Where did the month go?!

This whole being a law student thing is doing strange things to my sense of time. What the hell happened to October? How in the world did it get be to Halloween already? Ack!

I had a very dull weekend doing lots and lots of homework and outlining, but I did manage to start another knitting project. Really, I need to finish some projects, but all of the other UFO's I have going are on tiny needles and I wanted something on big needles that would go fast. Plus, it's cold, and I need a new cuddly sweater. I'm knitting a sweater coat thing that looks something like a bathrobe out of Knitscene but I'm using some of my handspun. I have the back just about finished, and so far and very happy with it. I even have an outfit planned for it. It's a fairly mindless pattern, perfect for an overwhelmed student.

I'm getting very excited about the holidays. Someone and my parents are coming out here for Thanksgiving, and then I am going to back to California for winter break. Hurray! I'm going to be in the Bay Area with Someone for most of the vacation, down at my parents for Christmas, and just relaxing and visiting friends and not reading law books for 3 whole weeks. Yay! And I've already found someone to look after the cat for me. It's good to be on good terms with your neighbors.

Lots of Llamas!

I meant to post this awhile ago, but what with one thing and another I forgot.

(sound warning) - Llamas!

Some people have far far too much time on their hands...including me it would seem.

In other random news, it's spitting down wetness and the fire alarm went off at school this morning so we got to stand out in the wet for an hour while the police made sure the building wasn't about to fall down or whatever. Excitement I could do without, but it gives form to the day I suppose.

Now, I must stop getting distracted by llamas, fire alarms, red leaves, rain, and small shiny flecks in the carpet and work on this damned memo.

Yeah. Right.

A few observations

1 - My backpack is wider than my ass. I really have no idea what to do with this revelation.

2 - Autumn. We don't have this back in California. I now know and understand why that is true. There is a tree near campus that is the most amazing fire orange and red, like no tree I have ever seen. It's pretty amazing.

3 - Actual Mexican food does not involve anything called "cheese sauce." Anyone telling you otherwise needs to lay off the crack.

4 - Plastic surgery freaks me out.

5 - It disturbs me deeply that one can assume that someone around here has "a patch of woods" in their yard and be right 99.9% of the time.

Sleeeeepyyyyy

It is enough to say at this point that I have finished two Christmas stockings and felted 18 mice. I even took pictures, and I swear I will post them, but right now I am freakishly tired. Ever so tired...which sucks because I have a lot of torts and property reading to do, and a memo on adverse possession and easements to write.

We seem to be reading a lot of very strange cases from California just now in torts. We have one where some enthusiastic revilers decided it would be a swell idea to throw an arm chair out a window and injured a pedestrian, which is interesting, because this is not the first defenestration of furniture case we've seen. Then there was a whole line of cases about drunks in California, including one in which, as best I can tell, the judge decided San Francisco streets should be kept safe for the average drunk. It entertaining being asked to explain my home state, but some of this stuff has me mystified.

I just wish I wasn't so tired.

I also wish I was not having strange nightmares about contracts and future property interests and failing out of law school or getting crap grades and being unable to find a job. I'm not kidding either. It's awful. But it'll get better, it's already getting easier.

What this woman wants

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what I want, in a meta sense, lately. Negative lists of all the things I don't want aren't that helpful, or healthy. I want a family, I want companionship, I want time to spin and create things, I want to cloth the people I love, I want the means to care for myself and my family and enough left over to feel secure and maybe take nice vacations. I want to feel like these things are in reach, like I am not sabotaging it somehow, like I am moving towards them and not farther away...

In the short term, I want a suit, new glasses, and a larger financial aid check so I can fix the car, eat and pay rent all at the same time. I want a weekend to spin, and friends to spin with. I need people around me, and damn it I want a child. So much for being some liberated independent woman.

On the iPod

Ewww!

For those of you with a weak stomach, run now...

