Sua SponteMy law school odyssey: the ongoing narrative.
One of the neatest things about living downtown is that we can, after a ten-minute walk, attend events in person which we only ever would have seen on television in our previous suburban life.
This afternoon (although you could have fooled me, since it was already dark) we trooped down to City Hall to watch the lighting of the giant Yule Christmas Holiday Tree. The city website, which had informed us that the actual switch-flipping was to take place at 4:30 pm, had apparently lied. The street was packed full of people, but the tree remained dark as we listened to a German men's choir, a gospel choir, and a children's choir sing. They were all quite good, but we were standing still and it was cold out.
And then it started to snow.
Unlike the flurries we had earlier in the week, this snow was a bit more insistent. It melted as it hit the pavement, but stuck to cars and hair and hats and coats. I giggled, of course. The weather here tends to have that effect on me.
In central New Jersey, where I grew up, snow falls in chunks like celestial spitballs. Even a flurry consists of minuscule wads of the stuff, and in a real honest-to-pete snowfall, very small people might well be throwing snowballs at you. Here, on the other hand...
I looked down at my coat and squealed in delight. "Look! Look!" I showed my husband. "It's a perfect little snowflake!"
And another. And another. They looked like those tissue-paper cutouts you'd make in second grade. Each one was, perhaps somewhat tritely, different from any other. They were the thinnest, finest, most fragile, most perfect little designs you could imagine.
"That's radial symmetry," said my husband sagely. And then less sagely, "Wow."
More fell on me. This was even cooler than the Gesangverein currently giving a full-throated rendition of O Tannenbaum on stage. Even the broken ones, like broken sand dollars, still boasted of sometime perfection. And there were more of them than anyone could count. Children tipped their heads back to catch a few on their tongues. I couldn't help watching the snowflakes slowly melt on my coat; they'd start white, turn translucent, and eventually disappear. I almost, but not quite, forgot how cold I was.
The airborne snow eventually did thicken almost to New Jersey consistency. And they did, eventually, light the tree, upon which my husband and I bolted into the nearest department store and spent about an hour thawing out and shopping.
Now, every time I see a second-grade classroom window, I'll have a memory to go with it.
There are so many layers to the Thanksgiving holiday: the historic Pilgrims-and-Indians costume party, the traditional turkey and gravy and lasagna candied yams and so forth, the travel and collecting-in-one-place of a large number of relatives (or, sometimes, just us). But the layer I've neglected most often, over the past few years, is the thankfulness element. This is supposed to be a holiday not just to eat or bicker with cousins or dress up as Miles Standish, but to be grateful.
I am grateful for so much, right now, that I am in serious danger of gushing and turning boring (if I haven't already done so). I am grateful that, even after flying many thousands of miles last month on very little sleep, I never once got sick. I am grateful that our move went off without a hitch. I am grateful to have only two sit-down exams this term, grateful to have a span of four days off to outline and get my act together. I am grateful to have a summer job already lined up, when I would almost certainly still be looking had I not transferred schools.
I am so grateful to be here that I could burst.
The Lexis-Nexis representative at my school, giving me some one-on-one training last week, remarked that she didn't remember me from last year. "I'm a transfer student," I told her.
"Really? Where from?"
I told her.
"Oh!" she said with a huge smile. "You must be so happy!"
I matched her smile, watt for watt, my eyes wide as quarters. "I am!"
I am!
Last week the public-interest club held a fundraiser, selling T-shirts bearing the name of the law school. I now own a hooded sweatshirt announcing my affiliation in GIANT BLOCK LETTERS, and I can't remember the last time I was so proud to wear an article of clothing. (Professor Trademarks would call this the "inherent utility of the mark.") I went down to the doorman's station a few days ago to pick up some takeout food that had been delivered for us, and got a big smile from the takeout guy. "You a law student?" he asked me. "I am now," I replied without thinking.
