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.