i'm "published"!

www.casa.org

ho ho ho!

Christmas weekend was a mighty success.

Christmas Eve was filled with family traditions: open-face crab sandwiches, martinelli's, scriptures about the birth of the Savior, etc. Oh, and of course we put out cookies for Santa.

Christmas day, we went to church, enjoyed a lovely Sacrament meeting presented by the bishop's family, and I accompanied a violinist on a special musical number of "O Holy Night." Oh, and I accompanied all the hymns because the organist emailed me the night before asking me to save him since he wasn't in town and forgot to ask me! It was no big deal. Then when we got home, we changed back into our PJs and opened gifts. We were very blessed. There were definitely too many presents for just the the two of us. Our friends and family were very generous to us. The biggest surprise of all was Rosa and I got some studio equipment, so now we can record our own music!

Monday we watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Very fitting, I suppose. And we tried to get our studio equipment to work, but it's not as simple as you'd think. There are still some kinks we're working through, but we hope to have it all up and running by the end of the week.

Today I spent several hours moving a home teachee from one apartment to another. Down a couple flights of stairs and up a couple more. If you ever want to remember how out of shape you are, just help a friend move in town. Yipes.

Rosa's actually out right now with the sister missionaries. They're visiting a Spanish-speaking family that doesn't know any English. When they called, I wonder if they thought she spoke Spanish since her name is Rosa. Hopefully it works out okay!

Hallelujah!

I have seen the beast, and yet I live to tell the tale. I have been down to the most bottom pits of finals darkness, and I emerge into the light of day, a greater man for the experience. And my eyes are killing me.

No seriously though. I finished my last final today! Yay! I'm a free man! Minus the other things I've contracted to do over the break, I'm basically responsibility-less for the next month. I'm like a kid in a candy store at this point. I can finally hang those pictures I meant to hang when we moved in. I can finish sorting through my files. I can sort my sheet music. I can put my first semester books on my shelf! Now they're just for looking at.

My last test was civil procedure, and even though I feel like it rocked me, I don't feel so bad because I heard many people with the same feeling. I also have a next-door-neighbor who felt bad about his first year finals right after he took them, and now he's the Notes Editor for the Law Review, and has a clerk position on the Court of Appeals. So the moral of the story: you never know until you know.

And until I know, I'm not going to think about it for a second. I'm going to bed now, and I'm not setting my alarm. Good night and good luck.

Just one left!

We've been getting packages lately. That's always nice, especially when it's gifts from people who care about you. The FedEx and UPS guys are the modern Santa, sans the chimney.

So I knocked one more out today. Contracts is over. I really enjoyed that class; it's amazing the difference a professor can make in your feelings about a subject.

Now I'm on to civil procedure. Before I've had 2-3 days between exams, but this time I only have one. The test is on Wednesday. Wish me luck!

Joy to the world!

A couple months of work culminated in our all-music Christmas Program in Sacrament Meeting today. And, except for one error in the printed program (by yours truly), the whole thing went off without a hitch! In fact, it was way better than we had anticipated. When you plan a good program, you're usually destined for success, but that success is multiplied when you have the Lord on your side. The Spirit was very strong today and bore witness of the Savior to so many people who were present, including me. What really struck me today was the reminder that we all have to be shepherds in our own field. The other big thing is that music can be a very powerful tool for accomplishing the Lord's work.

People were very kind and gave us lots of positive feedback. I guess no one could hear the total lack of sleep in my voice on my solo. Don't tell anyone I slept less than 4 hours last night. I guess putting on a Christmas Program in the middle of finals isn't exactly the smartest thing to do.

But luckily I got a little nap time in after church (I have no children). And now I'm going to bed, only to face the infamous Contracts final tomorrow. Wish me luck!

cholesterol rising

My parents very kindly sent us some Omaha steaks and burgers. So Rosa and I each ate a steak last week and boy, were they good.

But we had a storm last night (I use the term "storm" loosely), and the power went out. We assumed we'd have power back within a few hours, so we just lit some candles and hung out. Once 10pm came and we still had no power, I decided it was time to save the steaks, so I ate another one. This morning came, and still had no power. The people across the street had their lights on, darn it, but we didn't. Rosa's work had power too, so she went to work today, and I? Yes, I had another steak.