Harold popped. Well, more like exploded. It's gross. I figured he'd blow sooner or latter, he never did stop getting bigger and more deformed looking.

So, now what do I do? My medical expertise sort of falls apart at this point. And my mom isn't at home. How sad is that? I'm nearly 30, and I still call my mommy when I get a boo-boo.

Puffendorf and Barbeyrac, meet Harold

I'm working on property outlines today, and had forgotten how entertaining some of these legal philosopher guys names can be. A few of these cases read more like something from a Harry Potter book than anything else.

My wrist is killing me. Somehow, the blister is actually getting bigger, which makes no sense, and has got to the point where I really feel I need some way to refer to it. I've been calling it Harold. Harold is massive and more misshapen then he used to be, but mom claims he will settle down eventually and go away. I can only hope. He's making it hard to do things like type and pick up books, two critical features of my daily life right now.

In actual fiber news, I finally made my first trip over to my local yarn shop. Oh hurray! It was lovely! They have a great selection, a nice open space with good places to sit and look at books or work on your project, plenty of light, and a nice classroom space. They two women I talked to were really nice and welcoming and immediately offered me a job teaching classes at some point after I mentioned that I used to teach. Even better! Hopefully I'll be able to get on the class and workshop schedule in a month or two, it would be a nice bit of extra income and keep me in contact with people other than law students. I'm getting excited about starting this Christmas stocking now, it should be fun.

Maimed!

I should not be allowed to cook. In a sad attempt to make soup yesterday afternoon, I not only broke my stock pot, but sustained a large 2nd degree burn on the inside of my left wrist. Ouch. The blister is large and disgusting, and T (who came for dinner with his wife H last night, hence the cooking) said it looked "like a snow-globe." Nice. All I know is that this hurts in a dull achy kind of way and keeps getting bigger.

Other than that, it was not a bad weekend. I didn't get as much done as I had hoped, but I did accomplish things, got some rest, and should be in good shape to kick the ass of the second half the semester. I'm just trying to focus on the process of learning the law, and not worry about anything else (like grades or jobs or children or impending barren-spinsterhood a la Bridget Jones).

Tomorrow I get to make the trip over to the yarn shop to pick up stuff for this Christmas stocking project, which should be fun. I'm actually looking forward to it, strangely enough. I'll get to work on intarsia, which I have not really explored much as a technique, so that should be useful. I really want to make argyle socks for Someone for some reason, so this will be a good introduction to the techniques I'll need for that.

Why state the obvious?

So, aside from having nightmares about property interests and defeasance, and getting somewhat annoyed about consideration doctrine in general, school isn't really that bad. It's not easy by any stretch, but I'm feeling pretty ok with myself at this point. We're on fall break this weekend, so I'm spending today and tomorrow working on my outlines for the first half of the semester, and for the most part I feel like I'm starting to see some patterns and direction. All of which are good things.

It's all a matter of staying focused on the process, and not getting too freaked out about my actual grades. That and studiously avoiding the Big Questions, like is this going to cost me my chances of having a family? Will it cost me the people I care about? Will I ever be able to retire? Is this a price I am willing to pay? I've been trying really hard to keep those issues at bay and not freak out about my impending barren spinster-hood, trying not to second-guess myself and every decision that has led me to this point. When I can do that, I can focus and get my work done and feel pretty good about this thing, but when I can't, which has been most of the time recently, it's impossible.

Anyhow, since I got back from my brothers wedding, I've been doing pretty well with Big Question Avoidance, I think seeing my family and spending some time with Someone really helped with that. Those people love me and support me and believe in me, it makes it easier to have confidence and faith in myself in that environment. But yesterday I was talking to a second year student, and he suddenly had this revelation that I would be 32 when I graduated, and had I thought about whether or not I wanted to have a family and if giving that up was something I was willing to do for this? Yeah. Thanks guy, that was really helpful. I really need to hang out with the older women, they don't ask questions like that, they already know the answer (which in most cases isn't an answer at all, and that's why it's such a difficult thing).

