and i didn't think it was right not to post a picture of porkchop downs and the three pigs bringing up the rear, so here it is.

the state fair round-up

ok, i am going to try to pull out all the stops to tell the tale of our day at the VA state fair (i even got a you tube account to do this), but b/c of my technical ineptitude, i will make no promises. also b/c i am only giving myself 30 minutes b/c i really need to work on my paper topic. and with 30 minutes i can generally only manage to upload one picture, not multiple pictures and you tube videos. we’ll see how it goes. ok. here goes.

so ave and i arrive at the fair at 1:45. we figure this
gives us a bit of time to stroll around b/f we head to
pigeon rolling. we start at the front, where we find a
pavilion of all sorts of wonderful delights.

mostly, when i say “wonderful delights,” i mean
the t-shirt stand where we found my 12 hours worth
of joy and my lifetime of disappointment. but that was
not the only fabulous shirt to be offered. check out what
anthony found:

we amble around for a bit, checking out the foodstuffs and whatnot, before we decide that we should try to find pigeon rolling. it is at the other end of the fair, but we’ve got a map and that shouldn’t be too hard, right? i mean, pigeon rolling will surely be fairly obvious. and surely everyone who works at the fair will know what it is. i mean, IT’S PIGEON ROLLING FOR GOD’S SAKE! and it happens twice a day, so you think the people in the vicinity would have seen it by now. well, as i’m sure you can tell, it’s not so easy to find and no one knows where it is. well, at the last possible second, we find it. now we can finally settle the debate we’ve been having about what is pigeon rolling. i say you just kinda throw the pigeon and they try to flap, but i figure their wings have been clipped or something, so they can’t actually fly away. anthony thinks it’s the pigeon equivalent of log-rolling and they’ll be rolling sticks with their feet. i think this is ridiculous.

well, at 2:31 we find howard tess, who opens our eyes to the world of pigeon rolling. turns out that once upon a time, someone swore he saw a pigeon rolling, so they have now bred these birds to roll. howard describes it like “the backstroke.” basically the pigeon just rolls backward. it’s a little disturbing actually and anthony isn’t sure he’ll ever be the same.

this is when howard opens our eyes to the seedy underbelly of pigeon rolling. this is a competitive sport. so there are people out there who juice up their pigeons! yes, steroids! in pigeon racing! with steroids, the world record is like 750 feet. without, like 300. i think our pigeons rolled about 10 or 15. the one was going well til he fwacked into the wheels of a woman’s mechanized wheelchair. anthony thinks that in addition to breeding them for the rolling, they have also been bred so that their noses are metal detectors.

ok, so once we have been scarred by this, we go on to pan for gold and befriend some lady who likes us b/c we go to UVA and she “has been forced to talk to people from tech all morning” and then we ride a ride that lets us fly and we go to the worst fun house ever. truly. awful. anyways, then we meet up with lexi and aaron, ride a few rides that remind me that fair rides are all in circles and tho i love roller coasters, circle rides make me feel yucky. fortunately, there are plenty of other things to be done. next we went to see livestock, which it actually turns out was the "animal birthing pavillion" or some other such thing, which would explain why we saw lots of newborn baby animals and spent that 30 minutes cooing and petting fuzzy cute things. it was good times. it made me want to be a rancher. the kind of rancher that just coos and pets fuzzy cute things. ok, so i would be a terrible rancher.

then we go to what is perhaps one of the most amusing things i have ever seen. it was the "amazing animal adventure" where princess jara showed us her "magical castle" and we pretty much giggled thru the entire over-acted thing. i'm not really sure there is any better way to describe it, except for to say that it REALLY warranted a lot of giggling and i'm not too sure how you do that with an animal show.

oh, but there would be another way to explain it.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWqlGqRkuZU

(yes, the point is that the cougar show is set to enrique eglesias' "hero." that is ridiculous! hysterical! preposterous! awesome.)

then to porkchop downs, the pig racing. while the princess jara show was one of the most amusing things i have ever seen, this was maybe the funniest. lexi and aaron finagled us some good seats in the front, where lexi proceeded to jump up and down, shoving small children out of her way in an effort to be named a "pig rooter" and vie for a prize of a poster of a pig, grumbling all the while, "i bet it's not their birthdays," when the 6 year olds were picked instead. tho to be fair, lexi and i were way better pig rooters than any of the people they picked.