I must have been a law student last year too, since I went to law school and studied law. But I would much rather imagine *this* state of being as the life of a law student. I no longer spend three hours a day on a train. I've stopped attempting to digest my own intestines, and have cut way back on the alcohol. It's OK if I miss a case or two in the reading, and exam grades are no longer a sword hanging above my head. Instead I drive to school, park the car, walk up to the building and shiver -- half with cold, but half with delighted relief. I made myself unduly miserable last year by obsessing over transferring schools. Now I get the flip side of that obsession: undue glee at just being here.
Then again, maybe it's due.
Props to Becky for clueing me in to the existence of a product I had not, before this moment, realized was missing from my life: Revolve magazine.
It's sold out its first printing!
This may be an idea whose time has come, for any publication bound in dark leatherette that can be dubbed "too big and freaky looking." I can just picture my Corporations casebook, all glossed up and full of beauty secrets. "While you're putting on your sunscreen, consider asserting your appraisal rights." Or "Considering a merger? Let them approach you first."
Truth, however, is stranger than fiction: "Was Jesus a vegetarian? No: Plenty of fish, some lamb." Maybe in the next issue they'll include recipes, too.
(Don't miss Becky's rhetorical analysis of Revolve.)
G R E E T I N G S Capricorn
Standing in the spotlight feels just as sweet as you thought it would! No one will dispute that you have earned the right to be here, so take just a minute longer to bask in the light that's shining just for you. You had your doubts along the way about whether or not all of your hard work and dedication was going to pay off, but there's no way you can have any regrets now. It's good to know what you can accomplish once you put all of your effort into it, and now that you've proven yourself, the sky's the limit to what you can achieve in the future.
Hammering away at your Trademarks outline? The Cornell LII has the whole Lanham Act in easily-browsed format (at least more easily browsed than our left-justified handout!), and unlike Lexis Nexis, you can link straight to it.
Here are the sections with which I'm currently wrestling:
Section 43(a) (everything false advertising)
Section 35 (remedies)
Section 2 (all your distinctiveness stuff is here, including the primarily-geographically-deceptively-misdescriptive part)
More, I'm sure, to come.
I should really be outlining right now, but there are too many other things that are more fun to think about. Weddings, for example. They're so much more fun than outlining. Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of outlining before an exam, you could get all your studying done by getting married?
I'm headed to Ohio for a wedding in January, a fun dual-religion fusion ceremony for two old high school friends. Then there's my cousin Matthew's wedding, which fortunately is happening during spring break: his fiancee is Costa Rican, and the wedding ("Nuestra Boda" read the invitations) is taking place in Cartago, Costa Rica.
"That's far," groans my husband, who nonetheless is not allowed to skip it.
But that, in fact, is not far. *Far* is the wedding of St. Daniel's roommate, one of my dearest college friends, the guy originally responsible for me owning a copy of the White Album. He is getting married on February 28, roughly two weeks before spring term exams, and he is doing so in New Zealand.
New Zealand!!!
"Do you have to go?" groaned my husband.
I sure as hell would love to go. But timing might be a bit tight given my school's unusual term system. We actually have *finals* before spring break, something I've never before experienced.
"You've been here through spring finals," I asked F. today in Corporations. "Imagine it's February 28. Figure two weeks until exams. What does your workload look like?"
"I'd probably be in study mode by then," she said.
"Ah," I said, heart sinking. "I'm trying to make plans, see...I've been invited to a wedding on the 28th, but it's in New Zealand."
F. blinked at me. "And your problem with this is...?"
Damn, I love this school.
"You can study on the plane," said S.
"Yeah, it's like a fifteen hour plane flight or something," said F.
"I sleep on planes," I told them.
"You can do that too," said F. "It's fifteen hours."
Two weeks until exams: that's kind of where I am right now. I've got the first major chunk of a Trademarks outline, haven't really made a dent in Corporations yet. Then again, aside one short hour of Corporations tomorrow, the next five days are classes-free and scheduled to be sacrificed on the outlining altar. Study groups will ramp up next week, and exams are the week after.
Could I go to New Zealand right now, if I had to?
Could I not go to New Zealand right now, if I had the opportunity to?
Could I frickin' outline right now, like I'm supposed to, and quit dreaming about other hemispheres?
Course selection time is rapidly approaching, and I'm faced with the perfect dilemma: there are no fewer than six classes that I'd love to take. (Sane students here cap out at four, perhaps in part because of the shorter term.)