So last night was a bit rough, and today has been kind of tenuous. I'm getting a lot done, I have gotten my Civ Pro outline well under way, I have a skeleton for Contracts, and I have a whole day and a half left to work on this, but the panic is there, just on the edge, waiting to pull me into the crazy place if I don't keep a close reign on myself. This is the point at which I start to question and doubt and wonder, and I just haven't got time for that right now.

Maybe I need to go for a walk...

Fee simple subject to a condition subsequent?

So the general consensus seems to be that I am too hard on myself and overly self-critical and that this is leading to or contributing to a great deal of my current stress and anxiety. Dad says I've been like this since I was kid. He likes to remind me that I came home from my first day of kindergarden in tears because I hadn't learned how to read yet. Not "they didn't teach me to read yet" but "I didn't learn how to read yet" which is a subtle difference but I suppose makes all the difference in the world. I do kind of feel like whatever I do is never really enough, however hard I work or try, it's never good enough. Good enough for whom exactly I don't quite know, but it seems like I could, and should, do better. Classic over-achiever perfectionist type stuff I guess, but it's a bit strange to have people who have known you for 2 days point this out.

Anyway, it turns out I am not as caught up with my reading as I thought I was. I'm up to date with contracts, will be up to date with stupid old civ pro after lunch today, and am pretty much up to date with torts, assuming I don't fall asleep at my desk this afternoon. But property, oye vey. I missed a bad lecture, with lots of definitions and things, and in trying to get cought up with that I got behind on what I needed to read for today, so I now have 3 days worth of reading to get done for Friday's class, as well as some supplimental stuff to clarify what I missed last week, so I can ask intellegent questions when I go talk to the professor during office hours next week, as opposed to something like "So, what's the deal with this whole defeasible thing? and what about those future interests?" Certain parts of this class are very painful, but for some reason I actually find it really interesting. They just seem to use far too many words.

At least we have a long weekend coming up. It's fall break, so I have no class Monday or Tuesday. The current plan is to do some cheesy tourist stuff with a friend (H, who Someone introduced me to, she's a grad student in the CS department and her husband is from the Bay Area and hates it here too so we all rant and bitch about ignorant hillbillies together, it's very therapeutic), then lock myself in the undergraduate library and start outlining.

Somewhere in there I need to find the local yarn store. I have a commission to knit a Christmas sock for an old Dickens Faire friend and will need to track down the yarn for it. It should be fun, and it'll give me a bit of extra cash. Anything to keep me in latte money. Hell, if anyone else wants something knitted, let me know.

Home again

I just got back from my baby brother wedding back in sunny and not too hot California. Between getting a sister, spending some quality time with Someone, and catching up with a bunch of family, it was busy but quite nice.

Of course, it didn't exactly start off right. I had a 6:40 AM flight out of an airport about an hour from house. Which means that I had to get up at 3:45. I set my alarm, got to bed early, and woke up all nice and gently only to realize it was 6:17. Ack! Several minute of blind shrieking panic latter, I pulled it together long enough to call the airline, find out about stand by options, and race out to the car where I called first Someone, to tell him I would be coming in latter, and them my parents, to tell them I would be missing the rehearsal diner. Of course I was hysterical, and it was only 3:45 in the morning on the West Coast, but what else was I going to do? I'll never this one down, that's for sure.

It all worked out ok, I made it, I got picked up ok, and it was all fine, but I had a really hard time sleeping for the rest of the weekend, terrified as I was that I would oversleep and missing the wedding/family BBQ/plane back/whatever. Oh well.

Anyhow, I must get unpacked and unwound. I'm starting a new little lace bedjacket/sweater thing for myself, the pattern got here while I was gone and I can hardly wait to start. I love lace knitting. And this bedjacket thing looks like it has some serious potential.