Amanda in El Paso

At the dead end of one of the roads in the old country club neighborhood in West El Paso, near a pond fed by what he calls a "Texas Waterfall," amidst two happy formerly indoor cats, two wood ducks, two regular ducks, three sheep and one bat, dad and I have been sunning ourselves for the past few days.

(Those interested in a more detailed inventory of animals should know there are also frogs, leagues of songbirds, at least one small lizard, and a heron, although I can't speak personally to its existence, depending instead on Amanda's reports.)

Since arriving in El Paso Thursday evening, dad and I haven't stirred from Amanda's shack - or more specifically, the big, partially shaded deck in front of it, overlooking the aforementioned manmade pond where the aforementioned waterfowl paddle and the aforementioned cats patrol. Midmorning we have coffee and read, by late morning the sun has moved above the big tree directly in front of the deck and we have some sun, and at noon we collect Amanda and have lunch somewhere.

(So far we have had Mexican food thrice and ordinary food once; Amanda's workplace has a neighboring business called "Burro-Time," which is a hut-sized drive/walk-up establishment with a menu board where most of the prices have been whited out and only a few have been written back in with felt-tip marker. I had the barbacoa tacos, which were excellent, and Amanda appears to be developing a taste for chile relleno.)

In the afternoons I've tried to do a little research, but I've mostly read fiction, taken naps, and watched movies on the television dad procured in short order upon arriving and realizing this central shortcoming amongst the shack's other charms. Dinner has largely been prepared in the shack, which boasts all the amenities, if the sink is sometimes stubborn to drain.

(Humor aside, at least at this moment in El Paso's climate, the place Amanda rents is more than comfortable. It has chinks in its armor here and there which may make cooling it a challenge, but right now it's lovely almost all day to have the doors open and the cats strolling in and out.)

Amanda had yesterday entirely off, so we broke out of our routine and visited downtown El Paso for a tour of the city's free art museum, which has a temporary exhibit featuring work of Monet, Matisse, and some of the American impressionists as well. Afterward we had lunch at the race track, and dad guided us through the program into some successful horse-picking by the last few races.

(Amanda also chose one based on its likelihood of excelling as a hunter under saddle horse - I agree, it had a lovely trot - but we couldn't reproduce results based strictly on similarity to show horses.)

Sunday we spent the afternoon in Mesilla, New Mexico, which is a very small town with a historic downtown square, lots of adobe buildings, and a wonderful restaurant with a glass ceiling in the dining room and a colorful history of its own, judging by the high-ceilinged, ornate bar with its several chandeliers, and the approximate age of the brick floors, smoothed to a polish by years of happy diners' traffic. Some sort of costumed troop of actors were reenacting a historical event of some kind in the square, but due to our late arrival, a subpar speaker system, and the unfortunate timing of the reenactment's lunch break, we never quite figured out it was. We did hear the word "secession" thrown around, and later research reveals that in March of 1861, Mesilla purported to secede from the Union and call itself a separate territory ("Arizona").

(Those interested in this little piece of history are welcome to educate themselves from the same semi-reliable source of which I availed myself: http://www.lcsun-news.com/mylascruces/ci_17612661)

I've been reading a beautifully written historical novel set all over Europe, with wonderful complicated sentence structure and diction that still reads smoothly. Unfortunately, the effect of reading something like this is that my own writing becomes wordy and convoluted, in a sort of subconscious and desperate imitation, and for that I apologize. However, I know my audience, and for that reason, I blog anyway, knowing that delivery is in this case secondary to content. And my content is good, bringing as it does news of Amanda, our beloved veterinarian, who I visited at work today and happened to find behind the desk, holding a chart, wearing her lab coat, and no doubt solving medical mysteries. I was so proud I choked up.

(Dad and I head home early Thursday morning.)

Extracurricular Activities

I apologize in advance for the inevitably poor grammar and organization that is to follow in this post. Like a sapped solar panel, I have none left; I must recharge.

