It seems as though every morning I wake up to the wind whipping against my window. It is that time of year when the trees are barren, the ground is hard, chills run up your spine every time you get out from underneath a blanket, and the weather bringing strong winds and unexpected snow. This whirl wind that I wake up to is kind of representative of me right now. It seems as though everything is going by so quickly that it doesn’t even feel like I was there. I only have 5 more days of classes. Of which, we will be covering some of the most important topics within a very short amount of time. It is crunch time for all professors while they cram in everything they didn’t get to or schedule make up classes to comply with ABA regulations. I just find that all of this information crammed in at the last minute has been keeping me up from 6:30am to midnight for the past week. I need all this time to read the materials, prepare for class and continue writing papers. It isn’t so bad, but just tiring and there is not a lot of social activities going on so you don’t really get to see a lot of people unless they are studying too. Well, wish me luck with surviving the last 5 days of class.
Archive for November, 2007
As with most of the posters lately, I too I have taken a while to put something up. The semester is racing towards the end and so it seems everything is piling up to get finished. One class is finished already, environmental writing. I enjoy the class and fortunately we have it again in the spring. I have a huge paper due in extinction and climate change. I keep chipping away at it, but the pressure is even more because it is our only grade. I’ll have a take home test in energy regulation and policy. We were given a former exam and it doesn’t look as bad as I expected. It will definitely take some time though. My only in class exam will be in environmental law. We were given a sample exam and it doesn’t look overwhelming but I still need to do a lot to prepare myself for the test. It is open book and notes, but for time and organization wise, everyone suggests outline everything.
The fall colors are all gone now. It seemed like one day lots of colors then the next, nothing. The locals say it wasn’t much of a fall this year, but I thought it was pretty neat. The temps are now in 30s and 40s much of the week. I think you get used to it, because it doesn’t feel so cold to me, but then again I’m not out in it very much. We had our first actual snow on Tuesday. Unfortunately the roads weren’t clean when I went to school. I hear the snow caught the road crews off guard, I hope that’s the case. I put my car in a lower gear and just crept along. I was grateful I didn’t have any hills to go up or down. I thought about walking. I only live two miles from school and would walk all the time if the local traffic didn’t treat our highway like an interstate. If we get a big snow and the roads are iffy, I will probably walk and pray a car doesn’t hit me.
The holidays are in full swing. Today is our last day of Thanksgiving break. I enjoyed having the time off. I didn’t go home. We felt it was a lot of money to fly home with Christmas being right around the corner. In undergrad we had the whole week off, but we only got two days here, however some teachers canceled their classes on Wednesday. I hung around here, did lots of little chores I had been meaning to do. I had big plans for school work but I knew before the break started it wasn’t going to happen.
My birthday was two weeks ago. Some of us went out to eat in West Lebanon. We went to 7 Barrel Brewery and it was pretty good. So far someone has had a birthday every month and we try to go to different places in the area. I don’t feel older but I don’t think anyone ever does. I certainly don’t look the part. Everyone says I will love looking so young when I’m older, but it can be annoying now.
We only have two weeks of classes left. It seems like I just got here. In typing that I just thought about everything I still have left to do…oh crap. That is one thing about getting older; time goes by faster and faster. Maybe I should pull my Delorean out of storage.
Hi! Did ya miss me?
Yes, I’ve been terribly neglecting blogging lately. Every day I would think, oh, I’ll write another post soon, but not today… and the next thing I knew, over a month had gone by. No, I don’t really expect that anyone much missed my posts, but I’ll admit that, back when I was a prospective student, I really enjoyed reading Todd’s posts and I missed them when there weren’t new ones. Which there haven’t been in awhile. (What’s this, Todd, you don’t blog anymore just ’cause you’ve graduated or something?!) So yeah.
School work really caught up with me (ha — as if I were ever ahead of it!). Since my last post I completed the first of two major memorandum assignments in my writing class (last month) and have the second one due soon. I’m glad we get another semester of writing in the spring, ’cause I like it.
My other class, Environmental Law, is good too. I’ve noticed that Professor Firestone always starts at the right side of the chalkboard and works his way to the left. That reminded me of… me. Back when I was in college I noticed that I had this inexplicable habit of working from right to left sometimes. On exams I would start around the middle of the page, go left to right and top to bottom, and then when I ran out of space at the bottom, I would find the space I needed… to the left of what I’d written. It must have annoyed the graders, and I think at least once I lost a point for my work being so sloppy (or because the grader, to use his own words, “just had to take a point off for something” — I got a 99% on that exam). I have no idea why I worked that way, but I did notice that I had that habit, for whatever reason. I seemed to take notes that way, too. But I don’t so much in law school. Maybe because of the subject matter: in college I took mostly science, math, engineering, stuff like that, so most of my work involved equations and stuff. For some reason, writing down English words instead of numbers and formulas inspires me to be more normal, or so it seems. I don’t know what Professor Firestone’s excuse is.
Actually he was an engineer before he went to law school, so maybe there’s just something about engineering that does that to people. But still, engineering is not what he’s teaching us, and usually there isn’t a lot of math in his class. But on Monday there was some — actual calculus! That was fun. (Now, any math-o-phobic prospective students out there: don’t be alarmed. Prof. F. has assured me that we won’t need calculators on the environmental law exam.)