My problem -- or, potentially, the solution to my problem -- is that too many of them conflict with one another.
Evidence, which the universe pretty unanimously agrees is something one should take in law school, conflicts with Patent Law, which I've been advised to take if I'm interested in IP work (I am). A seminar in Advanced Trademarks, assuming that I could handle it -- the jury is still out on how much of this economics-speak I've managed to master -- conflicts with a seminar on textualism taught by a famous judge. Worse yet, my dream seminar in Electronic Commerce Law conflicts with my other dream seminar, Negotiation and Mediation. Finally, there's a seminar on current issues in law and technology which conflicts with nothing except the school limit on how many seminars you're allowed to take per term.
I'm thinking that Evidence will likely get the ax ("You can take it next year!" was the best advice I've heard), as it meets on Fridays. But this then leaves me with a rash of seminars and scant few lecture-hall-and-final-exam classes. I suppose there's always Tax. It's something I told myself that I'd take eventually, and next term it's being taught by Professor Corporations, whose teaching style suits me well. But on the other hand, it's Tax...
At least I don't have to make up my mind for...oh, days yet.
It is snowing out.
None of it appears to be sticking, and I don't have class until Trial Ad today at four PM, but right now I'm just glad to be indoors.
Update: Weather.com tells me it is twenty-four (24) degrees out, with a wind chill factor of nine (9). Have I caught up to you yet, Becky?
Thanks to everyone who shared their Oh See Eye experiences; congrats to everyone who's scored summer employment thus far; and tons of kickass-offer waves incoming to those still looking. I'd originally asked the question in the hope that someone would have had an experience similar to mine in form, but it turns out I'm as much of a freak as I'd suspected.
Eh. Not for the first time.
The story at its shortest is simple good news: I will be employed by a law firm this summer. I finished up my interviewing marathon with two offers, one in each market I was considering. Each firm seemed awesome. I could have happily gone to either. But homesickness, or something like it, won us over in the end, so come June we'll be heading back to California.
Which brings me to the weird part of the story. I had two offers, but based on the high callback-to-offer correlation I've been seeing among my school friends and my unscientific survey, other people in my position would have done better. My California yield was 14%, and on the East Coast I hardly fared better at 25%.
"It's strange," I told the career-services director. "I've got an offer at a firm I like in each market I targeted. I've got what I wanted out of the process. And yet I can't help but feel as though I screwed something up."
Maybe. It helps to learn, even apocryphally, that California was a tough market to crack this year. And frankly, despite the fanciness quotient of my resume, I've never been one of those heavily-recruited people who always had jobs falling into their laps. Rarely will I play an interview perfectly; far more often, I'll misstep somehow. Two simultaneous offers ties my all-time record. This particular stack of dings, on the other hand, doesn't even come close.
Fortunately, the firms that did make me offers fell within the circle of ones I liked rather than the lukewarm pool or the please-don't-make-me-work-there ilk. And the firm whose offer I ultimately accepted has its own story: it's located quite near where I lived last year, and right across the street from our financial advisor, so I'd frequently have occasion to drive past it. Every time I'd see the signs, the dozen-buildings-or-so campus, I'd sigh to myself and ruminate: Such a shame. Place looks so neat and I bet I'll never be able to work there.
And now I will. Mirabile dictu.
Incidentally, for a much better, longer, more detailed, and more exciting story of the 2L job hunt, I recommend Waddling Thunder's saga (currently up to Part VIII). I don't think there's much more for me to say on the subject, but fortunately he's got plenty.
G R E E T I N G S Capricorn
Now that you've finally reached your final decision, you can let others in on what you've decided upon. You may not have wanted to let any of the options you were mulling over escape your lips in the past, but there is absolutely nothing holding you back now. You've thought about this long enough that there's no doubt in your mind that you're making the right choice. As long as you explain the details of your plan, other people will be receptive to it as well.
G R E E T I N G S Capricorn
Out with the old and in with the new. In other words, it's time to leave the past behind you and take a giant step into the future. All of the old problems that used to plague you have found other people to haunt, so this time around you'll be starting out with a clean slate. You don't have to do anything spectacular right away, but you should know that people are expecting great things from you eventually. Starting small will allow you to slowly rebuild your confidence while perfecting your craft.
