A little over two months in now, and I can say I'm still having fun in law school but the stress is definitely beginning to set in. I still basically like all my classes; Torts continues to be highly entertaining, and Contracts, strangely enough, has become my favorite (my professor never fails to crack me up, whether intentionally or not). Con Law and Civ Pro are less entertaining. I still like both my profs, but the subject matter, especially in Civ Pro, is just not interesting. My problem with Con Law is actually that we have too much discussion. With only thirty people in the class and rich fodder for discussion, we end up going off on tangents and never getting to the actual point. The discussions are definitely interesting, we're just not really learning what we're supposed to be learning. I was actually more on-target with my Con Law practice exam than I expected to be, though, so I'm not too displeased about my progress.

The one major pain-in-the-ass thing I've been dealing with lately is that the special exam software, which is available for Macs, apparently has too many bugs in it for the admins to allow us to use it for the exam (they had a lot of problems using it for the practice exam, and since this is the first semester it's been available for Macs, they're not risking it on the real thing). So, everyone with a Mac has to either find a 2L to borrow a laptop from, rent a laptop for the exams, or handwrite their exams (I'm sorry, but for a three to four hour essay exam this is just not an option for me). That's annoying.

A week from tomorrow, we're having the first info session on the Paris summer institute, which I'm really looking forward to. Now that November 1 has come and gone, the career office is allowed to interact with the 1Ls, so in addition to extra reading, practice exams, special classes to go over the practice exams, etc., etc., we've been having career services presentations in the last week. One nice thing I found out is that students who do the Paris program aren't expected to find a job for the part of the summer they'll be home. I still plan to check out options in the law library or working with a prof, but truthfully, it would be nice to just relax and spend some time working on my own business during May and June. I've been neglecting it a bit, and I really need to get some more advertising out there.

I realize that I never posted about my fall break trip to London - rest assured, I will soon (and I do mean that), but for right now I just want to say that it was really fun and even slightly educational. In my spare time (mostly moments between classes lately), I've been working on editing and posting the photos from that trip, which can be found here. I'm still working on these, so check back.

I've been doing a lot of photography lately, since it's a great stress reliever for me, and Ithaca is so beautiful in the fall that it's easy to get good shots. I'm particularly pleased with this one, taken yesterday at Taughannock. If only I could take photos like this all the time!

(OK, it won't let me direct-link the image, so just click on the link above to see it.)