PT-LawMom

This one looks like fun. I’m not going to tag anyone but feel free to do put it on your blog.

What were you doing 10 years ago?
I was seriously ill and about three weeks away from undergoing major surgery that would result in delaying my entrance to university for a semester and recovering in bed for three months after almost two weeks in the hospital. Sucked to be me.

What were you doing 1 year ago?
Flying off to another city as spokesperson for a group I really believed in and then working part-time at night as their spokesperson on a campaign for six months. Law school wasn’t even in my plans until about mid-August.

Five snacks you enjoy:
1. Chocolate
2. Cottage cheese and berries or peaches
3. Peanut butter on toast
4. Cheese and crackers
5. Diet cherry limeade (it’s a snack because I get like 5 extra cherries - LOL!)

Five songs that you know all the lyrics to:
This was hard. I love to sing. I know the words to way too many songs.
1. Why Walk When You Can Fly (Mary Chapin Carpenter)
2. Let Him Fly (Dixie Chicks)
3. Brand New Girlfriend (my son calls this the smoochy-smoochy song and we sing it all the time! Bad, huh?)
4. If I Had Only Known (Reba McEntire)
5. Homewrecker (Gretchen Wilson)

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:
1. Buy a townhouse, a kitten and a rocking chair, fill it with books and call it a Used Bookstore (great disguise because I really just want to sit and read all day with a kitty at my side)
2. Build my in-laws a big house with electricity and running water
3. Take a long, long, loooonnngg vacation
4. Donate money to charities that really need it
5. Help several friends realize their dreams

Five bad habits:
1. Talking too much
2. Impatience
3. Worrying
4. Procrastination
5. Irritability

Five things you like doing:
1. Singing out loud with the windows rolled down and the music cranked up as I drive
2. Reading
3. Playing with my son
4. Hanging out with my husband
5. Spending time with my mother (most of the time)

Five things you would never wear again:
1. Stretch pants
2. Braces
3. Shoes that don’t really fit (I have a weird shoe size so I can only find expensive shoes from a few places)
4. Short shorts (if you know me, you know this has never ever been a good idea for my thighs!)
5. White pants

Five favorite toys:
As a kid:
1. Cabbage Patch Dolls
2. Knucklebones (with sheep knuckles)
3. Jacks
4. Books
5. More books (I wasn’t much of a toy-loving kid. I really loved to read and didn’t do much else!)

Now!
1. DVR!!!
2. Laptop
3. iPod
4. Digital Camera
5. Cell phone

Now the FOUR things!

Four Jobs I’ve Had:
1. Waitress
2. Proofreader
3. Environmental Analyst
4. Personal assistant to the wife of a famous Sunday morning political show host

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over:
1. Beaches
2. The Breakfast Club
3. Never Been Kissed
4. Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason
5. Anything with Will Smith in it

Four Places I’ve Lived:
Yardley, PA
Asheville, NC
Albuquerque, NM
New Plymouth, New Zealand

Four Places I’ve Vacationed:
Hawaii
Germany
Mexico
Guatemala

Four of My Favorite Dishes:
Lamb
Chicken with tomatoes and balsamic vinegar
Cottage cheese with fresh berries
Chicken teriyaki

Four Sites I Visit Daily:
Celebrity Baby Blog
Washington Post.com
My son’s birth board
NYTimes.com

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now:
On that post-lottery-win vacation
In a hammock sleeping with my son
At a great restaurant in Italy
Reading a good book in a comfy recliner

If you haven’t read Keith Olbermann’s amazingly well-written special comment on why Bush and Cheney should leave office now, point, click and get on over there NOW!

In this age of blogs and Internet forums, while I’ve seen my share of kind gestures, more often I see snarky, downright nasty behavior and it has me wondering whether something has changed about our society. I’m a nice person. Yes, I get irritable and frustrated but I tend to be very trusting of others, generous and kind-hearted (modest, too!). It is my approach to the world that makes it hard for me to understand why people would choose to make mean, nasty comments on others’ blogs/web forums or only find negative things to say. Is there a small segment of the population out there so insecure with themselves that they need to rip others down? Do they find it easier to be nasty online? Would they say the same things if the person was in front of them?

Why am I thinking about this today? Fortunately it’s not due to any of my lovely blog readers. First off, my good friend, Christa, sent me a very thoughtful, measured editorial about the failure of the immigration legislation written by one of her family members. From the comments to that piece, you’d think his work was an act of treason! People were really hateful. One of the comments legislators made about the failure of this legislation is that those who supported the bill didn’t speak out but those who opposed it came out in force.