It is amazing what one can do when one has time.
Today I got up early, skipped the gym, headed straight to the lawbrary and spent a good two and a half hours developing the bones and the meat of my first-ever direct examination. My main issue to date, particularly in Trial Ad, has been poor timing; there was never time enough to do what needed to be done, and what needed to be done invariably came due at a time when I could least manage it.
No longer. I took the time this morning, settled into a groove, and assembled a neat crisp DX that turned out to be almost twice as long as the part I actually got to do in class.
But it worked. Finding the time to do it right made all the difference in the world. Gone were the days of stuttery sleep-deprived depositions, fearing that my witness knew my case better than I did. My line of questions came out honey-smooth, my exhibits worked without a hitch, and the feedback I got from the instructor was all solid good advice. (I read a phrase aloud from a contract, one of my exhibits, and asked my witness what it meant -- the kind of mistake you make once. And I "drove" the dialogue when, in a DX, you should disappear behind the witness -- easily fixed with practice.)
I did look like a total goof once, when I hollered out "Objection! Hearsay!" just for the thrill of doing so. (The actual objection, which would have been overruled anyway, was apparently "calls for speculation." I learned a little about what hearsay was, back during my old school's write-on competition, but didn't learn much about what hearsay was not.) Fortunately, since I haven't yet had Evidence, I can still get away with these outbursts. "This is just an exercise," says our instructor, a teacher after my own heart. "You should be having fun with this."
When there's enough time, I do.
I think we're finally done moving.
It's worth noting, first off, that this is the first weekend I have spent here since mid-September. The first Thursday I didn't have to rush out of Corporations, hoof it to the airport, return a rental car and catch a plane. The first Saturday night that my husband and I were actually able to go out and see a movie. No hotels, no packing frenzies, no interviews, no funerals. Just me, home.
And I think it is home, now. We've hung up all the pictures that are going up in this apartment; we've unpacked every last box; and now the empty boxes, unhung pictures, and old Pendaflex files are firmly (and I mean firmly -- crowbars are required to extract them) ensconced in our four-by-four storage downstairs. The furniture is all in place. The stereo is working. The computers are live and online. Aside one large framed poster and two boxes in our front hallway that are destined for the Salvation Army, we're basically moved in.
It's about damn time. There is a scant month left in the term. Rather, there is a scant month between today and my last exam; classes are already beginning to wind down. Last year I was outlining my arse off by now, or at least trying to through the fog of El-Dubyar. Despite the fact that the academic term here is several weeks shorter than it was at my previous law school, I can't help but figure that my exam preparations should already be well under way.
Then again, I've had a pretty good response from nearly everyone I've invited to form a study group. (Only one person had already committed to another group, and another preferred to study alone, which doesn't count.) This tells me that a nontrivial number of the 2Ls at my school are at roughly the same place as I am -- keeping up with the reading, more or less, but spending the balance of their free time on things like interviews and continually planning to start the outline this evening.
Of course I could be wrong. They could have just been studying au solitaire up until now. But I'm not going to freak out about it.
It is an unimaginable luxury, to be able not to freak out about it.
I am fortunate -- well, hell, I'm fortunate just to be here, and not a day goes by that I don't appreciate it. But I'm particularly fortunate thanks to two especially well-timed, well-placed school customs: the 2L dispensation and the B+ curve. The latter is an obvious benefit to anyone who's just transferred from a school that curves to a 2.7. But the former is even better: 2Ls, in our fall term, are permitted to take three courses instead of four since we're theoretically all over the place on callback interviews.
"Don't do it," one of last year's transfer students told us at orientation. "I'd already accepted my offer by October. I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with."
I had a feeling that this would not be a problem for me. I ignored his advice and did it -- and could not be more thrilled with my decision. Now, instead of last year's horrifying battery of four exams in quick succession, I'm only facing two. (And a closing argument during exam week, but that should be fun.) Outlining for two classes in the next few weeks is eminently doable. And now I'll finally have time to do it.
