Time for a Breather...

Wow, the past week has been beyond ridiculous. I've got a lot to say, so if you just want a summary and don't want to read this whole post here it is:
Went to the dog park, witnessed WAY too many times for a competition, made tacos and studied with Grace, took a Contracts test, and took the Bluebook test.

On Friday Grace and I went to a different Dog Park in Hoover, and we like it MUCH better than the one in Green Springs. It has obstacle/agility courses, sand pits, lots of shade, plenty of places for humans to sit, and doggy water fountains :-). We also met a lot of really nice people and a not so nice cat. This cat comes running out of the bushes and decides the best place for it to camp out would be right outside the dog park. Of course most of the dogs start freaking out and trying to chase it or play with it, so what does the cat do? This idiot cat decides to climb up the fence around the dog park and sit right on top of it so now the dogs can reach it's tail. It wasn't a pretty sight, and it got really angry when it's tail got bitten, but it wouldn't leave!

Grace and I ended up taking Jersey and Lu to the other side of the park and met two Poodles that actually ran around (it was really weird to see a Poodle move at all), a 6 month old Brittany, and a Boston Terrier. I thought it was super weird that out of all the dogs that could've been at the park, those three were there!

Afterwards I had to run to campus and witness for my friend in an Arbitration competition. Arbitration is SUPER boring. Luckily I was able to use my notes and didn't have to cram MORE information into my already overloaded brain. The worst part was having to sit there through the whole thing.

After I witnessed for Ellen, I went over to Grace's and we made tacos and studied Contracts for a good 5 hours. I've never studied that long IN MY LIFE, but we had so many cases to go over there wasn't another option. On the plus side, the tacos I made and the apple cobbler I bought to heat up were REALLY good, so it wasn't completely miserable.

Saturday Grace came over here and we studied some more, went over some hypotheticals and quizzed each other with the flash cards I made. We discovered that the best way to study with the flash cards is to actually read them backwards- that is, instead of reading the case name and giving the facts, we read the facts and gave the case name. We realized that this was more like what we would get on the tests- a hypothetical with facts in which we would have to decide what cases's facts matched up most closely. That really helped a lot.

I had already agreed to help Ellen this whole weekend with her Arbitration competition, so on Sunday I had to go witness again. This time I WASN'T allowed to use my notes, so on top of all my contracts cases, I had to shove information about a fictional person into my overloaded brain. It went pretty well, but I was more than ready to leave because it was the EXACT same case from Friday, except Ellen was arguing the opposing side. I get home, change clothes, and sit down to do some Bluebook exercises when I get a text from Ellen saying that she made it to the final round and asking if I could come back AGAIN and testify! I agreed, and even though it was the SAME case as the last two times, it wasn't AS bad because I was able to play a character I had already been. The big downside was that this time it took MUCH longer, and the other witnesses were people who had been cut from the team so they weren't very fun people to be around.

I finish witnessing and Grace and I decide to go over the cases one last time to be sure we know them for Monday. We did really well quizzing each other, and I was able to get to bed by about 10.

So Monday morning I'm getting ready for the test and making sure I have my anonymous test number and a pen and everything else. I'm running over the cases in my head while I take Lu for a walk and keep wondering why everything in the distance looks really fuzzy. I decide it's because I haven't woken up all the way yet, and finish walking Lu and getting ready and head to campus. About halfway to campus (the whole drive is all of 4 minutes, so it wasn't that big of a deal) I realize that the reason everything is fuzzy is because I didn't put in my contacts or put on my glasses. Luckily for me I'm nearsighted and can see pretty much perfectly if things are close to me so I didn't have a problem reading my test or anything. I think I did really well on the Contracts test. I ran out of time when I had one point to make, but literally EVERYONE ran out of time. There wasn't a single person that finished their test. Plus, I had already made some notes on the prompt about the issue I was going to address, so hopefully I'll get some points there.

After the test I went home and slept and COMPLETELY forgot that we had our first Called to the Bar lecture that day. I went home and slept through it. Luckily it only counts as an absence in my LLR class and I don't get points taken off of my grade or anything.

Now today was a completely different story. Nothing really interesting happened other than the Bluebook test which was just utter hell. I have NEVER gone into a test not knowing the material- ever. I did all of the Bluebook exercises, I wrote notes in my book, I highlighted rules, I even did EXTRA exercises on the Lexis website, but when I sat down to take this test I almost had a panic attack.

The first question was something like "pick the string citation without any errors". I had no idea- NONE. I flipped to the index and look for string citations- AWESOME it's there! AND there's three different pages that reference string citations. I flip to the first page... it's a page about signals. Ok, maybe I read the page number wrong, so I flip back to the index- nope, I've got the right page number. Well, ok, maybe one of these signals has to do with string citations and I just don't know it because that info is on one of the other pages. Nope. I go to all three pages listed in the index about string citations and NOT ONE OF THEM answers the question that I'm asked. They DO deal with string citations in regards to what order the signals go in, but NOT in regards to what order the ACTUAL citations go in. I look up at the clock and I've spent a good 5 minutes on THE FIRST PROBLEM- and this is where I almost have a panic attack. I make myself breathe for a second, and decide that I'm just going to skip that question and go on to the next one, which was a VERY good idea on my part. Although the rest of the questions were by no means easy, at least they didn't put me in a panic.

When Professor Baggett announces that we're halfway through time, I've made good progress, and while I'm not feeling GOOD by any means, I'm at least getting something accomplished. About 5 minutes after Professor Baggett gives us the halfway time call, someone actually DOES have a panic attack, which puts the rest of us on edge again. I finish before time is called and go back through the questions that I can. I ended up finding mistakes in a lot of my answers, so it's definitely good that I went back over them.

Afterwards, it looked like ALL of the 1L's were in a state of shock- either crying, laughing, shaking, or being completely non-responsive. It was definitely one of the worst scholarly experiences of my life, but at least it's over now and I can relax!!!