Taco – Page 15

Bringing in 2017

January 10, 2017 by Taco

Greetings and a belated welcome to 2017! 🙂

Another year has come and gone, and the world spins ever onward. As such, it’s time to do an “end of year wrap-up” here at Dinosaur Bear, which essentially means 1) Complain about Law School 2) Not complain about the holidays!

Hard to complain about this.

I’ll get the whining out of the way first – last semester might have been the worst since the first semester of 1L and at the very least it was far worse than all of 2L. 3L is supposed to be all “omg so bored” but I messed that up somewhere along the line. Quite frankly I just tried to do way too much. The plus side of it was that I got to do some awesome research assistant work with a really cool professor. The downside was that my actual black-letter law coursework really suffered. Sure, I don’t have my grades yet (since such things take 30 years, give or take, at HLS), but I am profoundly concerned about the outcome of my Tax exam. I ended up studying really.. eh.. ineffectively? for it. Mostly I focused on the language of the regulations and not enough on learning Excel formulas. So naturally the exam was about 80% formulas. It was a good time. It’s the first time in law school that I ran out of time on an exam and just had to blindly guess on a few questions. Which was also part of the problem, a fair portion of the exam was multiple choice. What’s great about a traditional “issue spotter” law school exam is that you can savagely word vomit for 20,000 words and generally will know you didn’t fail (though to be fair I guess even that is situational). Multiple choice doesn’t really offer that chance to vomit. I mean you can literally vomit on your laptop if you like, but it’s not going to get you a better grade plus it’s nasty.

Anyways, Taxation aside, exams were exams. Despite my incessant complaining I generally don’t get that worked up over exams. In fact even on the exams where I’ve done pretty “meh” I’ve not lost any sleep over it. In fact there have really only been 2 classes in all of law school where my exam shitter-shattered me – my very first law school exam, and now tax. Interestingly enough, that first exam is also my worst grade so far, let’s hope Tax doesn’t go for the record. 🙂 [And lest you think a “bad” grade for me is something like a B, nah, I legit got the lowest grade possible above an F, haha – though zero fucks were ultimately given, it’s my hot body I do what I want.]

Oh, and in keeping up with tradition here is a shot of my miscellaneous handouts and notes from the semester – excluding, as usual, the casebooks themselves.

Much easier to complain about this.

But hey, I can’t complain too much (challenge accepted) I got 13 days of no law school. Which in hindsight is kind of funny since in undergrad you get like what.. 3.5 months off for Christmas? Those were the days. Long brakes and classes that didn’t have mandatory law school curves. 😀

Still, in Taco’s world Mandatory Curves = Mandatory Beer. Beer is the life blood of a law student, or at the very least beer is my lifeblood, as a lot of my classmates drink $15 mixed-drinks.

The six-pack that got me through exams, or maybe just 1 evening, I can’t remember.

I also had no shortage of beer through the holidays, which is a good thing. Oh, speaking of beer, if you haven’t looked at it recently or ever, I’ve retired The Beer List – an update explaining why can be found on its page. The TL;DR is that it’s just been streamlined elsewhere.

On the non-beer front, I’m currently knee-deep in J-Term. This is my first “normal” J-Term in that I’m not stuck in that abhorrent waste of life known as the 1L Problem Solving Workshop, nor am I off on magical awesome adventures in New Mexico. Instead I’m taking a straight up doctrinal class. It’s 3.5 hours a day, 5 days a week. Which is about 3 days too many in my opinion. The good news is that class is over at 12:30pm, leaving me all afternoon to do fun stuff like try to finish the 100 pages of reading for the next morning. That’s no exaggeration either, we’re going through a 1107 page book in 11 class periods, not counting the supplemental readings. Still, I’m really interested in the topic – American Indian Law – but it’s just uh.. a lot of law school. I get home from that 3.5 hour class feeling mentally the same as when I’d put in 10 hour days at the DOJ. The good news is that my research assistant position has been delayed a bit due to Congress being worthless, but that also means I’m currently making no money, so it’s a double-edged sword. It will start up before the end of the month, but at the moment I’m kind of glad it’s been pushed back a bit, even in spite of the lack of income.

What I’m really not looking forward to is that with the way J-Term works, you have 1 single day between the end of class and your exam. Then after your exam you have 2 days before the Spring Semester starts. It’s pretty cool. Yep. I live for it, yisssssssssssssssss.

Anyways, enough about that crap. I’ll update on law school again once I’ve done my J-Term Exam and have a more finalized Spring Term schedule (and I also have a cool update about what I’m doing for “Spring Break” to share at some point).

Let’s backtrack a bit and get to the good stuff – that is the holidays!

Yes, the holidays were a happy time of year as usual, even if they were slightly abbreviated due to my exam schedule and SB’s work schedule this year. That said, we didn’t let the shortened length hamper our fun and we partook of all the usual holiday fun, such as eggnog.

Yes, that’s Valentino upside in the couch – he had a bit too much eggnog.

Too much indeed.

December also saw our first bit of snow that amounted to anything.

Though as I type this (1/8) we have a lot more outside – somewhere around 1 foot.

In addition to eggnog we made some cookies for SB to take to various places – we went with a classic: gingerbread!

We made those bad-boys from scratch too!

Of course we also had our little ole’ traditional “Taco’s House” family Christmas, which has grown over the years from just SB, Little Friend, and I to a whole swarm of buddies.

This was Pigsten’s first Christmas. As he is still a hatchling we don’t know how much of it he understood, but he liked all the colorful and shiny packages.

Even Tristen got wrapped up in the excitement.

The big “pressie” this year was Journal 3 from Gravity Falls. Unless you’ve watched the show it would be kind of hard to explain the significance of the Journal, but needless to say everyone was pretty excited about it. Plus, we still aren’t sure where it came from! Mysteries! If you haven’t heard of Gravity Falls, I’d recommend watching it unless you just despise cartoons.

One of the characters on Gravity Falls, “Waddles” is one of Pig’s favorite characters, for obvious reasons.

After having presents and stopping Tristen (multiple times) from casting spells from Journal we all had some Taco-made pancakes and special coffee!

Special in that we’d saved it since we met the Santa Claus in North Pole. It was pretty strong – probably to keep the Elves awake – but good!

Our family Christmas was two days earlier than usual this year, in large part because rather than flying from Boston back home we decided to take a train! Yep, after our high-speed train ride from Berlin to Munich, our train trip from Chicago to Seattle, and train ride (nearly) halfway across Alaska, not to mention our nearly constant short train trips on public transit, we are a bit hooked on train travel. Plus, as our voyage took us from Boston to Chicago, we’ve now been coast-to-coast on a train! As we’ve largely forsaken our passenger rail network in the US (I can soap-box that for hours, and even took a one-person graduate course in undergrad about this very thing) our options were Amtrak, Amtrak, or Amtrak. So, after the difficult decision of choosing our provider, we settled with Amtrak and booked our sleeper car (seriously the only way to do a train with an overnight component trust me) on the Lake Shore Limited! We later found out that that particular route is one of the worst performing routes in Amtrak’s entire network, but more on that in a moment.

Things started out pretty sweet. After we arrived at South Station we were setting on metal stools with our luggage among the “plebs” as Tristen would say. Well, on a whim I happened to notice that our sleeper cat ticket also got us access to the First Class Amtrak lounge known as “ClubAcela.” So we went from crappy seats in a crowded station, to a private comfortable lounge with free newspapers, coffee, snacks, TVs, etc.

This is what one might call “Shitting in high cotton.”

I took like five Cliff bars – those things are expensive. So, after enjoying our small bit of high society (check your tickets people!) we moved out to our train. We got to bypass all the poor souls in coach and go straight to our sleeper car. It was pretty nice – though in fairness our coach experience on the Alaskan Railroad was pretty awesome, but we also had pretty much an entire car to ourselves, whereas here the train was sold out and Coach was packed and depressing and basically the 1st Circle of Hell.

Meanwhile, we settled into our small (read: tiny) lowest tier sleeper room (which is plenty for us) and took advantage of our free food, drinks, and WiFi!

Tristen isn’t one to miss his football.

While the beer didn’t come free, sadly, we didn’t let that stop us from throwing back a few beers “on the rails.”