Now before you judge, just remember: these are really good steaks! At this point, they're mostly thawed out, and we just barely got the power back like an hour ago (that's a total of 24 hours, folks, with no power, caused by an afternoon storm of about one inch of snow). And I guess we can't let them re-freeze now that they're thawed, so Rosa is right now cooking up everything in our now thawed-out freezer, so that when the freezer gets cold again in an hour, we can stick all our meat back in there.

That might be more detail than is necessary, but the point is: I had an excuse to eat two steaks in about 12 hours. And the other point is: Charlottesville is ill-prepared for "disasters" such as a little snow and teeny bit of ice.

In other news, I took my Criminal Law exam yesterday. People always kindly ask, "How did it go?" The answer is you never know. Since everything in law school is a huge competition, all exams are graded on a curve. So really it doesn't matter how I did; it only matters how everyone else did. And we'll all have to wait until late January or February to find out.

And a happy 235th birthday today to Ludwig van Beethoven.

One Down, Three to Go

So I just finished my torts final. Yay! My first law school final is over. I was getting really nervous this weekend, and this morning especially. But it wasn't too bad after all. The test itself was everything I expected it to be, plus an hour. FOUR hours total. I basically sat down and started typing, and finished about 22 pages later. But at least now I've got one exam under my belt.

Criminal Law final is next. Another "100% of the semester grade" test. It's not as exciting of a subject as you'd think. It's more of a philosophy of punishment class. My professor is one of the country's leading experts on the subject, so he's totally out of touch with what first-year law student life is like. He's a very nice guy, but he's like 700 years old, so he was lecturing over our heads for an entire semester. Hopefully I can figure out what he wants by Thursday at 1:30.

Not much else to report. Just me and the books. And my lovely bride. Happy Monday!

Make your own e-snowflakes

I thought it was silly, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.

http://snowflakes.lookandfeel.com/

Noteworthy in the news again!

BYU's student paper, the Daily Universe, ran a story today on Noteworthy. Check out the story here: http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/57865

Tort-a-thon

"The essence of all three of these torts is interference with the plaintiff's right to possess and control his or her property. Although the concern with the bodily autonomy that characterizes the personal injury torts is not present here, it would be a mistake to suppose that the property torts are concerned only with monetary loss resulting from damage to property."

Believe it or not, this is one of the clearer passages I've read in the last few days. I've had torts on my mind non-stop. Assault, battery, trespass, etcetera. In fact, this morning, I was chipping away at the ice on my car, and I was tempted to do it for my neighbor's car without him knowing, but then I was worried that I would do damage to his car and bring liability upon myself. I immediately considered the "duty to rescue" doctrine, as well as "due care" once you decide to offer aid to another.

Well, anyway, the good news is that although there is a lot of ice around here, I'm not the one outside shoveling/picking the ice on the sidwalk. Yay for renting.

Also worthy of note is that Rosa got approached by another guy yesterday. When he found out she was married, he seemed embarassed, but she was polite about it. They both smiled and moved on.

In other news, I have to go back to studying. Happy Friday!

Semester ends today

Today is the last day of classes for the Fall semester! That would be good news, except I really have been enjoying my classes, and worse: that means finals are coming up. Finals start this coming Monday, beginning with Torts. Criminal Law is next week as well, then the following week is Contracts and Civil Procedure. Yummy.

Noteworthy makes TV debut

Noteworthy was on TV Monday! It was just a BYU news show, but it was pretty cool nonetheless. Check it out here: http://www.newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/57746. Unless you want to watch the whole show, cue it up to Noteworthy's story at about 13:30 in the video. Cool, huh?

Welcome Christmas!

It rarely snows in Charlottesville, but for some reason we got a ton yesterday. This is what we woke up to this morning.

our first tree. adorable, i know.

our first star

Cool quote

I ran across this quote today and wanted to share it.

"Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best." — Henry Van Dyke