But getting back to the point: today is Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving! Take a few moments to be grateful for the good things in your life — it’s healthful to do so. Among other things, I am thankful for VLS.
Today VLS provided a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, free of charge, for members of the local community — those who are poor or alone or simply wanted to attend. Even those who couldn’t leave home were provided food, as I understand it. Isn’t it lovely of the school to do that? It’s one thing to sit in an ivory tower and proclaim the virtues of community service, giving back, and so on, but it means so much more to actually do a good deed for people right there in your own backyard (practically). VLS really “walks the talk,” so to speak.
I especially liked the squash. It was yummy. I felt a little rude taking the last piece of chocolate pie (I am of the opinion that an item does not qualify as dessert if it’s not chocolate, and of course traditional Thanksgiving “desserts” don’t meet my exacting standard), but then I discovered that two more chocolate pies materialized afterward. If only I’d saved room to sample three different chocolate desserts! Ah, but gluttony is the name of the game on Thanksgiving Day. Or is it? Let’s not lose sight of the real point of this inspired holiday — thankfulness.
Thank you, VLS.
So I woke up today to find the ground covered in snow which made me really excited. I can’t wait to go skiing!! Although I’ve never been skiing, I got the beginner packages to Stowe and Burke so hopefully I won’t crash into a tree. Anyways, i’m sticking around for thanksgiving so hopefully we’ll get some more snow for the holiday weekend. Finals are coming up and I’m kind of getting STRESSED!!! Anyways, I hope everyone has a great break and eat lots of turkey and drinks lots of wine and be MERRY!!!
Peace
I have been a wildlife manager (hunter or fisherwoman) since the age of six and have continued my involvement throughout life. For the past three years, I have been unable to escape Michigan State University to participate in this family tradition. However, this morning, I got outdoors, listen to the chickadees sing, watch the fog roll in and out over the course of the morning, and to watch a small doe wander into the field I was sitting at the edge of. This doe (female deer) was no bigger than my 70 lb. Irish setter and she was alone. In Michigan, I have observed small does, but never by themselves. So I wondered where the other deer were. I watched her quietly and patiently over the course of thirty minutes to see if she was signaling to other deer, but there were no others. I was delighted that this little doe wandered out into the field so I could observe the Vermont wildlife first hand without it knowing that I was watching it. The doe wasn’t scared, but just kept grazing and being alert to every sound she heard. I had an amazing morning, but unfortunately, I am feeling very tired before environmental law.
If you want to know more about VT deer hunting, I have put together some facts for you below.
Vermont’s antler regulations put in place in 2005 are designed to allow more bucks to live longer. ”A deer population with a healthy number of older bucks is better for the deer herd, and it means exciting hunting opportunities for Vermont hunters,” said Fish & Wildlife Commissioner Wayne Laroche. Vermont allows for an annual limit of two bucks per year where a legal buck must have at least one antler with two or more points one inch or longer. However, one anterless deer may be taken in 19 of the 24 wildlife management units only during archery season. Vermont hunters saw a dramatic improvement in the quality of bucks taken last year. About 42 percent of the bucks shot were 2 ½ years old. This fall hunters will be seeing more 3 ½ year old bucks, a prospect that has hunters planning with great excitement for Vermont’s upcoming hunting seasons. You can see recent photos of Vermont bucks on the Fish & Wildlife website . Last year, hunters or wildlife managers took 12,682 deer in Vermont’s deer hunting seasons.
*These views are my own and do not reflect the views of VLS.
So it’s been a while since I’ve posted. My excuse is that I had my password saved on Internet Explorer which has decided not to work on my computer anymore. I have now switched to Firefox like everyone else. My computer is currently in the process of falling apart. It will now not work without having the power cord plugged in and it has decided not to really connect to wireless anymore. Needless to say, I rely on good ol fashioned pens and paper in class. It’s starting to get cold outside. I checked weather.com and it’s supposed to snow next weekend! I haven’t seen real snow in many many years so it’ll be a real shock. Especially considering I’ve never experienced a real fall (the leaves are actually supposed to fall?!) and had to sweep up all the leaves on my front stairs. I had a stressful week when 3 different assignments were due (a memo, a paper for Energy, and an outline for Extinctions) but the stress has passed, and a whole new wave of academic concerns is about to come up. Another memo (the pressure is on now because there was only one A out of both classes on the last one), the Ethics paper and presentation, the Extinctions paper, and, of course, finals. I only have two finals this semester, Energy and Environmental Law. Energy is a take home and Environmental Law is an open materials final. Not to say that I’m not thoroughly enjoying my classes…I definitely am. Each class and each professor has their own quirks that are great. If only I could list quotes from Professor Firestone…he makes me laugh more than any other professor I have. Out of all the classes I am taking this semester, I only truly dislike one of them. One out of five is not bad at all. I’ve been going out of town a lot on the weekends while I still can before it gets too cold for me to travel comfortably. I’ve made my last trip for a while (minus Thanksgiving…I’m going home to California) and I have an undetermined trip to Boston to visit my friend Kate from college (she’s in grad school there). By that time, I’m sure I’ll need to escape back to a big city, and away from other law school students to study for finals. Thursday night I went on an adventure with my friend Sarah and scoped out potential places to study for finals. It’s scary that its the first week of November and we already have to start worrying about finals!!!
This post was all over the place! I’ll be posting more often now that I remember my password : )