For the most part things were rolling along pretty well the first day (it was supposed to be a 19 hour trip) – we even left South Station at exactly the right time, even the Germans would have been proud. However, somewhere in New York things started to go downhill. First there was some sort of accident on – or near – the track which caused us to be held up. I’m still not sure exactly what it was, but when we finally got through the area there were downed power lines, about 5 cop cars, and at least 10 full-sized utility trucks. So, by the time we hit the hay we were about 2 hours behind schedule. The boys stayed up a lot later than us, hunting mice and grubs.

Despite being behind schedule, neither SB or I were too concerned because on our way to Seattle we were at one point 8 hours behind, but then made up all but like 1.5 or 2 hours of that overnight (we got stuck behind an oil train, which I cold also soapbox about – e.g. right-of-ways). So we figured the same thing would happen this time. NOPE. When we woke up we weren’t 2 hours behind, we were six hours behind. By the time we were supposed to arrive in Chicago we are only halfway through Ohio. So yeah. The good news is that SB’s family – who were picking us up – had stayed in a hotel in Chicago the night before, so they weren’t sitting at Union Station twiddling their thumbs. Anyways, as we progressed deeper into the Midwest things were mostly grey and snowy – go figure, but some of the river crossings were really cool (literally) with all the ice.

Once we got out of Ohio things sped up a bit, and pretty much all of Northern Indiana went by fairly seamlessly.

Anyways, we eventually made it into Chicago – about 5.5 hours late. We weren’t overly pleased about that, but given the state of our passenger railways you can’t really expect super performance on long-distance rides. The good news is that despite the large delay, we both enjoyed the trip. The only real downside is that delay caused me to miss seeing one of my friends (and the new Star Wars movie) – and since I literally only see my friends one time per year anymore, that kind of sucked. But hey, we’ve now been coast-to-coast on a train! 😀 The silver lining of being so late was that since I missed hanging out with my friends, we were able to hang out more with SB’s family and we even stopped through our old Stompin’ grounds of Lafayette, IN to have dinner (and beer) at the Lafayette Brewing Company. It was kind of funny, SB forgot her ID in the car and our server gave us a little spiel about “This is Indiana” which was funny because we’re from Indiana, but also because MA is like 50x more anal about IDs than Indiana is anyways.

All in all, we had great fun with the fam-fam. We didn’t stay through New Years this time around, but the Christmas schedule itself was largely unchanged. The Boys got to hang out with their Cousin Scooby.

Pigsten found Grandma Meem’s little holiday village and pretty much stayed there for 48 hours straight – and was surprisingly hard to find!

Pig bonded with his Sensai Mr. Bear, and they discussed Pig’s recent 1000 hour Yoga certification and how Mr. Bear was spending his time enjoying Nirvana.

The humans had pressies, food (oh so much food), alcohol, and family game time. I don’t even remember the name of this particular game, but SB won 20 freaking dollars worth of quarters during it!

I also tried a Budweiser for the first time in probably 5+ years. Budweiser holds a special place for me because it was the first beer I ever drank at the ripe ole’ age of 2 (or less). So, while I’ve moved on to other beers, I generally try to avoid beer-snobbery towards Budweiser specifically. But after getting Daryl 1 a twelve-pack for Christmas and noticing that the beer literally says “America” on the front, I just had to try one.

DIS IS AMERICA.

And it sucked. I mean god it was terrible. What’s weird, is that it was somehow worse than Bud Light. I mean.. what? But bonus points for plastering “AMERICA” all over the front of the now Belgian-owned beer.

The boys also partook of some beer… obviously.

Aside from SB slaughtering us in some quarter card game, we also busted out the ole’ Nintendo 64 which allowed me to redeem my e-peen at Mario Kart.

It was a lot of fun, though those 64 graphics don’t fare so well when stretched out to fill Meem’s TV (which Daryl 1 once broke in a fit of emo rage – seriously, I should tell that story sometime).

We also got out and about some, since our hometown has basically nothing to do in it. SB and MIL were supposed to get tattoos, but fate bitch slapped that idea. So we went and drank lots of beer at a place called “The Tap” – which lives up to its name.

In fact, they not only had an amazingly good selection of beer for Indiana, they had a damn good selection of beer period. Easily Top 5. BIL ordered a freaking $14 beer though, which cracked me up as I still have anal-rage over my $12.16 beer from freaking downtown Washington D.C. Anyways, in order to keep the good times a flowin’ we also went to a liquor store after the pub (which should be a rule) and bought some more beer, which we drank later. The first of which was an interesting offering from Dogfish Head which we mostly got due to the name and label.

Then we had a Rhubarb Sour Ale from “Tin Man Brewing” – in fact this was kind of the reason why we’d went to the liquor store as I’d had another sour from Tin Man at The Tap and the server had recommended this Rhubarb Sour Ale, but The Tap didn’t have it. So we went and found it in true alchy style.

Sours were kind of a theme for the evening, I love sours.

We also had Dogfish’s “World Wide Stout” which was ehm.. not well received. Maybe it was because we had it after the sours, but holy crap, it ended up being 18% ABV. It is not one I’d drink again.

In fact, so unenthused by that stout were BIL and I, that we had to wash down our beer with a beer.

Funnily enough, that “chaser” beer got me a badge on Untappd that I never thought I’d get – “Take it Easy” – which is for drinking twelve beers in one day. Yep, I’d lie and say I’m not proud, but I would be lying. Plus these were 12 real beers, not 12 Coors Lights, so Yessum, I earned that badge. Mmm gamification of alcoholism.

Sadly, for all the good company, good food, good (and bad) beer, and fun times, eventually we had to leave. It felt really short this year, namely because it was shorter than it’s ever been. But, that’s probably the way things will work from here on out. So we just have to make do with the time we had! Being an adult isn’t all fun and games I suppose – though I did get a new toothbrush this year, which was actually my most exciting physical present (not even joking, though it was a fancy $80 electric toothbrush to be fair)! For their part the boys seemed to enjoy themselves just as much as usual, especially their sleepovers and football games with Floppsy.

After a farewell lunch with my Dad, Stepmom, and Daryl 1 (once again at The Coachman) we were on our way by home – this time by plane, which while faster (much faster) than train, is generally far less exciting and magical – though we did make it out right before a big storm which was nice. The one exciting bit was that at some point in the past year Southwest had sent SB (but not me, lol) free drink tickets. So we busted out those bad boys real quick like. I even got to try a beer I’d never had before, “12 of Never” by Lagunitas.

While SB went with a tried and true Fat Tire by New Belgium – which I am still pooper-pained about not getting to visit in Fort Collins.

What was even better, is that they didn’t actually take our drink coupons, so we can just use them again!

It was kind of a bumpy flight back, or maybe the beer just made it seem that way. 🙂 Still, there were no issues or delays and soon enough we were flying over the outskirts of Boston.

We then proceeded to fly like 50 miles out into the ocean and take the weirdest approach I’ve ever seen to Logan before, but the landing itself was far less eventful than certain landings I’ve had at Logan in the past. Once landed the first thing we heard at baggage claim was that an entire flight worth of luggage had just uh.. not came? or something. Either way I was like “welp this is gonna be good.” But fortunately for us our luggage came out just fine – albeit slowly, but better than destroyed. From there we made it home fairly uneventfully – though I did time it and it took us 1.5 hours to make it to our front door from the time our plane made it to the gate. Meaning that we can nearly fly 1000 miles in less time than it takes us to go 4.8 miles in Boston. That’s sad.

Once we were home the boys tried out some of their ~~clothes~~ armor they had gotten for Christmas.

Valentino was ready to bring in 2017, even several days before the rest of the world was.

Pigsten was especially enthralled by some dinosaur Christmas socks that Meem got me. They were the “Sock Guy” brand just like my fire breathing T-rex socks.

After getting all settled in from our trip home we had a few fairly normal days. I was mostly working on finalizing my bar application (now sent on its way, woo!), SB was working, and Pig was doing Yoga.

During out first Friday back we tried out a new place called R.F. O’Sullivan & Son for date night, which we’d meaning to go to for awhile. We naturally had some beer. I went with the holiday “Celebration Ale” from Sierra Nevada:

While SB went with one of her standbys of Allagash White.

