Oh, November.

What a month. I'm exhausted and it's only the 16th!

My days are running together so much now that I don't remember what has happened when or if I've already written about some of this stuff, so bear with me please!

Finals start 3 weeks from yesterday. YIKES. Just so you get an understanding of how stressful that is, my eye twitch is back. My eye hasn't twitched since hell weeks back in high school. If you're unfamiliar with hell week, it's the week before a show opens where we do all the technical stuff. We would sometimes stay up at the school until 2am and then have to be in class at 8 in the morning.

Our open memo is finished, but this week is settlement week which is adding to the stress level. In theory (I think) it is supposed to be relatively simple. Since we're plaintiffs' attorney we ask for a number and we bargain back and forth to reach an agreement with the defense. In real life, if you can't reach a settlement you go to court, but we've been told we HAVE to settle.

So, like it said, it isn't supposed to be too difficult- the problem is that our professor told us ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about how this process works. Everyone else was talking about signing up with negotiation partners for settlement and our LLR group had NO idea what was going on. We got an email last weekend saying "Here is your partner and here's who you're negotiating with. Good luck!" No joke. Nothing more. He did give us a sample settlement agreement, but that is really just so we can copy and paste our terms into the same format and turn that in. We've had NO guidance about what we're supposed to do. It's frustrating.

Also, I am SO READY FOR THANKSGIVING!!!!!!!!!! I haven't had a break since we started school. I know that "real adults" don't really get breaks, but c'mon- if MED SCHOOL can get a fall break, I think we can get one too. Everyone is beyond exhausted, and you can really tell in class. The girls that used to show up every day in class with all their makeup on and put-together outfits are starting to look pretty ragged. That's one good thing about not looking picture perfect every day- no one really notices when you're having a bad day.

Kiyoshi and I went on a lunch date today, and that was nice. It did, however, put me behind on my readings for tomorrow and that's not making me any less stressed, especially since I have 3 classes tomorrow instead of just 2.

The UAB Ethics Team won the Regional Ethics Bowl again. Yay them! They go on to Nationals in January (I think) and hopefully they'll win nationals again!

Mom and Dad get to go to the beach on Saturday already (jealous), but they're going to stop in Birmingham and have brunch with Kiyoshi and me. I'm excited- free food is awesome. And so is seeing my parents :-)

I love you all!

A Wedding, A Birthday, A Funeral, and A Fall.

It's been a long time since I've posted, so there's probably a lot more that's gone on since then that I'll forget, but I'll give you a brief recap. The most important things are those listed in the heading of this post.

A Wedding.
My Uncle Patrick got married this past weekend, and it was quite a party. Granddad and Grandma Patty surprised him and Kara with a photo booth that all the guests could take pictures in. It was a lot of fun and there are a ton of really cute pictures. Unfortunately, I don't have a scanner and the pictures aren't up on the website yet so I can't show you any of those. I can however, show you a few of my favorites that I took :-)

Albey and Allison


Me and Chelsea


Me and Patrick


Mom being a flower girl.


Me and Albey

It was great to see everyone again. It wasn't so great that Bama lost to LSU, but I'm pretty sure I'll get over it ;-)

A Birthday.
One of my best friends EVER turned 22 yesterday! Can you guess who? I'll give you one hint: Snow White.
That's right! Katalyn's birthday was yesterday. I'm super sad that I didn't get to see her, but I did send her a message telling her that I love her! And for those of you others that miss her, she and her husband have a blog on here too that documents all their awesome escapades and their life ADORABLE son Owen. Go check it out here. I LOVE YOU KATALYN!!!

A Funeral.
So, it's not a funeral in the literal sense, but today symbolizes the death of any social life I may have had in the past semester. Exams start 4 WEEKS from TODAY!! I've decided to do 4 weeks of studying (one week for each class), but divide it up a little oddly. Grace and I are getting together on Wednesdays and Fridays to study together, and write our "super outlines" and then I'm sure we will do some super hard core studying the weeks of finals.

We had a practice exam in Civil Procedure last week and Grace and I both learned that we needed to devote some SERIOUS time to that subject. It was a little disheartening because she gave us a question that would be on a regular 3 hour exam to do in 50 minutes. On top of that, I personally had a problem because of how literal I am!! Her exam instructions said "only using rules 12(b)(1) and 12(b)(2)". The word ONLY was underlined. So what do I do? I turn to that rule in the book and it says that cases can be dismissed due to lack of 12(b)(1) subject matter jurisdiction 12(b)(2) personal jurisdiction. I thought she meant that was the ONLY rule or procedure we should look at. Not until I got to the second half of the question did I realize she meant that we were only supposed to ANALYZE the question in regards to those two rules, but STILL APPLY OTHER RULES in our answer. At least I made that mistake on a practice exam that only counted for participation and not on a real one that counts for my whole grade...

A Fall.
No one fell, don't worry. I'm talking about the season of Fall in Birmingham. It's absolutely GORGEOUS. Every year I tell myself I'm going to take pictures and I never do. This year I took some just walking around the apartment complex, but the don't do justice to some of the majestic colors you can see in other places of town. Here are two of my favorite pictures to make you jealous of Birmingham's Fall:





I'll take more in the coming days and add them to Facebook.

I am absolutely exhausted right now because I didn't sleep well this weekend and I haven't caught up on my sleep yet. I'm going to take a nap and then start working on studying for Criminal Law!

I love you!