And nothing left to unpack!
"Wow," said my husband, admiring the price tag on my current drink of choice. "Six-dollar wine."
"Cheapest they had," I replied, which was true. And it's not bad, either.
I have no excuse. Not only am I certain that there is a Trader Joe's here, I know exactly where it's located. I just need to shlep out there and pick up a case of Two Buck Chuck.
When I graduated from my First Real Job After College to my second, which paid me roughly 40% more per year, I made myself a promise: from now on I drink good wine, and my car gets good gasoline. I've been good about the car thing, especially since I got the A4 (which accepts nothing less than 91 octane--the inside of the gas cap says so). But while I've steadfastly refused to go back to the "Chillable Red" wine-in-a-box crap I drank when I was broke, I fear I'm still a vino cheapskate.
Thanks for all the advice on bad needles.
Here is a public service announcement on good needles:
GET YOUR FLU SHOT.
I got mine today, and it didn't even cost me anything. Them's good needles.
Even when I'm all in a lather, even when stupid university bureaucracy pisses me off, this city can still turn everything around and surprise me.
First it was ladybugs by the zillions, all over the place. Then I saw real honest-to-pete autumn for the first time in years. And today, for the first time, I've experienced the city's most famous weather feature.
It was clear and sunny when I headed down to school for Trademarks, so I was not expecting the weather to have shifted so much by the time Corporations ended. And yet: I walked out of the law school building, WHAM! immediately staggered backward, and almost lost my balance entirely.
This was even niftier than hail. It was fifty-four degrees out and the wind was blowing like an oncoming wall.
You don't spit into this wind; you can't even hear yourself if you laugh into it. My unbuttoned coat billowed out behind me like a sail. As I frantically tugged at the buttons, the wind turned and decided to buffet me from behind.
WHAM!
When the wind is in your face, you must walk forward to stand still. When it's behind you, any walk immediately becomes a jog trot.
WHAM!
It has a personality, this wind. No howling, no noise at all really, just pure force. But not without artistry. All the pretty gold leaves had taken off from their former trees and were flying in astonishing cyclones and eddies, back and forth in front of me, threatening to catch my hair and my muffler and perhaps lift me off the ground as well. I made it to my car (which trembled with each WHAM! successive blow) and couldn't help but admire the whirlpools of leaves swirling past my tires.
The radio is reporting major traffic due to wind, and a two-hour arrival delay at the airport. I hope none of those folks are carrying chinchillas.
Through a truly annoying adminiscrewup, I am on something called Immunization Hold at the university. Apparently my health records attested to my immunity from measles, but not from German measles or mumps.
"Those are all on the same shot," I told the desk clerk person. "Obviously if I've got one, I've got the others."
"It doesn't say you do. We need something that says you do."
"That's the only paper I have," I said.
"Then you'll need to be revaccinated."
"Fine. That's at no cost, right?"
"Our last free vaccination clinic was Saturday."
"I was at my grandmother's funeral on Saturday."
"Then you'll have to pay for the vaccine."
"Excuse me?? I was at a funeral."
"You weren't here. And that was our last free clinic. The state sponsors them, not us."
I found myself hurting for the Negotiation and Mediation class being taught next term. There had to be a way to convince this idiot that the vaccine I already had was good enough, or barring that, that I should not be penalized for a family obligation when the university clearly still had a supply of vaccine and there was no other way for me to get off immunization hold. I suppose I should have asked to speak to the woman's supervisor, but as I was furious and inclined this week in particular to burst into tears, I settled for an appointment on Tuesday. Forty bucks. It's still fingernails on a blackboard for me to think about it.
Maybe I'll try to renegotiate then.
Justice Bedsworth has just published his second book. I can't find it, or his first for that matter, on Amazon. Can anyone help me out on this one?
(I know I'm supposed to be getting rid of books. But there are some that you just know are worth the effort of boxing and hauling. Better The Judge than another outdated casebook.)
Commenter Jane asks my opinion of LEEWS. I never actually took the class, nor did any of my 1L friends. Their promotional literature scared the crap out of me. But that wasn't too difficult last year, when every day something seemed to. So I'll open the question up generally: hey readers, have you taken LEEWS? Was it worth the money?