Part of why we tried out R.F. O’Sullivan & Son was because it was right across the street from Star Market, which we needed to visit in our ongoing search for corned beef (for New Years). Turns out, Star Market didn’t have it either (not even the butcher up the street from us had it), so we settled from a nice looking lamb shank and then picked up the last ingredients for a special pie I was making – both of which were for New Year’s Eve.

The lamb turned out AMAZING. I didn’t really have a recipe, just sort of went with a bunch of Taco-picked spices and a nice slow cooking process, and also beer, always beer.

Nothing like eating beer while you drink beer if I do say so myself.

Our featured beer of New Year’s Eve was “Route 101” by Ipswich Ale Brewing, a fairly local brewery.

As for that pie, it was a Pumpkin-Flan-Coffee Pie. Yes, a Pumpkin, Flan, and Coffee Pie – and it was awesome.

Like most of my creations there was no recipe, I just went for it, and it turned out delicious. I have a pretty good track record with just randomly creating things. They might not aesthetically score many points, but the flavor is generally good.

So, with our slow-cooked semi-corned lamb, beer, and hybrid pie we brought in the New Year by doing what we do best, staying in our apartment. 😀

We had talked about going out for some of Boston’s “First Night” celebrations, but it was cold and raining so we just stayed put and watched it all on TV. Actually that isn’t true, we could see Hancock Tower (er.. I guess it’s know known as the lackluster 200 Clarendon building) lit up like a candle. It’s kind of hard to see in this photo, but the building generally only has a flashing little red light on top, but on New Year’s Eve – or at least this New Year’s Eve (we’ve only been here for one) – they lit it up like a candle on top, it was pretty cool.

While waiting for the local fireworks (and the ball in NYC) we played a few games, starting with Blokus Duo – an instant Pigsten favorite due to the colors.

We also played a couple games of Scrabble Slam – including trying to do it with 5 cards instead of 4, which made the game literally impossible – though that was kind of fun in its own way. Then, soon enough Boston’s fireworks started, and we were able to watch them out our window and on TV – always funny.

And that was pretty much our New Year. Nothing to fancy, but still fun. Each other + the boys + food + beer = happiness. SB even managed to stay up until Midnight! She struggles these days. :p

Since SB took the 2nd off, and I didn’t start classes until the 3rd our mini New Year vacation was extended by a day, which was nice – though I mostly spent it preparing for J-Term. Once SB was back at work and I was back to going to school daily things quickly returned to normal and now we are all in our “busy bee” schedules again. Valentino and Pig are in their last semester at BC, and Tristen is – like me – on his final stretch of law school. SB is working two jobs, and trying to grow her Yoga practice. Pigsten is continuing Clifford School, and naturally has lots of construction work to do.

Speaking of Pigsten, the little fellow turned 1 on January 4th! We celebrated with some of his favorite things, a green drink, colorful things that look like rocks, as well as some gummy worms which Pig is obsessed with so Pigsten likes too! Seems like just yesterday Pigsten came to be known as Pigsten.

We still aren’t entirely sure he knows what a birthday is, but he was very pleased with his tasty colorful things and opportunity to use his truck!

So, in other words, things have gotten back to “Normal” here – insofar as such a thing as normal exists in the Taco household. 😉

Thus, the Christmas tree and presents and holiday movies have given way to the January grind, complete with a foot of snow on the ground. But, there are a lot of exciting things in the pipeline. None of which are quite finalized yet – and in fact most of them are still closer to ideas than actual plans – but I’ll be sure to share those things as they begin to solidify. In the meantime, I’ll keep on keeping on, as will Dinosaur Bear. In fact, Dinosaur Bear turns five years old this year, and while it wasn’t always known as Dinosaur Bear, it’s the same blog with the same ole’ me, so it counts. :p

2016 had some incredibly exciting events. From New Mexico, to Montana, to Wyoming (and briefly Idaho!), to Canada, to Alaska, to trains, planes, automobiles, boats, ships, and even a Unimog. Knowing SB and I, we won’t settle for too much of the mundane, so here’s to 2017 and whatever excitement it ends up bringing our way. 🙂

Until next time, and Happy New Year!
-Taco

“Rexy.”

Fall of 3L (also Puffin Adoption #2 & Start of #3)

December 12, 2016 by Taco

I was trying to think of something witty for the title of this post, but my brain is running a bit dry in the creativity department. Turns out “Fall of 3L” kind of has more than one meaning, so maybe I should give myself more credit.

Either way, this is just sort of a ~~whining~~ check-in post to let the world know I am still alive (and I know all .00000000003 of you were waiting with bated breath). I’ve sort of been on a bi-monthly schedule with Dinosaur Bear lately, rather than my weekly schedule of yore. Ah well, c’est la vie.

As you can probably guess, exam season is looming here in the land of 3L. There is a motif, known as “3LOL,” which is something that a lot of 3Ls says while pretending not to care (keyword: pretending). I’ve always thought it was kind of dumb, as no one I saw using (hashtag or otherwise) 3LOL actually seemed to be working any less, or be any less stressed. But that’s how we law students work I suppose, the closest we can get to not caring is pretending to not care and then laughing at each others superficial not-caring, all the while knowing that we really do care.

But, as mentioned, I don’t use 3LOL – not because I find myself caring more (in fact there are strong arguments based on my grades and study style that I care less) – but because I really screwed up any attempt to make 3L “easier” than 1L or 2L. I thought I was supposed to be bored to death by now. Maybe I would be if I had a firm locked up and was only taking exam-only black letter law classes, but such is not the case. Anyways, no 3LOL for me, more like 3LSucksJustAsMuchAs2L. Case in point: The worst exam schedule I’ve had since Fall of 1L.

In fact my first exam is tomorrow at 9am, it’s a 4.5 hour exam. Then I have less than 24 hours until the next 4.5 hour exam, and so on and so forth with things not ending until 7pm on December 19th. It is far and away the worst schedule I’ve had as far as “lateness” goes, as well as time-between-tests goes. Fall of 1L had no choice involved, so least I brought this schedule upon myself (though one could argue all of law school is in fact self-inflicted, but I digress). SO, until December 19th at 7pm I’ll be locked in that final death spiral with exams and trying to somehow figure out a way to adequately wrap up my research assistant position for the semester. I won’t be done-done until about 5pm on the 20th, but the 20th stuff is mostly fluff.

This blog post is a temporary escape from last-minute studying, which is sadly just about the only kind of studying I am even good at for law school exams. This has been made more difficult this year due to an exam changing format 4 days before the exam (to a closed test), as well as two other exams not even have a format listed. If you are a student of any kind, this is basically the same thing as you having no idea whether you’ll be writing an essay or doing a multiple choice test until you walk in the room and sit down. It’s pretty fantastically crappy, but professors seemingly have infinite ability to not be decent people when it comes to giving you information about exams. But again, c’est la vie.

So I’ll stop whining for a second and talk about some stuff that has happened since Thanksgiving!

For starts, as is pretty obvious, December has arrived – which is kind of crazy when I think about to the insane amount of stuff that has happened this year (arguably the busiest year of my life thus far)!

While I like the December photo on my “Baby Animals” calendar Meem got me, Tristen was none too pleased about having to look at a “rat” all month. He was placated a bit by our annual tradition of listening to “If We Make It Through December” by Merle Haggard. It’s one of the Boys’ favorite songs, though they are still pretty bummed about Merle Haggard’s passing. For whatever reason, that song makes surviving the “cold exam time” between Thanksgiving and Christmas a little more bearable for Tristen – who is quite susceptible to cold weather – notwithstanding the recent huge fire we had in Cambridge. Fortunately for us the fire didn’t impact our building or immediate area, though the air was still pretty thick with smoke.

We’ve also had our first rounds of snow return to the Boston area.

It’s not been anything too substantial yet, but it’s still early for us. The worst doesn’t tend to start until around January.

Another thing that has returned is one of our (many) squirrel buddies that lived behind our apartment. He is specifically fond of a particular pole and really likes barking from it.

We hadn’t seen him for awhile, but no sooner than we commented on this fact than did squirrely buddy reappear. Must have good ears.

Aside from running, grocery shopping, and “lovely” treks to campus, I mostly leave the frigid outdoors to those chunky squirrels (who are welcome in my apartment should they wish to come in – forever). But its difficult to stay in all the time (sadly) so warm coffee has been a constant.

