For two weeks now, Houston’s been hotter than … well, a mild fever. Which is hot, as air goes. And despite the lack of rain, it’s still a wet, heavy heat. At least the drought is keeping the mosquitoes at bay. Biking to work has become a somewhat icky endeavor; I’ve learned to bring an extra shirt to change into when I get there.

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I saw a car today with three bumper stickers: a Mac apple, a Houston Astros sticker, and a sticker that looked like those oval country/vacation spot stickers with initials in them but actually stood for “Jesus Freak.” I don’t know why the combination struck me as odd, but I kind of want to meet this person.

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Browsing the internet on my lunch break*, I noticed that I’ve been slacking on the blogging front lately. So here I am.

I took Sam to the vet this morning for a check-up and a squirt of something-something vaccine up the nose. I told the vet one of his eyes had been red off and on lately, but it hadn’t seemed to bother him too much. She took him into the back for a tear test and found out that my poor puppy is making almost no tears and has horribly dry eyes. And his cruel, cruel mother had let him suffer all this time. She didn’t say that second part out loud.

So now I have a tube of goop to squirt into his eyes once a day. I have to hold his eye open and squeeze a line of goo the consistency of Vaseline onto the surface of his eyeball. The vet techs managed to do it with two of them holding him still—I can’t wait to try it at home by myself. I can only hope he’ll understand how soothing the nice happy goop is and come running for it every morning. Hey, it could happen.

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Before I talk about work I’d like to share a quick story from today’s evening walk. The story is that a bird pooped on Sam’s head. Better him than me, I thought, since he didn’t notice and probably would have enjoyed it if he did. But then at home when I tried to wipe off the mess with a wet paper towel, he ducked and I got poop on my hand. So I didn’t escape unscathed after all. It figures.

Okay, work. I’m still thrilled to be there, even though I emptied my candy jar in the first two days. I’ve had to bring in and eat *fruit*, can you imagine? I finished my first practice assignment in cite analysis today and will probably get to start on a real assignment tomorrow, assuming I didn’t completely miss the boat on the practice one.

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Today was Day One of my summer job as an editorial assistant at a sweet little publishing house that puts out a series of handbooks for practicing lawyers. If you practice in Texas, you can probably guess who they are, but I won’t name names.

No complaints about the facilities so far. Far from it, in fact. I have my own computer at my own giant desk in my own V-shaped “cube.” It even came pre-stocked with supplies: notepads, tape, tissues, a stapler and staple puller, paper clips, a white-out pen, white-out tape, and a rainbow of pens and highlighters.

The best part? My own candy jar, pre-filled with chocolate goodies. Hey, I would’ve done this editing work for you for free if you’d asked nicely, but now you’re going to pay me AND throw in a few mini Snickers to boot? Dude. I’m gonna edit those manuscripts SO THOROUGHLY.

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My sleep schedule, such as it was, got all shot to hell when I stayed up all Monday night before the Property exam condensing an Emanuel’s book and typing it into my notes. This may well be the absolute worst way to study for an exam, but when you’ve put it off all semester and the prof doesn’t allow commercial outlines, sometimes you find yourself in an unsavory position.

Around 3:30 in the morning I got to a section on mortgages, and I didn’t recall us talking in class about mortgages in any depth, so that bit of my outline looks like this (pretend it’s indented properly):

C. Financing Devices: Mortgages, Deeds of Trust, and Installment Contracts

1. christ i hope this doesn’t come up on the test

First question? “If Bart mortgages his house to Mort, and then Bart sells the property to Pam….” Argh.

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Our three back-to-back weekends of taiko performances wrapped up with Saturday’s pushing-the-hot-end-of-bearable show at the Dragonboat Festival. The organizers moved the festival from Buffalo Bayou to Sugar Land at the last minute due to flooding on the Bayou, with the happy result that instead of pushing our drums up and down a steep hill, we only had to drag them across a dozen yards of grass. I wouldn’t mind a bit if the festival folks made this change permanent.