I've joked before about the black suit phenomenon among law students interviewing on campus, but as it turns out, it's really amazingly practical to have a suit that doubles as appropriate funeral attire. You can never predict when a funeral will pop up and require your raven-clad presence.
It may be metaphorically significant that this one is happening right at the end of interview season. More likely, it's not. More likely I should snap the hell out of law school mode and stop seeing everything through my fractious 2L filters. Unfortunately, that's strangely difficult for me at this point. Between the move and school and interviews and all the unpacking and setting-up (upsetting?) that we've done this week, it still has not dawned on me that Grandma is actually gone.
She had been ill for a long time, and I probably win the Worst Grandchild prize for infrequency of phone calls to check up on her. The grandchildren in my family come in two tiers: three of us are in our late twenties, and the other three are in their teens. Even the teenagers were probably more on the ball than I've been. I suppose I could make excuses, what with everything else that was going on, but what good are excuses when she's no longer here?
I do have one good recent memory of a phone call to Grandma. I was staying in the Ramada near the university, and they'd put me in a handicapped-accessible room. "You won't believe it," I told Grandma, "this room's got all your stuff in it...the toilet with railings, the handheld shower and the seat..."
"What are you doing?" Grandma asked me.
"Watching the Cubs game and studying Trademarks."
"You're watching the Cubs game???" She couldn't believe it; she knows what a baseball fan I'm not.
"It's an exciting time for the Cubs," I told her, which was true. "You get into it. Same with the Red Sox. They won this afternoon."
"You're watching baseball!" Grandma squealed in delight. "I am so happy that you're watching baseball! I can't believe it! Here I am watching it all by myself in this hospital..."
It was an unlikely bond to share with my grandmother, but I appreciated it at the time. And still do.
And where she is now, I'm sure there actually was a Cubs-Sox Series this year.
G R E E T I N G S Capricorn
You're nearing the end of a long road and it's time to set some new goals for yourself. What are your priorities? Start with whatever is highest on the list (things that you want to do on a daily basis), and make your way down until you get to long-term goals or lifelong dreams. Now that you know what you're capable of accomplishing, you can set the bar just a bit higher for whatever you decide to take on next.
I promised I'd do it, and I'm doing it. We are unpacking the legion of boxes currently crowding our personal space, and I am sticking to my resolution to throw away as much as possible of what I find therein.
My German 130 Aufsatz notebook was hard to part with, but not as hard as the notebook I kept during the summer I spent in Germany. Still, they're both gone now. As is the photocopied, doodled-on chorus score for Don Carlo. There is a growing pile of books in the office that are destined to become gifts to my mother-in-law, a voracious reader of anything surreal or depressing. If I won't notice its absence, and especially if I won't remember ever having owned it, it's gone.
"Hey, this binder is empty," said my husband, grabbing it by the spine and pulling it from a box. He didn't notice the huge quantity of binder-clipped, thumb-indexed, heavily-highlighted stacks of paper that fell back into the box as he did so.
"Ah," I said, "that was where I kept all my outlines from last year. Never got around to punching holes in them."
"Oh." He looked in the box and saw them. "Do you have electronic copies of these?"
"I guess I do," I said, "but they're not annotated or highlighted or thumb-indexed..."
But he was right. He was right. It is disposal time in the A. household, and when the heck am I ever going to need a crappy Torts outline, however highlighted or thumb-indexed, in the future? Particularly when I've already got the Word document?
"You're right. You're right," I said, interrupting myself. "I'll chuck 'em. I have electronic copies."
I have electronic copies of my outlines, but not, as it turns out, of my exams. My exams. My goodness. When am I ever going to find these useful again? And yet there is so much attached to them. There is Crim. There is Contracts, the first decent grade I got in law school. And there is Torts.
It is agonizing to throw things away when they still have so much sentiment attached to them, even though you know you'll never miss them. It takes more time than I have, these days, to properly part with chattels that are actually meaningful to the course of one's life.
"I have to save these exams," I said.