Pigsten partakes of some coffee courtesy of a haunted truck-stop.

And what goes good with coffee? Why cake, of course. On my final day of classes I was able to procure an actually really freaking good piece of cake. I had to be mildly late to class to get it, but it was worth it, and I’d do it again for eternity.

Other than cake the end of classes was pretty much crap. 😀

But at least they were over, which allowed Tristen and I to hide beneath our “rockies” and hope that exams didn’t find us – they did.

But not all has been gloomy since the ~~end of classes~~ cake! We sent off another Puffin Adoption form! In fact, I need to backtrack a bit all the way back to before I was in Montana (which feels like ages ago, though it really wasn’t). While I adopted Optimus Prime back in April, before I left at the end of May we completed Puffin Fund 2.o!

Seen here almost completed.

Once that was done, we sent off the forms and Valentino adopted Strawberry in June!

That brought up our Puffin family to 2 – Optimus Prime and Strawberry. Though we naturally weren’t done there: we still had Pig, Tristen, and SB. So we started collecting Puffin UPCs again. Puffin Fund 3.0 took a bit longer, namely due to my time in Montana + Alaska + a really busy semester where I didn’t eat as many Puffin CEREAL breakfasts (I do not condone eating actual Puffins). But, we eventually gathered up 20 UPCs, and this time it was Pig’s turn!

As for what Pig has decided to name his Puffin, well, that will be a surprise for when his adoption is complete! But I can assure you it is a very Pig-ish name. He was quite excited!

Now that Pig’s forms are in the mail we’ve started Puffin Fund 4.0 – note that I couldn’t even spell Puffin properly, as I said, my brain is a bit toasted at the moment.

Interestingly enough, Puffin Fund 4.0 might well be our last UPC-based adoption. Barbara’s, the company that makes the Puffin Cereal, is changing up the process. For starters, the UPC-based program is ending in April 2017. It’s being phased out in favor on an online-based system where you can do activities and submit photos of receipts to gain points. You can use those points to adopt Puffins, Arctic Foxes, Elephants, etc. as well as get coupons and physical goods. All in all it’s a better system, though it’s a bit less magical as you don’t get the bonafide physical packets anymore or the excitement of sending in “box tops” a la 1950s America. Even the remaining months of the UPC-based program only allow you to request digital packets now. So we’ll have to print Pig’s packet, which is less exciting, but I suppose has a smaller carbon footprint. Still, we aren’t picky, so long as they send stories of our adopted Puffins, we’ll be happy!

Anyways, I suppose I should get back to studying. Rather that queue this up I’ll go ahead and send it out. “Hot off the binary” Dinosaur Bear news, nothing like it.

But hey, I did broke my usual “Literal 12 Days of Christmas” rule and allowed us to put up our Christmas stuff, listen to Christmas music, wrap some presents, and have eggnog last night! So at least I can enjoy our little “Christmas Corner” over the next week of general misery. 🙂

Hopefully the next post will be about Holiday fun, and thus a lot less about law school!

Until then, and to my fellow law students, this too shall pass. Unless you are already done with exams, then you are the enemy. 😛

-Taco.

Giving Thanks (2016)

November 29, 2016 by Taco

Greetings,

Well, Thanksgiving has now come and gone, which means per the advertisers it’s now officially Christmas. Bah, who am I kidding, it’s been Christmas since October. But, here on Dinosaur Bear Christmas is still a far away thing, as I don’t move at advertiser speeds. Instead of just skipping over Thanksgiving (and Halloween) as if it didn’t happen, I’m going to revisit some recent events as a way of giving thanks for them.

For starters, things have been busy on the law school front, though they always are.

Pigsten serves as a good visualization of being a busy little ~~bee~~ dinosaur.

But, I am thankful that there are things like beer to get me through the ~~crazy~~ busy times!

I love this huggie.

Plus, while things have been especially crazy with my RA position, the good news is that I 1) get paid for it and 2) was able to get just enough ahead of things to not have to do any schoolwork on either Thanksgiving or Friday (technically I should have done stuff on Saturday, but I didn’t, but that’s our secret). I’ve also started the bar exam application process which is a little crazy, but I’m thankful that so far things are going well with that (I’ll probably do a whole post on that at some point).

I’m also thankful for some recent events here at the Taco household. For starters, Pig and SB’s yoga program is almost complete (they graduate next week! – though Pig is about 600 hours ahead of SB).

Pig and Valentino doing some early morning yoga.

Valentino isn’t formally in the program, but he gets he fair share of yoga with Pig – when Pig isn’t busy “grubbing” that is.

In addition to some yoga, we’ve also had a bit of a sports-streak lately. Namely we saw both a hockey match and a football game within a 24 hour period, which is probably the first time in my life I’ve attended two sporting events so closely together.

The first was a fabled hockey match-up between Harvard and Boston College. Despite our best efforts, SB and I had never seen Harvard and BC face off in anything. We’d wanted too since we’d moved out here, but between schedule conflicts and cost (the Beanpot Tournament is expensive) we’d never been able to. Well, fate had something in store for us via a random e-mail from Harvard Athletics. We already had plans to go see a Harvard football game on Saturday (and had had the tickets since like June) but on Tuesday evening I got an email with the subject line of “No Plans For Friday Night?” which then offered a discount on Harvard hockey tickets (which area already not that expensive, really most of Harvard’s sports tickets aren’t) – the opponent? None other than Boston College.

After about 10 minutes of debate we decided to to it, a 7:00pm hockey game, followed by a 12:30pm football game the next day. Sport on.

Now this wasn’t our first hockey game. Now, we’d seen Harvard play Dartmouth, Harvard pay Yale, and Boston College play Notre Dame. Of course we hadn’t actually seen either of our teams win. Harvard tied both games and BC lost to Notre Dame. So we considered ourselves to be “hockey cursed.” Now in fairness we did see a team win, the Bruins – a game which ended in an epic shootout that sent TD Garden into a frenzy and was a ton of fun. But we hadn’t seen either of our college teams win. This face off would either end that streak, or see them tie. A house divided.

Because we got our tickets so late, and really because BC’s hockey team is quite popular, we ended up sitting right behind the Harvard player’s box.

We were worried that we wouldn’t be able to see much, but to be honest it wasn’t that bad except for when the coaches stood on the bench. One of the coaches gave SB some gum though, so that sort of made up for it. 🙂

Speaking of coaches, the BC coach had an EYE-PATCH.

My phone’s zoom is terrible, but the eye-patch dude shouldn’t be hard to pick out.

If you weren’t aware, eye-patches grant magical powers, so I figured Harvard was doomed, and sure enough BC scored first – a fact that was made easier to deal with thanks to some Dipping Dots, the first time I’d had them in probably over a decade!

While the start of the game was pretty tight, things took a surprising turn as we got deep into the second period. Harvard was ranked 11th, while BC was 3rd, so Harvard was definitely the underdog – plus BC was on a winning streak. Well, something just clicked for Harvard and did not click for BC and at one point Harvard scored three goals in the course of like 1.5 minutes – a crap ton for hockey. While BC went on to score another goal, Harvard did too, and that’s how the game ended, Harvard 5, Boston College 2.

The curse was ended, for at least one of us. 😀

Now, the universe likes to balance things out – give and take so to speak, so the next day Harvard proceeded to lose to Yale in “The Game” – ending it’s 9 year victory streak. In case you weren’t aware, one of the oldest college football rivalries in the US is not any of the schools you probably think. In fact it’s none other than Harvard and Yale, football teams which largely seem to not exist outside of New England (in part due to some rules that force teams to favor academics over bowl schedules). “The Game” dates to 1875 and this year was the 133rd playing (certain years weren’t played due to WWI and WWII). Overall Yale leads 66–59–8, though until this year Harvard had won 9 straight games. Go figure that the game SB and I were able to attend was the one they’d lose.

