It's Really Happening!

I really definitely 100% am going to Europe after the bar! YAY! Silpa and I booked a tour a few days ago and I made my plane reservations today so it's definite! Here's the plan:
I fly into London and will spend a few days outside London with family friends (hopefully). Then I'll go to Paris, where I'll have a full day by myself before I'm joined by Silpa. We'll spend another 3 days in Paris (one being the day she gets off the plane all jet lagged), one of which we'll take to go to Versailles. After Paris, we'll go to Rome and meet our tour. We'll end up with 2 or 3 days in Rome, then we go to Florence, Pisa (for an afternoon) and Venice to round out Italy. We'll drive along the coast of France, stopping in Nice (on the Mediterranean) for two nights. Then we head to Barcelona and Madrid, where the tour ends. After the tour, we'll do an extra day in Madrid, then go to Lisbon (because hey, we might as well see Portugal too!). I'll then head back to Chicago, via Boston so that I can put my furniture etc on a moving truck. Once I get back, I should have about a week before I move (assuming I find an apartment...). Wow. So much going on! And all that in ADDITION TO THE BAR which, really, is the biggest, scariest of all! Speaking of which, I should really get back to some outlining...

one more month!

So I've been studying all day (really fun way to spend a Sunday) and it just occurred to me that the bar exam is exactly one month from today (and tomorrow)!! HOLY SHIT! How did that happen? How is it already the end of June? I've been studying, but I dont' know nearly enough. Time to start freaking out here...
Back to Evidence.

happy birthday to me

It was overall a good birthday. Very subdued, but, on the balance, also very good. Would've been a lot better if I could have skipped that whole Fed Civ Pro thing this morning, but alas...
Anyway, the evening was nice. I went into the city and had dinner (and margaritas) with a few friends at Adobo Grill. I want to give a special thanks to those friends for hanging out with me tonight -- it meant a lot to me. Tomorrow night is a (late) bday dinner with the family. And now it's bedtime.

an hour later

And it's been an hour since the last post (ok, a little more) and I'm feeling better. Oddly, going to the dentist helped. My hygenist is really friendly and it's hard to be in a bad mood when you're talking to her. I mean, yes, it's a little weird to have a conversation while she's poking around in my mouth (not to mention difficult) but she's just so nice and chatty and she always remembers me. I almost like the hygenist enough to make me consider continuing to have a dentist in Winnetka even after I move into the city (don't really care either way about the dentist) . Almost.

OK, time to go read a painfully long, boring outline on Illinois Civil Procedure.

funk

Today is just one of those days. A "funk" day if you will. One of those days where everything you say comes out wrong. Where everything said to you takes on a meaning completely unrelated to the speaker's intent because you superimpose the funk that you're in onto everything going in and out of your consciousness. Which makes you even more defensive, which then makes everything come out even worse. UGH.
Unfortunately, the only way I know how to get out of one of htese funks is to go to sleep and that is just not an option right now. No, instead I get to go to the dentist. Yeah, because that will make things better...

procrastination!

So I was studying property for hours tongiht and my brain was starting to explode so I thought that maybe I would (FINALLY) put my graduation pictures online! Here's a few, the rest are at my flickr site (see link to right).

Mary, me, Emily, and Silpa on class day

Silpa, Emily, and Me before getting all wet at graduation

Me and Silpa getting wet during the morning ceremony

Me, Silpa, and Emily during a brief break in the rain in the morning ceremony

I got my diploma!!

Me and Emily after getting our diplomas

and last, but certainly not least, me and my parents, without whom I never could have done this!

Now I'm going to bed. The rest of property (as well as Wills and Family Law) will have to wait until tomorrow...

graduated!!

I come back to Chicago triumphant, having finally graduated from Harvard Law School. Pretty exciting stuff! The two days were nice (save for the constant pouring rain, the freezing cold, and stomach illness). While I didn't think that it was possible to have worse weather for graduation than my college graduation (which was in the 40s and no one was prepared for that), I think this may have been worse. Luckily, the fact of graduation itself outshined the weather :) So I am now a law school graduate. I'll post pictures when I get them off of my dad's camera. For now, it's back to real life and off to listen to one of the BarBri lectures I missed...

finally...

We head to Cambridge tomorrow for my graduation. Finally. I've been done with school for what feels like forever. It will be good to see my friends, but overall the whole trip seems to be so much more stressful than it's worth... *sigh* I'll tell you all about it when we get back later this week.

friday night

well, it's Friday night and I'm sitting here in my parents' house with Zoe, bored out of my mind. I had some dinner, I did some studying (yes, I studied... something I NEVER do on a Friday night) and now I'm not quite sure what to do. It's going to be a long summer of weekends like this I'm afraid.

It was a good week though! On Tuesday night the family saw Spamalot which was SO FUNNY. I highly recommend it to anyone in Chicago. My whole family really enjoyed it. Hm... nothing else particularly exciting happened. But I still felt like it was a pretty good week (except for being awakened at 4 o'clock this morning by my brother when he was going to bed -- I don't know what he was doing but it was loud). Bar review is going ok -- pretty boring mostly.

Tomorrow Tyler and I are heading to the Printer's Row Book Fair (or, as he put it, the annual massive nerd book festival) and I'm excited for that. I need more books. Right now I'm reading Les Miserables, which is wonderful, but too big to carry around with me everywhere. I've actually read it before, I think when I was 13, but I didn't understand a word of the story at the time. I'm enjoying it much more now.

Anyway, this doesn't appear to be going anywhere and I think I'm probably rambling... Later.