Woo woo woo woo wooooooo! It finally hit me this morning – my first year of law school is half done. Time to get myself up north and rock the family, friends, powder, and the sweet sweet joy of not studying.

Not to mention the RAWWK itself. In a few short days, Los Tres Hermanos de Explosion will victoriously reunite for yet another raucously dissonant noisemaking (and beer-drinking) session. Michael’s neighbors can’t wait!

but one hell of a contract law final standing in my way. Thankfully, it’s my last of four, and I’m almost looking forward to it.

Not to eulogize prematurely, but being back in school has certainly been a shock to my system … in a good way. I feel like I’m making up for time I wasted and lost when I was in college, and actually applying myself toward school is providing a catharsis that I’m only experiencing for the first time.  My expectations of performance, while still high, are tempered somewhat by my full-time day job – a dubious responsibility that I share with less than a third of my 1L part-time class.  Most of the rest are kids just out of undergraduate who either didn’t want a full load to start their law school career, or were originally seeking the full-time program and got shuffled into the part-time program by admissions.  Among the older people looking for a wholesale career change, around half quit their job prior to matriculating.  As such, the competitive landscape is unusual, to say the least, and the forced grading curve is really screwing with my usually accurate spidey sense of how I actually did.

I did how I did (and will do as I will do), and think that my efforts were close to my maximum capability with what resources and intellect I can muster.  I have a lot of things driving me right now – my aspirations for the future, some amount of (perhaps misplaced) pride, my sense of duty to the world around me … but most importantly, my desire to rejoin the people and places I love in a better position to help and support them.

So to my family, friends, and the beautiful and wild Great Northwest – here’s to you, and to hoping for the best.  If I succeed, it will have been because of you. 

I will see you soon.

Bailout? More like failout.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/12/11/auto.bailout/index.html

I don’t have a lot of time to dissect this, what with my torts final coming up and all, but I actually laughed aloud when I read about it.

Did anyone else catch the irony of the United Auto Workers’ refusal to drop domestic guaranteed pay rates to parity with the rest of the industry? That was, in large part, the cause of the bailout’s failure in the Senate. I’m so glad to hear that all of those union auto workers won’t be losing their salary level. You know, because they’ll still have jobs at which to make that salary. I’m sure GM, Ford, and Chrysler will still be in perfectly healthy financial shape without that $11B. Right? Those union guys are GENIUSES!

And on the political side, there’s yet more irony. The Republicans were bitching that the bailout proposal didn’t come with enough strings attached, and said bitching sealed the deal (or lack thereof). They seemed to ignore the White House’s warning that without the bailout, they’d likely divert TARP funds to the automakers. Those funds are likely to come without any strings attached whatsoever.

Basically, we’re looking at a clusterfuck of gargantuan proportions. The unions have, by attempting to protect their workers in the least sensible way possible, doomed thousands of them to having no job whatsoever. The government is probably going to step in and barely save the Big Three at the cost of billions of taxpayer dollars, not really force them to change the core of the idiotic policies that led to their near demise, and set them up for failure again in 10 or 20 or how ever many years until the global economy goes kerplunk again.

God save America from itself.

other than study for my three upcoming finals.  *gulp*

Chris had cows on his blog.  I, naturally, had to investigate.

Saw this on CatharticInk, thought I could do it too. Rules as follows: Go to the sixth page of your Flickr photostream and post the sixth picture on that page.

Huh, okay.  Mine isn’t of cows:

It does bring back some pleasant memories, however.  This was one of my last hikes before I moved away from Seattle, and it was a doozy.  The plan was to camp with Michael near Mount Rainier, then meet Jeff and Jake at Paradise (5,400′) for a 12PM start the next day, hopefully reaching Camp Muir (10,188′) by mid-afternoon.  I had done this particular shlep three times before, and it was painfully delightful each time.  (Or is that delightfully painful? Probably both.)

Problem was, Jeff and Jake weren’t at the trailhead at 12PM.  So I waited.  And waited.  And waited.

And waited.

I finally figured that the J-team couldn’t possibly have been delayed by nearly an hour and a half and were probably somewhere on the mountain.  To verify, I had Michael drive me through the parking area.  Sure enough, Jeff’s Prius was basking calmly in the afternoon sun, clearly without Jeff inside of it.  I wiper-posted a quick note intimating that I’d rather they not depart for home without me, then took my leave of Michael and practically sprinted up the snowfield.  I figured that I’d likely see them on their way down.

It turned out that I’d catch up with them on their way up, at roughly 8,500′.  They spotted my girlish figure while taking a breather and noted that my WSDOT-orange fleece was visible at least 1,000′ vertical feet down the snowfield (roughly 3/4 of a linear mile).  They too had waited for me, and after about 45 minutes set off thinking that I’d left without them.

Yeah, that’s right.  They were waiting for me … at a different trailhead.

We made it up, then back down, and a good time was (eventually) had by all.  A lesson was also learned – saying “I’ll meet you at Paradise at 12″ is a bit like saying “I’ll meet you in Seattle at 12.”  Lake City is as much Seattle as Beacon Hill, but there’s a slight possibility that the twain shall never meet.

Now that I’m homesick, it’s time to get back to studying.