In fact, on the whole my “The Game” experience wasn’t that great – and lest you think it’s just me being a sore loser, note that I still enjoyed last year’s game versus Penn where Harvard lost. The first issue was the cost. It cost $75 per person for “The Game” which while not outlandish in the realm of college football, is really fucking expensive for Harvard. So SB and I laid down $150 for the event. However, the cost wasn’t what really annoyed me, it was the people who ENDLESSLY walked in front of me. While I really like Harvard’s Colosseum I learned a couple of valuable lessons. 1) Good seats on a “normal” game (e.g. not packed) are not good seats for “The Game” and thus 2) don’t sit right next to an entry/exit row. While our other games here (which had like 1/20th capacity) had been fine, “The Game” is actually “over” capacity due to the fact they build extra seating for it – which also gets filled. The result was that what I thought would be good seats resulted in me not being able to see a solid 1/3 of plays, and then of those I could see, at least 75% were partially obstructed by one person or another. It got really, really old. For some reason people didn’t seem to realize that when they stopped to watch the game on the stairs, that they blocked 10-15 people’s view if the players were in the right spot on the field. I was not pleased, at all. So I paid $150 to really only see about %40 of a game of football. Plus – per SB who was our brave concession stand warrior – they were doing a HORRIBLE job of managing the crowds and food supplies, it took SB like 40 minutes just to get us food.

But, to stop whining and be thankful, it was a MARVELOUS day weather wise. Due to my Reynauds SB and I were concerned I was going to die, but it wasn’t an issue at all. Plus, the always weird (see here and here) Harvard marching band had this entire halftime show about about a giant Yale monster and some Harvard robot… and people running around with spatulas.. and yeah I have no idea.

The shinning moment of The Game was when a bunch of Yale students got naked and then got tossed around like rag-dolls by the cops (who they were intelligent enough to mock, because mocking the police has no consequences) and removed.

I post this here for perpetuity, for this is Yale.

Naturally, NO ONE blocked my view for that part, go figure. 😀

In another “not-the-brightest” moment, after their win (21-14) the Yale fans rushed the field, which I can understand after losing for nearly a decade. But what was great is that some of the Yallies didn’t seem to understand just how big of a drop it is from the stands to the field, so there were more than a few who were rolling around in agony after spraining (or worse) their ankles in the fall. It was kind of funny, but then again I’m kind of an asshole.

However, what I am even more thankful for than any of the above was the safe return of Tristen from California!

Look at that “manries” box, just look at it.

Yes, on October 19th Tristen went off on a “manries” spirit quest to the West coast (oddly very similar to Stephen King book I’m currently reading called “The Talisman“). He was gone until November 22nd (and thus missed a bunch of stuff, which he will hold over our heads for eternity). Why was he gone? Well, as mentioned, he was off at a special dinosaur hospital getting some of his “epic manries” battle wounds from countless adventures over the past four years. SB and I had been considering this for awhile and had determined that once we got back from both our Alaska Trip and our New England Trip that we’d send him off for some mending.

He was gone over a month, and while we had updates from his Doctor we were pretty nervous. Stuffing your child into a box a mailing them across the country is not an easy feat – and in many cases is illegal (sadly, think how cheap travel would be otherwise).

But Tristen being Tristen he did just fine. He has many stories of his “manries” endeavors in California – which range from lifting weights on the beach with The Beast, to joining a gang. As with most things, we’ll never know how many of these stories are true.

What we do know is that Tristen likes his schedule, not anyone else’s. So when Tristen arrived home a full day earlier than expected we shouldn’t have been surprised. As a result I had to run (literally run) home from school (screwing my shins all to heck in the process thanks to my backpack) to get him inside the apartment. There are, from time to time, packages stolen (or destroyed) from our building so we didn’t want Tristen sitting down there for long (lest he eat some thief). In total he maybe sat for there for all of 15 minutes. It was pretty obvious which box was Tristen’s, it was covered in all sorts of manliness.

Dragon #1.

A Triceratops.

A Brontosaurus (and a smaller horned dinosaur I am too pleb to recognize).

Dragon #2.

Yes, two dragons and three dinosaurs all on one box – very Tristen.

Before I even got him out of the box I could hear him saying “Res” over and over. He was happy to be home, and his brothers were happy to have him back!

I had essentially no time with them, other than getting Tristen out of his box, because I had to run back to school and ended up only being 5 minutes late to class. Later Tristen got to add a California stamp to his passport, making him the only one of us to spend any time in California outside of an airport!

So I was thankful that his hospital trip went well, and am thankful to have him back!

I also remain thankful for all our plant buddies (Little Friend is now at least 6.5′ tall again), including a new plant friend named Layla.

Layla technically lives with SB at her work, but she’s still a de facto member of our plant family. Speaking of which, while October has come and gone, the yearly conquest of the Thomas goes strong. In fact they recently claimed one of the Asian studies buildings on campus.

You laugh now, but when the pumpkins rise they’ll kill me last.

Another thing I’m thankful for is our weekly (or more recently, biweekly) family coffee dates. Last Wednesday was our first one with Tristen back, so we had cookies (and a cake-pop!) in addition to our coffee.

The story behind the cookie is one that Tristen loves to tell. Before he left for the hospital SB promised she would get him a cookie and a coffee. Well, on the day he was due to depart SB got him coffee, but forgot to get him a cookie. Poor little guy was a little heartbroken. Well, when he got back, he immediately started using cookie leverage, so SB not only got him a cookie, but also a cake pop. He seemed satisfied with the tithe.

Of course no Thanksgiving post is complete without Thanksgiving itself (unless you are an aforementioned advertiser, if so you’re probably focused on Valentine’s Day already). This was SB and I’s third Thanksgiving in Boston. The first year we did our own thang’, while the second year we were fortunate enough to have family come visit! This time around we were on own our again, not that we mind too much, it means more leftovers. 🙂

In fact this Thanksgiving started a bit uneventfully. SB had to work on Thanksgiving, but fortunately wasn’t on a late shift. So early in the morning SB took off while the boys and I stayed home. Our Thanksgiving preparations didn’t even really begin until after most people had probably already eaten. One thing that was really funny was that this was Pigsten’s first time seeing the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Pigsten is still a hatchling, and thus he LOVES colors (and organizing and digging), so he was AMAZED by the parade. He even moved his beloved box over next to Philip (our TV) to watch. When the Sinclair float came on he (and Tristen) about lost his shit.

The boys have a history with Sinclair, and in fact it’s ~~probably~~ most definitely my favorite gas station chain on Earth. Meem told me some people get Sinclair’s credit card just to have a dinosaur on their credit card, if I ever live near them I am totally going to do that, not even joking.

After the parade, and around the time most of Murka’ was slipping into a food coma, the boys and I started our meal preparations. All in all I’d spend nearly 4 hours in the kitchen, but since SB was doing her family part by working, the boys and I did our part by doing the lion’s share of the Thanksgiving prep.

First thing was naturally our “ricken” which came in at 5lbs – a good size for us. This year I make the “ricken” with pear, lemon, onion, spices, olive oil, and this awesome-for-cooking offering from Tröegs:

It was STRONG, I’m talking 11% ABV strong and with both honey and cherries in the brew I had to fight a certain little polar bear constantly to keep out of it. But it really worked wonders on our “ricken.”

After a lot of cooking, and a lot of catching sneaky boys trying to eat said cooking, SB made it home and completed our spread by throwing together a side salad so we could pretend to be healthy.

We had “ricken,” sweet potato casserole, rolls, green beans, cranberry-apple-orange spread, and pumpkin pie! Yum!

To celebrate Tristen making it back in time for Thanksgiving we even make our Cool Whip green on the pie!

We still have leftovers from the glorious feast. Part of that stems from the fact that the next day we went out with a couple of SB’s friends for a mini-friendsgiving at The Red House, a place down in the square that we had never been to before. It was a fun (even for anti-social ole’ me). We also had some of Stumptown’s Winter Cheer coffee, which is kind of a mini-tradition in and of itself for us.

Valentino really, really likes his coffee.

Naturally we didn’t just celebrate Thanksgiving with coffee, food, and friends – we also had beer – special Thanksgiving beer no less!

Two glasses, same bottle. I really need to work on my pour consistency. Usually I’m pretty good (I was taught in Denmark, literally) but I guess I haven’t been drinking enough lately. Good excuse to drink more if I do say so myself. 😀

Anyways, the Mayflower Thanksgiving Ale was really good, and I almost wish I didn’t have to share the bottle with SB. Almost. But in the end I’m thankful that she is around to share the beer with, just not too much beer sharing. 😛

So yes, though I moan and groan and complain pretty much incessantly on this blog, I am thankful for many things. I am thankful for SB, for the boys, for getting to talk to both Meem and my Dad around Thanksgiving, and for not having to do schoolwork for three straight days. December, at least until Christmas/New Years, is going to be pretty dang stressful for me due to a lot of different variables. But, for now, I am thankful that I had a nice little “oasis” week with my family, both near and far.