And it’s just in time that our spring season ends, because I have four finals coming up in the next two weeks, starting on Wednesday. They happen to come in order of increasing difficulty, at least as I see them now. Writing, the easiest final of all (because writing the brief was hard enough), was two weeks ago. I’ll go through my thoughts on the rest, not because you care, but because later I’d like to know how I felt about these exams before I saw them.

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Jonathan Coulton, anyone? I’d have that song playing right now if I weren’t in class, because I feel wonderful this morning. Not sure why, though.

It could be the four taiko sets we performed this weekend at the Houston Japan Festival. I spent two whole days outdoors hanging out in the lovely Japanese gardens, playing drums, moving drums on and off and on and off and on and off the stage, eating yummy food, drinking tapioca tea, and perfecting my sunburn.

It could also be that I’ve switched from taking my Lexapro in the evening to taking it in the morning. The doctor said it might make me sleepy and recommended that I take it before bed, which I’ve always done, but lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping through the night. Every night I wake up at least two or three times, and sometimes it takes me up to an hour to go back to sleep. If I lie down in the morning after I get back from walking Sam, I will fall asleep within five minutes and sleep through noon. I’ve missed many a morning class this way, and even a few in the afternoon.

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The Tennessee trip was FANTASTIC. The bus gave us its fair share of problems, and we lost a little sleep, but both shows went great and we had a blast. High point of the trip: getting to stay in the same hotel three nights in a row, or maybe the professional massages we got on our day off. Low point: no hot tub in the hotel. Who doesn’t have a hot tub?

I’ll be editing together a video or two about the trip. I hope I can get it all done in the next few days, before finals swallow me up and memories of the trip start to fade into the fog of the recent past.

I also got my brief turned in thanks to my partner from class, who printed out the pdf I emailed her from Memphis at 3:00 Monday morning and turned it in for me. (Thanks Elizabeth!) It’s hard to believe that LRW is practically over, maybe because this semester I spent the last few days before the due date rocking out with taiko instead of going OMGBRIEFBRIEFBRIEF non-stop.

And there’s more rocking out to be done: This weekend is the Houston Japan Fest at Hermann Park*, and then the next Saturday we’re playing at the Dragonboat Festival at Allen’s Landing. Come see us? You should.

Sigh, I’m on such a taiko high right now. I love practicing, I love performing, I love travelling, and I love my taiko family. I’m afraid I might explode from all the happy-making…maybe I should tone it down a bit so I don’t crash hard once all the big shows are over. Hmmm…nah, gonna keep living it up. Taiko on!

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* I’ll be there for all the Kaminari shows, 1:00 and 4:40 on Saturday and 11:15 and 4:15 on Sunday.

I interrupt this hiatus in my blog posting to let you know that I’ll likely be posting even LESS often for the next two weeks. My appellate brief, worth eighty percent of my Legal Research and Writing grade, is due next Thursday*, and all I have so far is a sketch of an outline and a list of cases to read more closely.

I have a conference with my professor tomorrow afternoon, so I figure today is a fantastic time to start putting some serious effort into this thing. With only one weekend between now and the due date and 20 pages to conjure up out of this thick stack of cases, I’ll barely have time to eat, sleep, read blogs, check Facebook, keep up with my YouTube subscriptions, and update my Twitter feed.

I’ve just removed Solitaire from my computer, so who knows, maybe I’ll post MORE here for lack of a more absorbing way to procrastinate. It’s a crazy world.

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* The actual due date is the Monday after next, but that weekend I’ll be on a taiko road trip (squee!) to perform at the Nashville Cherry Blossom Festival. What better reward for finishing a brief, eh?

Guess what guess what? NBC, Lifetime and the [producers? owners?] of Project Runway have FINALLY settled their lawsuit (in NBC’s favor), and Season 6 will air on Lifetime this summer!

Not much else to say, except that I can. not. wait.