ok, so they hype us all up for the final race. the asian pot-bellied pigs. they tell us that they get faster with every race, and we've seen some pigs running. but then you realize that this is 300 pounds of meat on a 1 foot frame. the gun sounds, the gates open, the pigs mosey out. this alone is pretty funny. but one pig charges past the rest of the pack (still at an amble, but he didn't get distracted by things at the gate, like the other pigs did.) so while everyone else is still about 4 feet after the starting line (i had a picture, but it won't work, so cut me some slack here), pig #4 is a foot from the finish line. where...he...proceeds....to....just....sit....while all the rest of the pigs waddle around the track. so in the end pig #2 overtakes him and wins. we are convinced that they had hidden food right there, and that this was all scripted, but you have to understand that it was about the FUNNIEST THING EVER and it took about 5 minutes for this all to play out. all the while, lexi and i were both crying from laughing so hard and my stomach hurt. priceless. i'm sorry i can't get the picture to work.

and finally, was our time at the pirate singalong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrf4ttXSrIA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9gl-hzGN9Q

awesome. lexi and i even got a shout-out during their next song, which was about two norwegian oystermen who rowed from the US to france. yes, we sure did. from the stage. it was good times.

anyways, it was an awesome day and hopefully a happy birthday celebration for both dee and lexi and tho i regret the lack of my t-shirt, i've probably got enough other memories to last me. i highly recommend checking out the pirate videos, if you did not.

OH DEAR GOD!

so when i posted, i looked at the post, and i clicked on the picture, and i happened to notice, when the picture was that large, that on the bottom left of the t-shirt, there was a web address.

so i went.

i can buy the t-shirt online!!!

i would have to pay shipping and it is not the same b/c i would not have bought it from an actual real-live redneck (tho i suppose that's what's at the other end of the web address), but at least i know that the opportunity has not forever passed me by.

i swear i feel my headache lifting.

my heart is breaking

so there will be a full-length post about the virginia state fair coming soon. in short, it was AMAZING and we had an awesome time.

but i have had a searing headache for about 6 hours and i still have to read before going to bed.

but i would like to post this photo:

i was tempted by this shirt from 1:30 pm when we first arrived at the fair, to 9:30pm, when i had left the fair and i called anthony to ask him to buy it for me. i had grappled with the decision all that while, but it became clear to me that i had to own it. unfortunately, the booth had closed by the time i made the call. my heart is breaking and i know that i will forever regret not being the proud owner of this shirt.

instead, we made other foolhearty purchases.

including the nearly $20 i spent on food. all of which had been deep fried. sincerely. elephant ears, fried corn on the cob, a corn dog, and deep fried oreos.

as for souvenirs, lexi bought this, the most terrible piece of "jewelry" ever "created":


and i settled for this:


we were pretty happy girls.

but i do not know how i will ever fill the void in my life left by the absence of this t-shirt. i feel a little piece of me dying with every minute i do not own it. i should not have waited so long. alas.

oh, and you can get lexi's account of the fair right here.

WE WON!!

so we went to oktoberfest tonight AND WE WON PRIZES!!! ok, so not all of us won prizes, but I won a prize and enough of us won prizes to let us look like this:
you can't tell, but we also have oktoberfest vests on. it's pretty awesome.

so here's the thing...

ok, so right now, i wish that i did not have a blog that people read. b/c i have a great story about boys and girls and absolutely crazy. i don’t even mean in that kind of moderately crazy way that you find out after a while, but that “oh shit, you can google someone and find out the 18 different kind of crazies that they are before you even really get to know them.” which isn’t to say that i don’t want to get to know the person. it’s to say that i want to get to know them even more.

but anyways. the point is that this would be a great story, if i wasn’t aware of exactly how quickly this could get back to the crazy. and since i (1) lost assassins last year b/c i didn’t think that anyone other than lexi read this blog and (2) i got in lots of trouble (even unrelated to assassins) when it turned out that people other than lexi read this blog, then i’m not going to say anything else.

so, there is a pretty funny story. if you know me, ask me. code word: “1L crazy.” i’ve probably already said too much, haven’t i?

if that wasn't too much, there is *SO* much more. trust me.