I only have a about one more week of regular classes left, which then leads into exam/paper/frantic-RA-work territory, so next post will probably focus on that lovely transition as well as a few other things that are going on. But for now, I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving! And remember, be a Scrooge like me, keep Christmas to 12 days. 😛

Until next time,
-Taco

Ethics n’ Stuff (7th Anniversary Festivities)

November 15, 2016 by Taco

Greetings,

I’ve finally forced myself to sit down and write out another blog post. I’ve been pretty busy lately (I realize I start essentially every post like this, which should probably give you some insight into just how busy I’ve been). It’s kind of crazy to think about that it’s already been 22 days since my last post, which was itself quite after the fact.

Anyways, Fall continues to roll on into New England. One thing I’ve noticed this year – that I had no reason to notice in past years – is just how variable Fall is depending on where you are. Sure, this makes sense, but I’ve now seen Fall coming really early (Alaska), early (Northern New England), and around the time I’d usually expect it (Boston). And while this next photo is now 3/4 of a month old (yikes, time is flying!) it does showcase a drastic difference in Fall foliage progress in this area even when just compared to the next state north, let alone Alaska.

Of course one thing about Fall – other than it being the objectively best season, is that it brings with it two very important events for yours truly: My anniversary and Halloween. Plus, we now have a tradition of adopting a Thomas during its quest for world domination. We are now up to Thomas III. Selecting the Thomas for the year is an important task, because our Thomas tends to live with us until July of the following year before returning to the Thomas Kingdom beneath the soil to plot further conquest. This time around we found a HUGE Thomas Mama at Whole Foods, who allowed us to take Thomas III home with us.

We generally get Thomas a week or two before Halloween and this time we adopted him on October 23rd.

We were sure to get a family photo in for our anniversary (another tradition) because a certain someone is off in California at a special hospital at the moment.

Yes, Tristen’s crazy lifestyle finally caught up with him and we decided that it was time to send him off to a proper doctor to mend all his “manlies” battle-wounds. SB can keep him touched up, but we needed a professional for a larger dinosaur tuneup. Of course finding someone who knows how to deal with dinosaurs like Tristen is a bit of a challenge, so we ended up sending him all the way to the other coast to get patched up. The bad news was that he missed our anniversary and Halloween, but the good news is that he is on track to back home before Thanksgiving! We’ve heard a little bit from him, but by and large we are ignorant of all his California hi-jinks, which is probably a good thing since one of the few emails I’ve gotten from him simply stated “I fought the law and the law won, send rokens.” I’ll be sure to post when Tristen has returned to us – though as of right now Tristen is the only person in our house who has been to California (excluding SB and I’s evening sojourn at SFO).

The other boys have missed their brother, but Pig has passed the time by continuing to accrue Yoga teaching hours far above and beyond his current 800 hour certificate, and even Valentino has been getting in on the action.

Plus there has been plenty of snuggling.

Also, on the topic of Tristen, MIL and FIL ran into a bunch of Tristen’s brothers and sisters out in Kansas!

Look at all those Tristens!

As a reminder we don’t need anymore children, so please refrain to acquiring more Tristens (or others) for us! Three is enough. 😛

However, despite the absence of one person in our apartment, we’ve gained another presence: a mouse. To be more precise, we’ve gained Theodore the mouse. Now, I haven’t seen Theodore with my own eyes, but SB has seen him at least once, if not twice. Thus far Theodore has caused us no problems and he seems pretty content to live under our stove and cabinets and in the walls. However, before too long Theodore will inevitably starting eating our food and pooing everywhere, so we’re currently engaged in Operation Mousetrap.

If we catch him, there’s some woods a decent clip from here that we are going to take him to. I say “if” because Theodore has proceeded to vanish since we put the trap out. Valentino and Pig haven’t helped because they actively warn Theodore about the trap each time they see him, so we’ll see what happens. In the meantime we are “family + Theodore” which really doesn’t bother me as I’d rather have Theodore than these huge god-forsaken centipede things we also have to deal with from time to time.

In addition to pumpkins, hospital visits, and mice, October also brought with it Halloween and SB and I’s 7th anniversary. Like usual we tend to roll Halloween and our anniversary into one big celebration. After last year, when we determined that we really can’t afford many places out here, we decided to go to the Thirsty Scholar, which is still too expensive for us, but not so expensive that we can’t go every so often (Tristen loves it, which made going without him a bit of a bummer, but also an excuse to go again we he is back). In addition to our yummy meal and beers at the the pub, I also made us a Hallo-versary cake, which turned out really nice!

It was a rainbow sprinkle white cake with self-mixed orange creme icing and of course a big ole’ jack-o-lantern on top! Everyone liked it and we ate on it for the next three days. In fact, I’m pretty sure we even snacked on it during the 7th game of the 2016 World Series. Now, I’m not a huge baseball person, but this was a pretty exciting World Series for a variety of reasons – and while I was pretty neutral towards both teams, I ended up favoring the Cubs because 1) 108 years is a long time and 2) Valentino favored the Cubs for obvious reasons, so I just went with him. So when they made their comeback from 3-1 we were pretty excited – a bit too excited, because when Game 7 rolled around and went late (10 innings) Valentino just couldn’t sleep. So a certain Taco and Polar Bear crawled out of bed and went back out into the living room and turned the TV on once the end-of-9th-inning rain delay was over.

Needless to say there was quite a bit of excitement in this house when the Cubs won, at least for the whole two of us who weren’t sleeping.

Naturally we paid for it the next day, but entire nations have risen and fallen since the last Cubs World Series win, so it was worth it.

All that said, it wouldn’t be a Dinosaur Bear post if there wasn’t at least some QQing about law school. Enter the MPRE.

An especially sinister looking version of the test’s logo.

It’s kind of funny, I saved that image (.png) and it had a white background, yet somehow when I compressed it the background turned black and the letters grey. I was going to fix it, but then I thought to myself that it was probably a sign (of evil) and that I should just leave it. Also, since this post has the acronym “MPRE” in it, it will probably result in a swarm of traffic like my other posts relating to tests – so hello random internet traveler! 🙂

Anyways, the MPRE – or Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination is an Ethics Test for lawyers-do be, because we don’t take enough tests as is. The MPRE, unlike the Bar Exam, can be taken outside of the state you want to apply your results to. For instance, you can take the MPRE in Oregon and have your results sent to the New York Bar, whereas you need to physically go to New York to take the New York Bar Exam. Further, unlike the Bar Exam which most states only let you sit for after graduation, you can take the MPRE before graduating, and most people do. All but two states require the MPRE, though not all states require the same passing score. The MPRE is scored from 50 to 150, and currently the minimum passing scores range from 75 to 86. The test itself consists of 60 multiple choice questions (50 graded, 10 experimental – though you don’t know which is which) that test your knowledge of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct and the ABA Model Code of Judicial Conduct and well as prevailing caselaw and generally accepted principles/practices that apply to ethics.

I can’t reproduce questions because of things like copyright law (and ethics, HURR HURR), but this is what a question on the MPRE might look like:

Question: Lawyer A is approached by potential client B. B tells A that B just murdered his family with an axe and that the axe is buried in B’s backyard. After discussing situation, A decides not to represent B, and B leaves understanding that A is not representing him. The next day A learns that B has been apprehended by the police, but that the police cannot locate the murder weapon. What is A required to do?

Answers:
A: Smoke weed er’ day
B: Go dig up the axe and kill A’s own family
C: Nothing
D: Bribe the cops to kill B in jail.
E: Run for President.