"Fine, you can make a bible out of them," said my husband, using the MIT euphemism for "class notes, problem sets and exams bound together with a three-hole paper fastener."
"A Bible," I agreed, and meant something different entirely.
Here are some things that have happened in the past six days:
* I had my last interview of interview season. I am still waiting to hear back from a nontrivial number of firms, but however those firms respond, I will be in a good place come next summer.
* That same afternoon I met with my last remaining consulting client, a small company which has been trying without success to replace me. "Every time we bring in another writer, they suck," was the consensus. This flattered me by implication: I do not suck. A good thing to be told after an interview.
* We went to a Halloween party without dressing up. I still had my makeup on from the interview, at least, if that counts. For me it probably does.
* We took our terrific neighbors out for dinner at the Malaysian place, since all that talk of beef rendang last week had me craving it again. It was still delicious. So was the lamb curry, the eggplant in black bean sauce and the spicy scallops. The neighbors liked it too. We'll miss them.
* For some odd reason, our hotel key card quit working on both the night we checked in and the following night. The third evening it worked just fine...but then, to our abject horror, someone else showed up at our door at 3:30 am and repeatedly attempted to unlock it. I phoned the front desk to complain. They thought we had checked out two nights ago. I submit to you that few things are more upsetting than having people attempt to gain access to your hotel room at 3:30 am when you are in bed without clothes on and the front desk guy tells you that you've got no right to be there.
I ripped him a new one; the people were sent to another room; and when I went to check out in the morning, I was only charged for the one night that they thought we'd actually spent there.
* We managed to stuff all of our remaining possessions in California into three suitcases. The chinchillas' travel cage was the fourth item in our four-items-tops checked luggage allowance. The chinchillas themselves rode in the cabin with us. Rant forthcoming at some point on the fact that it costs $75 per silent, odor-free chinchilla to carry them on, while it costs $0 for someone to carry on a shrieking thrashing baby with a loaded diaper.
* My ailing grandmother ceased to ail, about an hour before we arrived at San Jose Airport. Her funeral is this Saturday. This time I will make no statements about this being my last weekender in California. I fear jinx.
* The second leg of our trip, out of Salt Lake City, was delayed due to air traffic issues. We were finally allowed to take off on a schedule that had us landing at 10:30 pm, a neat half hour after Enterprise Rent-A-Car closed. Fortunately Avis is open 24/7. Unfortunately their prices are four times that of Enterprise. Fortunately the A4, which I have long and heartily missed, arrives on a truck tomorrow.
* The first night in the apartment was a tough one. Hubby did not respond well to the emptiness, was irritated by the light coming into the bedroom through the venetian blinds, noticed the buildingwide hum of the HVAC system, and couldn't sleep since the cheapo fan I'd picked up at Target to mask the hum was so cheapo that it made a thrum of its own. He hated the place. I knew he would.
* The next day the movers arrived. And then things started working out. They were able to back the semi up to the loading dock, got everything loaded up into the apartment, and were finished soon after lunchtime. We set up our own bed, cleared all the boxes out of the bedroom, unearthed the non-cheapo non-thrumming fan we'd had in California, and had a good night's rest. Hubby no longer hates the place.
* We will still need to invest in blackout shades and a white noise generator for the bedroom nevertheless.
* The chinchillas are still sulking from a stressful day spent in their shoebox-sized carriers. They should be over it within the week; chinchillas are not intelligent enough to sulk long term. I think.
* We brought 186 boxes of stuff from California. That's probably an exaggeration, since not every item on the list was actually a box of stuff (some were couches and mattresses and laundry baskets and suchlike). Still, we easily had 150 boxes. My goal is to cut that number in half by the time we leave here. It is telling, too, that at least two thirds of those boxes are labeled "office" or "books."
* Hubby's home office appears to be working out. Some days he will holler that SBC has shafted us, selling us the wrong DSL product and repeatedly lying to us when we call them on it. But more often, it will do what he needs it to. He's got a cracking view of the waterfront from the big bay window, his computers all seem to work, and our new phone system appears sufficient for meetings. I no longer feel as though I've screwed him over for workspace by moving here.
* We have DSL. I have a computer. I can post to my blog again. I am happy.