Success!

As of last Friday at 12:30 pm, I'd completed my first semester of law school. It feels amazing to have that behind me. I think that the next 5 semesters won't be nearly as stressful, because the uncertainty and not-knowing were the most stressful part of this semester.

Since Friday, we've been:

-shopping at the MOA with Laura

-to a crazy law school party

-doing some Christmas shopping

-watching the Vikings game

-playing in a hockey game against Hamline Law School

-to the Chatterbox Pub for some dinner and Settlers

-sleeping in

-to P.F. Chengs for a celebratory dinner

-watching a lot of Lost season 5 (we have to finish it before Feb 2nd!)

-cooking rice for the dog in our new pressure cooker

-cleaning and doing laundry

-plotting posts for the blog

My New Home

So the past few weeks, I've basically moved into a new home. Most of the time, you can find me here:

Study room K at the William Mitchell library. Yep, it's exam time. I've been spending around 10 hours a day at the library. Clearly when you're studying on Sunday, you don't worry too much about your looks.

I took two of my exams last week: Torts and Property. I felt really good about how both of them went. I'm sure the long hours must have paid off. It's been hard this weekend to stay focused on the next two exams coming up this week: Contracts and Civ Pro. Luckily, I have these guys to keep me on track.

We've planned out all of our time and days in between the exams so we know we're covering everything. It's been really helpful to discuss practice exams and other hypotheticals together.

Introducing Laura, work-out buddy, Naked-juice-drinker-extraordinaire, and recipient of the annual property midterm "Downfall" award:

And Maureen, taskmaster, "don't-mess-with-me-when-I'm-getting-tired" student extraordinaire, and recipient of the famous "googly-eyes":

I'll be back home Friday after my last final which ends at noon! Then a day to rest and a few days to rush around buying Christmas presents and preparing to head to Dallas!

O (fake) Christmas Tree, O (fake) Christmas Tree

O (fake) Christmas Tree, O (fake) Christmas Tree
Thou tree most fake and plastic-y.
O (fake) Christmas Tree, O (fake) Christmas Tree
Thou tree most fake and plastic-y.
The sight of thee in Target's aisle
Made us take you home to decorate
O (fake) Christmas Tree, O (fake) Christmas Tree

Thou tree most fake and plastic-y.

Happy Thanksgiving!

One of my most memorable Thanksgivings was spent in Turkey. Linda and I still think we were pretty clever to go to Turkey for Thanksgiving. Hahaha!

Sisters

Big Goals for the Weekend

1. Complete all reading for the entire rest of the semester. The balancing act between reading for class and actually studying for exams and class is getting to be too much. I'm trying to juggle too many balls at once. So this weekend, I'm going to take one of those balls out of the mix.

2. Write full office memo for WRAP. I haven't been feeling too strong lately about my legal writing skills. It makes me harken back to my infamous quote on the Page House quote board, "I like to make reading my papers as painful for professors as writing them was for me." However, this time has to be over. I went to a very general judicial clerkship info session the other day, and it made me realize that I have got to come to terms with the writing process. It's something that I'm going to have to become excellent at, even if it's a painful learning process. On the plus side, we had to write two in-class IRACs on Tuesday, and I feel really good about how those went.

Week in Review

Oh man. Law school is really ramping up now! Here are some highlights, lowlights, and just-plain-lights of the past week (or maybe two, it all runs together...).

• My first two hockey games with William Mitchell and the Fighting Eelpout. Two main take-aways from these games: Hockey is good for de-stressing. I'm very small.
• Study Group: I have a good study group. We have some good plans and deadlines for how we're going to approach outlining and studying for finals. Good discipline to keep me on track and good discussion to make sure I'm understanding the concepts, etc.
• Sundays at Tea Source: Starting to become a routine.
• Settlers of Catan: Still kicking Laura's butt at this game. We've ended up playing at least every other week with Laura and her husband Chris, and their friend Joe. Phil and I also played last night with non-law school friends Chapel and Astrid.
  
• Classes. Only three weeks left of these. Feeling pretty in the swing of things when it comes to class prep. It's nice to feel more like I know what I'm doing, at least in comparison to how I felt at the beginning of the semester.
  
• Still hating WRAP though. Still don't know what I'm supposed to be doing in that class. Pretty worried about the IRACs we have to write in class this week and the full office memo due next week. I just feel frustrated by this class most of the time. I understand that teaching people to write is a tough job, but I just wish they would give me more examples of good legal writing and memos to read so I'd know what I'm aiming for instead of trying to stumble onto it in a dark room.