Now, that’s obviously meant to be a joke as the answer is clearly B. Not all MPRE questions are that easy. In fact there is a bit of a running thing with the MPRE where everyone jokes about how easy it is and how no one studies for it for more than a day and that no one fails it. Like most law student circle-jerks both of these things are bullshit. Most people study for it for more than they will admit, and people certainly “fail” it – I put “fail” in scare quotes because since states have variable thresholds, one person’s fail is another person’s pass. Generally speaking the goal is to get 86+ so you’ve passed in all jurisdictions, but if you are dead-set on a state only requiring 75, then a 75 is passing for you, though it’s technically failing for most people. You get NOTHING other than typical law student narcissism if you score above 86. That is to say, an 86 passes in all states just the same as a 150 does.

So yeah, in sum it’s a big multiple choice ethics tests that forces you out of bed before the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning and will set you back $80 just to sign up for.

Almost as frustrating as the test itself is that per the administrators (the NCBE and those lovely bastards the LSAC) testing centers aren’t guaranteed and “travel may be required.” Basically, there are about 5 testing centers for the entire United States, and they fill up 6-7 years in advance. I signed up 5 months before the test and still had to travel 12 miles away (which is a lot in a metro area when you have no car), though compared to some people who had to travel and get hotels I did pretty well. I ended up taking an Uber both ways because it would have taken me 2 hours each way to get there via public transportation, and I likely wouldn’t have made it there via the MBTA by 8:30am even if tried and there were magically no delays.

The cool thing about going out to my testing center (which definitely excludes Uber cost, which Meem was kind enough to partially defray) was that I got to see a brand new place, Brandeis University. More specifically, I got to see their castle (Usen Castle).

I told you it was a castle.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to take the test in the Castle, but my building was right next to it, and since I got there a bit before the doors opened I got a chance to walk around the Castle.

Usen Castle sits atop “Boston Rock” which is the highest point on Brandeis’s campus. The Castle is currently all residential housing for students, though according to the Wikipedia the university is planning on tearing most of it down in 2017 to replace it with newer housing that will hold more students – this is why we can’t have nice things, though there is apparently a hold on the demolition project right now. Anyways, it made me think of Tristen. He was taking the MPRE as well, though someplace out in California and thus wouldn’t even start his test until three hours after me.

From its lofty perch the Castle has a pretty good view of Boston in the distance, especially on a crisp Fall morning.

As for the test itself, the administration was certainly not the worst standardized test environment I’ve been, and while the head proctor went unnecessarily ballistic at one point because someone defied her ALMIGHTY AUTHORITAH’ and then lectured us for 5 minutes straight about her AUTHORITAH’ to write us up, that was fortunately before the test started. The content of the test was mostly what I expected, though on the whole the test seemed to offer up weird answer choices compared to past administrations. I left feeling pretty neutral about it, which is how I felt on my practice tests (as opposed to law school exams where I normally feel either 1 – Like shit or 2 – Fine n’ Dandy) and I ended up passing those (I’m aiming for 86+ for reasons I’ll discuss at some point in the next year, maybe). So I’m definitely on the “Confident” side of the scale, but I won’t know for sure until sometime around December 6th, so we’ll see what happens.

But, since there is no rest for the wicked, I didn’t have much in the way of a post-MPRE resting period. The next week I essentially went straight into another paper for a class, and from there into preparations for an 8 hour long meeting I had with some Senate committee representatives, which despite going really well was still really draining. Emperor Dolan was also elected in the interim.

SO, this weekend (when I’m writing this) I’m trying to catch up on some stuff like blogging, reading – for class sadly, and also getting started on yet another paper. But the good news is that I shouldn’t see another exam until the middle of December, though sadly my law school exam period this semester is going to suuuuuuck, but I’ll complain about that later.

For now it’s back to some coffee…

…and trying to catch up with all the stuff I’ve neglected in the past two weeks. Here’s to law school – oh, and year 8, that too! 😛

Until next time,
-Taco

The New England Adventure

October 25, 2016 by Taco

Greetings,

I’ve been in a bit of a posting slump recently, primarily because I’ve been busy and my RA position has a tendency to eat up the time that I formally used to blog. Still, I’ve had little adventures in the meantime and over my Fall Break (which is usually an oxymoron) Meem came out and her and SB and I went on a long-planned “New England Trip.”

Due to the relatively hectic nature of our lives – and also because we have no car – we haven’t really had a chance to get out of the Boston area much. Yes, we’d been fortunate enough to go down to Cape Cod, but other than that we hadn’t had much of a chance to see New England aside from when we drove in with Lillian. So, two of things which had remained on our “Boston Bucket List” were a trip to Ben and Jerry’s in Vermont and a weekend trip to Maine. From these two items we got the idea to do it during the Fall for the leaves, and from this we got the idea to extend it it to New Hampshire as well, and from there I decided to throw in Rhode Island and Connecticut because why not do all of New England? At some point in all the planning process Meem joined in because she was wanting to come out and see Salem anyways, so it all just sort of fell together into a whirlwind 6 day, 5 night jaunt through a decent clip of all the New England states (which as yet another reminder does not include New York). My Fall Break is technically only 2 days (M & T), but I was able to scrounge up enough time (and also skip some stuff, but 3LOL) to be gone the previous Th & F as well. Meem flew in on Wednesday night and I met her at Harvard Square after my glasses were over.

The next morning,Thursday, October 6th, with rental car in.. hand? we began our voyage and set out from Boston. This route map shows the path we took, with each number corresponding to where we stopped for the night (i.e. the numbers aren’t all the places we stopped to be tourists, only where our hotels were). The whole thing moves clockwise if it wasn’t obvious.

White River Junction, VT
Gorham, NH
Bar Harbor, ME
Portland, ME
Danvers, MA

So, you kind of get the gist of how things went down. Now, while I’d normally go through our trip in a journal-style approach (e.g. Alaska) I unfortunately don’t have the time nor gumption to do that for this blog post, plus I don’t have the full range of pictures at my disposal just yet. So, what I’ve decided to do is to approach things in a manner I’ve done in the past, which is to limit myself to a max 20 words per photo (below the photo as usual) and I’ve selected 80 photos from various points in our trip. The result: I cannot devote more than 1600 words to our New England Adventure. As a point of comparison, my average post is around 2,437 words (though I’ve already written 500 words anyways, haha). Of course even this approach will take a few hours to draft – because blogging is TIME CONSUMING, and I make NO MAHNIES from it.

Anyways, the challenge to that 20 word limitation is that I need to more succinctly tell the story, lest Tristen bite me for not mentioning his exploits. So, with the introduction out of the way, let’s get started!

