Prepoceros

I’m pleased to report that after five days of raising a fuss, my rogue wisdom tooth did finally settle its ass down, as I requested. While it was hurting, though, I called to move the surgery date up a bit, so they’re all coming out tomorrow. Huzzah!

Right now I don’t feel much anxiety. I’m trying not to get worked up about it, and so far that’s been pretty successful. No dizziness or nausea, at least, which is a relief. Last night I thought I felt the first wave of nausea coming on around bedtime, but after thinking a little more I realized it was probably that chai frappuccino and toffee bar I had for dinner instead.

I imagine I’ll post pictures of my chipmunk face in a few days, so look forward to those. So long, extra teeth!

Right after we got back from California I had a consultation appointment with an oral surgeon to see about getting my wisdom teeth out. Because my bottom teeth are growing in sideways and he’ll have to cut through a lot of bone, he advised me not to do it without sedation. Meh. I think I’m okay with the idea now, especially since he told me I wouldn’t have a tube down my throat and I’d only be under for 45 minutes.

I didn’t know if I’d be able to squeeze it in before the end of the summer, because I didn’t want to start law school as a chipmunk with the accompanying pain and oozing, but the insurance approval came through sooner than I expected, and I got on the schedule at the end of July.

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If you’ve been watching the news for the story of a horrific Amtrak derailment*, you can relax now. The Sunset Limited brought us home safe and sound at 5:20 this morning (ahead of schedule, for once!).

I’ve been essentially without internet for the last two weeks, so I’ll be catching up slowly. There’s too much for me to even begin to tell about the trip, at least before I unpack, but I will note that I just logged into my feed reader and found 593 posts waiting for me. I have yet to decide how many of these I’ll attempt to read.

I only got about fifty emails during that same time, only three-ish of which needed immediate attention, huzzah. I love how uncomplicated life is in the summer. If only I could be a student forever.

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* Does anyone else do this kind of thing when friends and family go on vacation? No? Just me?

We’re within twenty-fours hours of our California trip, so it’s that time when every thing you do revolves around getting ready for vacation. Did I remember to pack my swimsuit? Will I need a sweater? What earrings go with this top? Will my prescriptions be refilled in time? Will anything in the apartment rot and/or explode if it’s left alone for two weeks? Do my parents have enough of the kind of rawhide that Sam likes? And so on.

It took John just over an hour to pack. Me? I’m glad I managed to pick out fourteen days’ worth of clothes and only need six pairs of shoes.* Can I get by with just one purse? I was going to go with the medium black one because (a) it’s black, (b) it has pockets, and (c) it can be zipped closed, but one of my outfits is REALLY brown, so maybe I’ll bring the small not-black purse, too. Don’t even get me started on belts.

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A week ago I walked out of the grocery store and spotted a car just like mine, but with a big gash in the corner of its bumper. My momentary freak-out ended when I saw my own ungashed car two spaces away.

But the next day, as I walked up to my very own car in my very own apartment parking space, I noticed that the light was reflecting strangely off of the rear passenger-side door. Further inspection revealed that the door panel had indeed been smushed in. No paint damage, fortunately, just an obvious foot-long vertical crease. Rage! Frustration! Fistshake!

Did I mention that this car is now a month old? One month. All this time I’ve been freaking out about bumping or scratching the pretty new finish, and then some idiot had to go and do it for me.

The bastard is completely anonymous, too. On that side of my apartment parking spot are two poles and my bike, and no one parks in the next spot over, so it had to have happened while I was out somewhere. I hope the culprit gets a bad case of chicken pox. Or pubic lice. Something REALLY itchy.

Wednesday night I saw Eddie Izzard live. Overall it was great fun, but having seen some of his earlier shows on DVD, I was a little disappointed at the slower pace and repetitiveness of this one.

Best joke: Noah is ushering animals onto the ark, with his son on board helping keep count.

“Okay, here come two tigers, two cats, two gazelles, two rabbits, two geese . . . what have we got so far?”

“Uh, so far two tigers, Dad.”

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First, comment filtering is magic with extra sparkles. Whereas previously I was faced with a queue of a hundred or so spam comments every time I logged in, since the switch a week ago I’ve had to moderate three whole comments. THREE. And two of them were from real people. (The third was an ad for online poker in French.)

By the way, I’m not sure if “approved commenter” status carried over in the switch, so you might have to wait a while to see your first comment post-update. If you’ve posted something that’s completely disappeared, email me (prepoceros at gmail).

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This long, relaxing, commitment-sparse summer is the perfect time to initiate the planning stages of Operation: Win at Law School. It’s clear that with the amount of reading, organizing, and personal responsibility law school will bring, I’ll need a “productivity system” more effective than my current version, which consists of the following steps:

1. Write appointments and due dates in my planner.
2. Do homework assignments when/if I get around to them, unless they’re ungraded or the grading scale is so “curved” that I’m already guaranteed an A.
3. For exams, gather notes the night before. Study notes the morning of, preferably while walking to class.
4. Go to class.

Step 4 is the key to the whole system. This may seem obvious, but it took me about four years to discover it. When I go to class, everything else takes care of itself, and college looks a lot like high school. So, if you’re about to enter college, take it from me: you can skip all the fancy motivational “College for Dummies” books and just GO TO CLASS. I swear, no one should ever put me in charge of an undergrad orientation. It would last about fifteen seconds.

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Things look a bit different around here, I realize. (If they don’t, you probably need to refresh and/or clear your computernet thing.) Don’t get used to it, though, because they’re about to get differenter.

I We John just updated my version of WordPress for the first time since I created this blog THREE YEARS AGO. We skipped all the way from 1.5.1.3 to 2.5. Dealing with comment spam had been unbearable for months now—I get about a hundred spam comments a day, and none of the plugins worked because I was so far behind the times, so I’ve been sorting through them all by hand to pick out the occasional real live commenter.

Updating, in addition to its many benefits, meant that my theme reverted back to its original version, before I painstakingly (because I am bad at CSS, not because the changes I made were all that complicated) tweaked the color scheme and added the rhino header. I could recover my modified theme, but I figure that after three years, it’s probably time for a change.

I could’ve used the default blue theme as a placeholder, but if anyone new stumbles across my blog, I’d rather have them think I *tried* to spice up my site design and did poorly than think I didn’t try at all. Hence the red red RED theme, which was the first half-decent one I saw on wordpress.net, and which will be gone as soon as I can come up with something I like better. So you can expect to be seeing it for the next six months.

How long has it been since I last posted? A month? Everybody’s stopped reading, right? Awesome. Now I can talk about you behind your backs.

The thing is, I had finals, so I took a week or two off, and after that I’d get back to blogging, but then I graduated, which was a Big Life Change (in that my employability spiked dramatically), so naturally my next post HAD to be about graduation, but that would be a LONG post, and an IMPORTANT post, and really what’s the point of starting all that today when I can eat cake and take a nap instead. You see?

But no, that’s not how blogging works. Blogging (the hacky way I do it, at least) is about jotting things down as they happen, however dull and poorly-written the results might be. Planning, gathering resources, editing…those are for chumps. And professionals.

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