Those comments were nasty but the ones that really got me going were those cited by the author of yesterday’s On Parenting blog on the Washington Post. The author had written about the childcare dilemma she was facing during her nanny’s sudden trip out of the country and commenter trolls completely ripped her up one side and down the other, asking why she couldn’t just stay home and take care of her kids like a “good mother”. Yes, of course. Why didn’t she think of that? Cause it’s so easy to just take a few weeks off of work.

What I don’t understand is why they couldn’t frame the comment like, “Could you possibly negotiate a few weeks off of work?” Why does it have to always be a character assassination? Especially in regards to everything to do with parenting, the comments can fast get heated and mean. I joined and quickly unjoined an iVillage birth group when I was pregnant after faced with nastiness. I have a great parenting group now but sometimes the “in crowd” on that board can get snarky and judgmental and make me want to leave.

I read with horror a few months back about the death threats one blogger was receiving and how she shut down her blog to keep her family safe. Who are these people?!? Are there monsters lurking behind the “normal” exteriors of the people we meet every day? At what point do we stand up and say that this harassing hate speech just isn’t acceptable? Sometimes free speech just goes too far. Where are peoples’ moral compass directing them?

Fortunately I have “met” many wonderful, kind, tender-hearted souls out there in the blogging community and I’d like to think there are more of “us” than there are of “them”. It’s just discouraging to see so much nastiness out there. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Okay, 2Ls, 3Ls and graduates. Please send me your tips and tricks for law school success. Today I spent a good part of the day doing practice exam questions from other law schools online databases with a classmate (our prof doesn’t have any old exams up and the other profs who do don’t have model answers posted). We did okay but not as well as I would have liked. We might have done better if we’d concentrated and written answers out instead of verbally going through issues. We missed some key parts of the model answers and I was disappointed. Which resources did you use to prepare for exams?

What about supplemental reading? I keep hearing about people who read the textbook, use a study aid and also read hornbooks to fully round out their knowledge of the subject. That seems really excessive to me! My summer associate recommends High Court Case Briefs. I found out yesterday that Westlaw has an e-book service that will allow you to download the cases you want individually for $1.99. I think that could be helpful. I’d like to hear what other people have found useful and whether it’s really just a crapshoot or whether only the overachievers using CDs, three study aids and a hornbook will get good grades.

Well first off, I found a new service provider on Friday who pretty much fixed what the old one had wrecked. Yay! So needless to say my spirits were much higher by our Saturday anniversary night when Chapin got home from work. I made him his favorite dinner and we had strawberries and cream on angel food cake for dessert. I put Pumpkinhead to bed and then Chapin and I had a little alone time before he crashed at 10 p.m. (looonnngg day at work!). Today we went to see Ratatouille with Pumpkinhead and had a great time (it was funny!).

I also picked up my MacBook from Apple’s Genius Bar (it kept telling me to restart and it’s one of the newer generation so the old patch reported online wouldn’t fix it) and spent 20 minutes speed-shopping at Talbots. For those of you who have kids, you know the phenomenon. When you get an hour free to run errands without them, you learn to do things fast!! I think I tried on 30 pieces of clothing in 15 minutes. Fortunately/unfortunately many of them fit and looked great so I went a little spending crazy. It’s their bi-annual sale and I typically hate to shop so it was get-the-good-stuff–in-several-colors time. I drove to the mall, shopped at Talbot’s, picked up my MacBook in the middle of the iPhone rush at the Apple store and still made it home in 70 minutes!! Now I’m up in my office studying and ready for another week of school.

I’ve been very fortunate so far. Even though I had to miss one of each of my classes, a good handful of classmates e-mailed me to a) inquire about my well-being and b) send me their notes. I felt so lucky! I also realized that many of them are taking notes on every thing the professor says while mine are more sparse because I typically just fill in my outline/case briefs and perhaps take a half-page of notes on random things to slot into my outline later. There are pluses/minuses to both approaches but it doesn’t make me the best candidate to reciprocate the favor, for which I feel a bit bad. One of the classmates who e-mailed me his notes asked me to send him mine for one day a few weeks back and I ended up having to spend a good 45 minutes filling in info from my outline and brief notes to make them more complete.