The 2016 Meem, Taco, SB, and The Boys New England Adventure of Joyness and Ice Cream
~~~~~~~~~

We started our adventure in Newport, Rhode Island, where we visited the “40 Steps” and took in the coastline.

Despite being the smallest state Rhode Island has some impressively large boulders on its rocky coasts.

The coastal area of Newport has all sorts of old mansions which belonged to to families such as the Vanderbilts.

After Rhode Island we headed to spleepy-ish village of Mystic, Connecticut home to the Mystic River.

One of the village’s more prominent features is its bascule bridge which still operates!

We had a yummy lunch from Karma Kitchen right down next to the river.

After a night in White River Junction, Vermont we headed northwest for Waterbury, VT (home to Ben and Jerry’s).

Eventually the we drove up and out of the fog and got to take in the wonderful Vermont countryside.

Next stop was the world famous Ben and Jerry’s factory, which is actually the top tourist spot in VT.

Look at all those delicious flavors, needless to say we all went on the factory tour.

The factory itself was nestled in a very pristine area just outside of Waterbury and near Mount Mansfield.

If you follow a trail up behind the factory you’ll come to their (in)famous “Flavor Graveyard” – a bonafide graveyard.

Here lies “Oatmeal Cookie Chunk,” my favorite of the dearly departed ice cream flavors. It was a sad day.

Just down the hill from the factory are where 3 Ben and Jerry cows live, we were drawn to them.

As were all of the boys, the cows are Ben and Jerry’s mascots after all, so they are basically celebrities.

From there we headed east with our next destination being the White Mountains of New Hampshire (not Alaska).

This was one of the first good views we got of the mountains on the horizon as we adventured onward.

Eventually we got off onto the scenic “Base Station” road, which led us to the Mt. Washington Cog Railway.

This was SB and I’s second Cog Railway, but it was Meem’s first. We were all excited to go up.

There were two trains going up (last of the day), we got the far less crowded one. It was good.

Pig and Pigsten were up front with SB and I and Pig really seemed to enjoy himself.

The treeline on Mt. Washington is only at ~4,500′ because the Presidential Range has horrendous winters.

Here is an awesome shot of the fall foliage giving way to the rocky tundra further up the mountains.

At points the Cog Railway reached inclines of 37.5° – for comparison a regular train can generally only manage <5°.

Many trails cross over the railway towards the summit, the most famous of which is the Appalachian Trail!

The summit of Mt. Washington checks in at 6,288′ – the highest point in the entire Northeastern United States.

Since we were last trip of the day, we got to take in the AMAZING sunset views.

Pigsten watches the sunset? Or Pigsten marvels as his nuclear warhead erases his enemies from history? We may never know.

We got really lucky for sunset, the median cloud cover for the mountain is 84% to 94% – we had none.

Once back down to base camp (~2,700′) Pig made friends with a big sleepy black bear.

After a night in Gorham, NH we headed out into a thinny and found ourselves in Gilead, Maine.

Here we trained to be gunslingers and lost SB in a bunch of Stephen King references (he’s from Maine).

To continue the King theme, the boys searched the railroad tracks for a body, but found none (or ate it).

The fog in western Maine persisted well into the morning, but it gave everything a really atmospheric (eerie?) tone.

I especially like this photo, it give you a good idea of what most of the countryside looked like.

Not only did the fog contribute to the thinny-like quality of the roads, there weren’t many other cars out either.

Eventually, just like in VT, things cleared up a bit and all the colors exploded from the haze.

We ate lunch at Dysart’s, the truck stop which inspired “Trucks,” or as you probably remember it “Maximum Overdrive.”

Next up was the Master of Horror’s house, located in Bangor. I was surprised by how close you can get.

Needless to say Meem and I got lots of fan-girl photos in front of it.

Just down the street Tristen encountered another dinosaur. Manlies.

Our next stop was Mount Hope Cemetery, which inspired, among other things, Pet Sematary.

While the old part of the cemetery was indeed kind of creepy, the newer part had loads of duckie buddies.

Once past Bangor we kept heading east along Route 9 – itself central to several King works.

We made our way up to Calais, ME (highest point [latitude] on the east coast) and looked at Canada.

We then made our way down to Bar Harbor, ME on Mount Desert Island, where Halloween had arrived (sort-of) early.

Everyone liked the lobster version of our hotel’s do not disturb sign, Valentino tried to eat it.

After a yummy lobster dinner at Jack Russell’s Steakhouse and Brewery everyone got some much needed sleep.

The next morning we woke to our only rainy day of the trip, but we didn’t let that stop us!

We headed into Acadia National Park and up Cadillac Mountain (highest [elevation] point on the east coast) – awesome views!

The coastal areas of Mount Desert Island were covered in dark rocks and cliff faces, it was really cool.

We took more than a few opportunities to get off the “main” park loop and get closer to the water.

One awesome feature is the “Thunder Hole” which is a natural tidal rock inlet which can produce a HUGE roar.

In addition to its natural features, Acadia is also famous for its myriad of carriage roads and bridges.

Acadia itself doesn’t actually cover the entire island, but even outside of the park you still have great scenery.

Despite the way it looks, the Bass Harbor Head Light is not possessed, its just covered by an acrylic shroud.

Speaking of red, there were lots of berries growing around the lighthouse as well! Valentino still has some.

After departing Mount Desert Island we drove into storms, but despite the rain we ended up with quite the sunset!

That night we stopped in Portland, ME and Grandma Meem purchased a manlies backhoe for Pigsten (complete with rock candy).

The next morning we had breakfast and got ready, well the boys watched cartoons while we got ready.

From there we headed to the Portland Head Light, which was commissioned by George Washington and completed in 1791.

The coastal area around the lighthouse was very rocky (a constant theme for Maine) – notice the old shipwreck marker.

We then progressed back into Massachusetts and to Halibut Point, located on Cape Ann (the northern counterpart of Cape Cod).

Halibut Point was once a granite quarry, but now its a gorgeous state park with AMAZING coastline for wave watching.

Also on Cape Ann was Hammond Castle, which once belonged John Hays Hammond Jr. but now belongs to Tristen.

Here is a great coastal view from ~~Hammond~~ Tristen Castle.

[INFORMATIVE PAUSE POINT: Ok so this is technically cheating, but mah authoritah. What follows is our visit to Danvers and Salem. If you have not, I strongly encourage you to read my Salem Post (or to re-read it) before continuing as it is much more in-depth than this post will be. While we visited most of the same places as last time, the addition of a car and more time (both highly useful) also allowed us to visit Sarah Osbourn‘s house, the Howard Street Cemetery (previously a field where Giles Corey was crushed to death), the Putnam House, the Putnam Burial Ground, Sarah Holten’s House, and also the Endecott Pear Tree (where a douche security guard chased us away) which isn’t related to the Witch Trials but it is still cool (and is even older). Not all of these things will be pictured below, but feel free to inquire if you want to know more about these places. As such, below is just a overview of some of our revisits and new-visits, constrained to the structure of this post.]

After leaving Cape Ann behind we headed down to Danvers, MA to start my 2 day “Witch Trials Tour.”

Because we had a car this time, we were able to get in a few extra trial-related locations in Danvers.

Foremost of which, for me, was the Putnam Burial Ground, resting place of Thomas, Ann Sr. and Ann Jr. Putnam.

They now lie under this unmarked mound – some would say a fitting end for three of the hysteria’s prominent architects.

Here is Sarah Osborne‘s house, she was one of the first three people accused at the outbreak of the events.

Despite the museum/house not being open, the grounds of the Rebecca Nurse homestead were, which was a nice surprise.

This gave me a chance to give Meem the “Nurse Homestead” portion of the tour, including the historical graveyard.

This graveyard likely holds Rebecca Nurse and very likely holds George Jacobs, making it the only known location of victims.

Even if you aren’t drawn in by the witchcraft stuff, the homestead is still worth visiting for the scenery.

Here is Judge Holten’s house, his wife Sarah gave damaging testimony against Rebecca Nurse during the trials.

Once in Salem we passed by Hawthorne‘s House of the Seven Gables – getting a better view of it this time.

We also passed the ritzy and selective “The Bunghole” a true testament to Salem’s lasting historical legacy.

Of course no Salem trip would be complete without walking next to SB’s most favorite ~~haunted~~ house in the world.

Our “Witch Trials Tour,” and really the larger New England Adventure came to a close in Salem’s Burying Point.

~~~~~~~~~

And that wraps us up, as from there we just headed back to the apartment, SB dropped off the car, and then we all got to bed decently early (for us, so not that early) since Meem had an early flight the next day, I had classes and RA work, and SB had a full work day. As with all of our adventures, it was a lot of fun and it was nice to have Meem with us (the boys highly approved of Grandma Meem’s accompaniment). We also got really lucky with the weather (only 1 rainy day!) and also in that the leaves were starting to really change right when we were on our trip. The year before the leaves had been mostly all dead/gone in a lot of areas, and in other areas hadn’t even changed yet. A lot of this stemmed from the drought New England has had this year, which while really bad for a lot of reasons, ended up being really good for us a “leaf-peepers” given the fact that we really only had one weekend to make this trip work. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed following along our route! I know I wasn’t super detailed by Taco standards, but I think there’s enough here to show you that you should probably take a Fall New England trip for yourself someday if you haven’t already, and this is especially true if you are a Stephen King Fan. 🙂

Also, I’ve been told I give much better Witch Trial tours than most, I accept beer and food as payment, just saying. 😛

Until next time,

-Taco

Bringing in 2017

Fall of 3L (also Puffin Adoption #2 & Start of #3)

Giving Thanks (2016)

Ethics n’ Stuff (7th Anniversary Festivities)

The New England Adventure

The 2016 Meem, Taco, SB, and The Boys New England Adventure of Joyness and Ice Cream
~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~

Search all of Dinosaur Bear

Disclaimer:

Subscribe

The 2016 Meem, Taco, SB, and The Boys New England Adventure of Joyness and Ice Cream ~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~

Search all of Dinosaur Bear

Disclaimer:

Subscribe

The 2016 Meem, Taco, SB, and The Boys New England Adventure of Joyness and Ice Cream
~~~~~~~~~