I am sitting in Newark, NJ airport waiting to fly into Burlington, VT.  I haven’t been here too long, but I just got off of a red-eye from San Fransisco, CA.  So it has been a very long night and a hard adjustment to the time difference.  I went to CA for a National Board meeting for the sorority that I have been apart of.  Now…I know what your thinking. Sorority?  Yes.  However, it is a professional agricultural sorority.  Most of our chapters do not have chapter houses, we are not allowed to drink at all at any function, and most of our chapters are not Greek.  It was a good board meeting, but very long.  I am glad to be heading back to VT, but I know that there will definitely be more humidity than there was in CA.  I can already feel it in this airport.  Well we are about to board…

Summer session started on Monday bright and early at 9am.  The day was very long with taking two classes from 9-4pm.  It reminds me of elementary school when I would actually went to school all day long with very few breaks.  Overall, I enjoyed both my Clean Water Act and Ocean & Coastal Law and Policy courses.  However, now that I am a few days in I am finding that there is at least 200 pages of reading a night and that my free time is limited to sleeping, eating and driving.  I really like the content of the courses and the professors instruction on both topics.  I am learning a lot, but in a very short time period that is jam packed with information and 3 hour lectures.  I look forward to the last 5 classes and what I still have to learn within them. 

So after Graduation and working for about a week and a half in the Dean’s Office, I decided to go home for a break for first term summer classes.  I decided to do this becuase I am taking two classes for Term 2 which is only two weeks long.  So I figured it would be a ton of work and to get away for a few weeks to see family and friends plus my sister graduated from high school.  Going home was great, but as always a long drive and it still cost less than flying even though gas prices ranged from $3.99 to 4.25 per gallon along the way.  Since I am back in Vermont though, I have been doing last minute details and wrapping up stuff before classes start Monday since I’ve been told by many who are just taking one class during this first term that I won’t have time for a lot of things.  So I am hoping to get most errands and projects finished this weekend.  Besides doing this, I have been preparing for one of the classes since school ended which I think will help me in the long run.  But I guess we will see…  Well back to reading and outlining.

I’m done with finals and just had the May Graduation Ceremony for the MSEL/JDs.  There are two graduation ceremonies for the MSELs, but I couldn’t make it to the July Graduation so I decided to go to the one this weekend.  Itwas a great experience.  My mom flew in from Michigan and hung out with me for the weekend.  We didn’t do too much besides relax around the house while I was reading and summarizing for summer classes.  I think it was fun for her to see what I go through on a daily basis or something similar.  Even though I am not officially done with my MSEL until August classes end, I had a great time at graduation and celebrating my hard work thus far in the academic year.  I am really excited for my summer classes.  I am taking Clean Water Act and Ocean and Coastal Law during Term 2 and Mediation of Land Use, Water and Marine Conflicts during Term 4.  There is also several conferences going on around campus along with a summer speaker series.  I think these extra presentations enhance the education I am recieving at VLS because they bring real-life scenrios to our attention and help us understand how to apply the concepts and tools we are learning everyday to these scenarios.  Two summers ago, I was at the Michigan State University Kellogg Biological Station taking courses and attended their summer speaker series and learned alot about many different topics, networked with faculty, staff and community members, and learned how to apply the knowledge from my summer courses.  Overall, I am very excited for this summer and cannot wait until classes start! 

So I am in finals mode finally, but am finding it really hard to concentrate on studying.  I have a final on Friday and another one on the next Tuesday along with a take home final.  I am pretty nervous about my Administrative Law final since it is my first closed book exam.  Plus I haven’t checked out my ExamSoft to make sure it works.  That is software that you use to complete your exams if you don’t want to use the bluebooks.  I used it last semester and had no problems, but some people have lost their entire exams.  So I am worried about losing my exam one of these days.  Well wish me luck!

Today we had our end-of-semester shindig. With a chocolate fountain. Chocolate fountains are always worthy of a mention. As is the sight of Dean J. dancing with a little girl. Dean J. is my hero. She rules.

Today we turned in our final assignment in our research and writing class. I hope ours seems adequately cohesive… not like totally separate things written by three different people and then lumped together. *Sigh*

Classes are over and I have no exams, but I’m not done yet. Still gotta write a paper for ADR. Ugh. Just shoot me now. See, the thing about ADR is, see, I don’t really know how to please the professor. We’ve turned in two short papers already and both times I got, shall I say, less than perfect grades, but not much of an idea of how to do better. On the last one, all the feedback I got was that I should have used a certain word instead of the word I chose for the purpose (although according to the dictionary my word wasn’t totally wrong, even if it wasn’t the best choice). That’s it. (Oh, and use 12 pt. font.) Not to mention that everyone in the class is terrified of being an unwitting plagiarist. Sometimes you have to put quote marks around a single word. Yes, really.

*Sigh* I would have preferred an exam….

This is my final week of spring semester classes.  Needless to say, this semester has flown by and I am not sure where it went.  Since last Friday, it has been in the mid-70s, the moon is shining bright, and the frogs are out all night.  It is finally spring and I can feel summer is coming.  This makes it hard to sit in a classroom or library all day reading, studying and outlining for finals.  I know I will get though this week and finals, but it is so hard with all the outside weather temptations. 

Okay so I’m a little behind on my blogging.  And I meant to keep up this semester.

Spring break caused me to get behind.  Or, should I say, further behind.  I lost all my momentum when I had a break!  Aurgh!

For spring break I took a trip, and when I returned to the airport in Manchester (”Manchvegas” as some call it) around –what– 10 or 11pm on the night before classes resumed, I discovered I had a flat tire.  *sigh*  So I pulled over and began rummaging through my trunk for my spare and jack, and started jacking up the car.  It had been a long day and I just wanted to go to bed, but was still a couple hours away from home (assuming I could actually drive).  A line from Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening kept running through my thoughts: “And miles to go before I sleep.”

That line haunts me still, as the end of the semester looms mere days away and yet I must complete some pretty major assignments before I am done.

Spring is in full swing in VT.  The bird are chripping, the rivers banks are full to the brim, and students are studying 24/7.  Since I live a little out of town, I get to see how the river has been progressively filling.  Last night driving home, the road was shut down to one lane becuase the other lane was covered with water!  I couldn’t believe it.  I have never seen so much water in my life, and the all the snow isn’t even gone yet.  So there is more flooding to come I am pretty sure.  I think this is why they call it “Mud Season,” but I haven’t had to bring out my mud boots just yet. 

apparently it really has been a long time since i’ve written.  is it april already? i had an epiphany in administrative law today that there is exactly a month (!!!!!) until that final.  eek! there is still ice on the ground and it snowed a bunch the other day.  this semester has been a bit crazy, and it’s already getting down to crunch time.  it doesn’t feel like it because of the weather but the locals i’ve run into at the soro market have assured me that this is the longest winter they’ve had in a while.  however, the big black bunnies that frequent campus have been hopping around and munching on the now exposed grass.  the really huge mounds of snow/ice are gone but now we have tons of mud. therefore, i am escaping back to atlanta for part of the summer and then returning back to exile here in soro.  soro is really gorgeous during the summer though and it got really hot in august.  it’s weird to already be thinking about summer when i am still wearing my coat and boots around though.  i feel like i have a million and a half papers to write and my administrative law final to worry about and my take home energy final…just one more month! that’s all for a quick update…for now : )