I have been spending 90% of my time lately on an "assignment." I put it in quotations because I usually define assignments as follows: 1) Assigned 2) Graded.

I haven't been called upon to think about assignments at all for some time, because they aren't really a thing in law school. In law school, professors prefer to grade one set of things, so they make that thing a final exam, and put all the things they ever taught you inside it.

This "assignment" is not graded. If it is completed, you pass. If it is incomplete, you fail. Because the "assignment" is a 30 or fewer page paper, with only a few other specifications, completion is not really an issue.

By 90% of my time, I mean all my time. Normally when I refer to "my time," I mean the hours in a week minus evenings with Sara and Joey, minus mornings eating breaking and drinking coffee, minus lunch breaks, minus barn visits.

But right now, I mean 90% of the hours in a day. And by day, I mean day plus night, or 24 hours. Which is roughly 22.5 hours. Or so. I'm bad at math and too tired to consult a calculator.

I'll cut the cryptic and admit: the paper is a brief, a moot court brief to be exact. And moot court is something I've been eagerly anticipating for some time.

Moot court is an exciting time in a 2L's life when she finds a smart partner, writes a big paper, and then makes arguments on that paper in the style of a Supreme Court hearing, with hopes to win scholarly fame and thousands of dollars in scholarships.

I WAS SO STUPID TO ANTICIPATE MOOT COURT.

Like most potentially rewarding tasks, moot court has taken over my life, preventing me from going to the barn more than twice in fourteen days, and infecting me with a 24-hour bout of insomnia that was truly terrifying.

This is how insomnia works: you are too tired to be productive or think clearly, and far too tired for physical comfort, but you can do nothing other than troll the dark house like a ghost and try to study only to realize you can't really read because apparently the parts of a brain that decipher symbols turn off without rest. Luckily it was a one-night-only experience.

Some combination of a stressful atmosphere, furious typing and massive amounts of data entry, organization and reorganization caused my Gateway PC to finally close its doors for business. It had been on its sickbed for some time, but in the heat of brief drafting, after I had gotten up to refill my coffee cup and sat back down to reopen the document, it innocently asked, What document?

Well, its exact words were, "Cannot retrieve mootctbrief.doc. The item no longer exists."

There was a moment where I considered throwing the computer out the window.

It must have understood the look on my face/read my mind, because after a restart it grudgingly gave up the document. But that was the last straw. After emailing the document to my several email accounts (the nonprofessional's version of "backing up") I decided it was time to replace the Gateway.

I have suffered from Indecisive Buyer's Syndrome (IBS) since girlhood. The most intense struggles usually took place at a rest stop familiar to my immediate family in Limon, Colorado. But the Gateway's previously mentioned terminal illness has been known to me for some time, and I knew I would need to replace it before final exams this semester. So, I'd done some thinking, made many consultations, and I Knew What I Had To Do. Still, the price tag on an apple product has a nonphysical weight of approximately 14 million pounds.

One beautiful, life-changing MacBook Air later, I have all but finished the brief.

The best parts of the brief were written by my brilliant moot court partner Jared. My parts, however, really aren't so bad.

Today, we print. Tomorrow, we party.

Also, unfortunately for Joey, tomorrow he has a scheduled minor surgery to remove a growth on his cheek. Luckily for Rachel, her mother is coming through town and can take him back to Abilene, and her father will drive him to and from the clinic.

Today I got an email from a professor. Professors, you ask? What are those? I had all but forgotten myself that technically the most important thing in my life is the 13-odd credit hours for which I WILL be graded. The professor in question is freshly returned from arguing before the Supreme Court, in a very non-moot way. His message? I have an assignment (sadly, quotations here are inappropriate). A law school first for me, and one I'm sure will cause me to continue putting my recent purchase (the beautiful, featherlight MacBook Air, if you somehow forgot about it, which I never will, because it cost more than any nonliving thing I've ever bought) to good use.

Back to real, graded and curved life for the next few months. I feel like I've been on a strange, stressful working vacation.