No, not the blog - just law school. It's funny how LONG AGO law school feels already. I think it's mostly because of the move: I never went to law school in this apartment! I enjoyed law school, but I can't even begin to tell you how nice that feeling is. Yes, I drag my ass out of bed every morning to go to A law school, for bar review, but I never went to MY law school from here. And I don't commute up to Mountain Town any more! I had to drive up once since graduation, to talk to a prof about a letter of recommendation, and it felt like it had been MONTHS since I'd last driven that route. I guess it had been almost a month, but it felt much longer than that.
This is all amazingly nice.
(Okay, I'll admit I kind of miss plugging in the iPhone and singing along at the top of my lungs, which is what I did going up to school, and just doesn't have the same impact if you're driving 15 minutes to bar review. But I don't miss losing 2 hours of my day with every commute.)
Our new apartment continues to be awesome. The dishwasher's kind of goofy, but otherwise it's spacious and comfortable and airy. I think I've already done laundry (in our OWN WASHER AND DRYER) more often than I did in the last two months at our old place. I especially like propping the door on the balcony open to get air going through the apartment (Middle Cat is restrained by a $12 baby gate from Target. Any cat in their prime could bound right over it, but it works for her portly 19-year-old self that hasn't jumped that high in about 9 years), and because I live in what's basically the desert, there are NO BUGS! The occasional moth flies in and can't get out again (and then Middle Cat lives out her predator fantasies by tracking them down and killing them, yelling triumphantly the whole time), but not actual BUGS, that suck your blood and make you miserable.
What amuses me is that whenever I say to natives that I love this state because there are NO MOSQUITOS, they all look at me funny and say, "We have mosquitos here." Well, maybe it's just that there aren't mosquitos in the city, but really, I've lived in New England, and I've lived in the upper midwest, and I've lived in the south, all in cities, and you could NOT just have windows open in the summer unless you were fixing to catch yourself some fever'n'ague. Okay, the mosquitos didn't carry malaria, but they made you just as miserable as if they did. So I can only conclude that people out here just don't know what the true misery of mosquitos can be like? Because there aren't actually REALLY any mosquitos here?
So, yeah. All is well, if I don't talk/think about bar review, which I hate with the burning hate of a thousand suns, but acknowledge as a necessary evil. I still haven't quite got with the program, which is bad, I know. I'll get there. I just won't have anything much to talk about until the end of July, so expect spotty blogging between now and then.
Onward, bar studiers...
Heh. I read your hatred comment above as the "burning hatred of a thousand nuns" at first.
You're right--there really are effectively zero mosquitos where you live, unless you live next to a stagnant pond. I'm in Maine now and suffering from BLACK FLY bites I got in Jackman, Maine, just beyond the border crossing from Quebec. I stopped for a picnic lunch and now look like a beating victim, so I'm definitely in favor of your no-bugs location for its lack of bugginess!
Congratulations on your graduation from law school, and good luck with the bar. It sucks, but everyone who works to pass it passes, and then it's done.
Posted by: Historiann | Wednesday, June 08, 2011 at 06:11 AM
Well, I would imagine if you could get a thousand nuns to hate the same thing, that would be pretty effective!
Glad to have confirmation of my take on local insect life, and sorry you're dealing with the black flies - those things are AWFUL!
Posted by: New Kid on the Hallway | Wednesday, June 08, 2011 at 08:02 AM
I was once on a hike in England during which a local started complaining about gnats (we'd just walked through a cloud of them). Most of the other Americans shrugged, and those of us who had survived black fly attacks started in on our war stories. The Englishman had NO clue.
Posted by: Dame Eleanor Hull | Wednesday, June 08, 2011 at 10:47 AM
Dame Eleanor, my mother's family is English, and whenever they came to visit us in the summer (New England), they would get DEVOURED by mosquitos. It's like the mosquitos could smell virgin blood!
Posted by: New Kid on the Hallway | Wednesday, June 08, 2011 at 01:11 PM
Phew - I thought you were ditching on us! Glad the blog isn't going anywhere and massive congrats to you for making it through law school - more or less in one piece! :-)
Posted by: Michael @ Law Actually | Wednesday, June 08, 2011 at 03:19 PM
Your finishing law school seems like a great milestone to your blogreaders and fellow-travelers on the road out of academe. W00t!
Posted by: Carin | Wednesday, June 08, 2011 at 04:29 PM
Congrats on your graduation from law school!
Oh, and I hear you on the mosquito front. Lovely that you can have the windows open. That sounds like a beautiful dream to me...
Posted by: Maryeliz | Wednesday, June 08, 2011 at 08:57 PM
Congrats! Your fever'n ague comment cracked me up. I'm reading the Little House books to my 5yo and he couldn't believe how dumb they were for that.
Posted by: Arguably Ambitious | Friday, June 10, 2011 at 07:27 AM