For the first time in four years I am spending the summer at home. As an undergraduate student, I stayed on campus each summer, but as of May 18th – that title no longer applies. Whenever I venture home I pretend that I am camping as we live in the boondocks, we don’t have a land line, our house is the one place that was apparently overlooked by AT&T’s “more bars/more places” campaign, and internet access is nowhere to be found. Needless to say, while at home I seek any (and every) escape I can find. I was hoping to land a paid escape for the duration of my stay in order to complete my epic battle against my credit card and put a few sticks of furniture in the new apartment (whenever I get around to finding one). Unfortunately, there isn’t much work in my area where a few floundering factories provide the majority of local jobs.

After a few agonizing days of uninterrupted “camping,” I was excited to receive an 8AM interview at a call center. The call center is about an hour from my house in the boonies, so I woke up at 6AM, got dressed, filled the tank, and made the journey only to be told – not even two minutes into the interview – that I was overqualified for the job. The interviewer politely explained that my college degree means I am destined for more than call center work (although I’m not sure she was entirely in the know; I mean, a BA isn’t what it used to be). I wanted to thank her for wasting my time, gas money and beauty sleep just to tell me that in person, but instead I explained that I will be seeking out my true destiny in August at Cornell to which she replied “that works out great then because we aren’t currently hiring for short-term positions.” Did you read my application AT ALL, woman? I checked the short-term/summer box! Back to the boonies…

If it isn’t one thing around the house, it’s another. First, death found time to visit our decrepit, old lawnmower leaving us with half an acre of overgrown field for a lawn. To make matters worse, there have been multiple bear sightings in the area. Most recently, an adult black bear was spotted in the local Arby’s parking lot (guess he was thinking Arby’s?). When we finally resurrected the lawnmower long enough to cut the grass nearest the house, we discovered a large flattened area where something VERY large had been lying undetected. Great.

I love balmy rainstorms during the summer. Tonight is a particularly stormy evening and I couldn’t wait to curl up under the covers. The rain is pelting the windows steady and hard. Brilliant streaks of blue, white and violet lightning flair at odd intervals, and the thunder that follows is intense enough to shake the house. All that’s missing is a howling wind. Anyway, I was headed for bed when I noticed a gurgling noise in the closet. No, it wasn’t the Arby’s bear. The roof was leaking. Apparently it has been for a while. Before I could go to sleep I had to fetch an empty 5-gallon paint bucket to replace the already full one (which was bubbling over and making the gurgling sound). I ventured to the bathroom to dump the bucket, cleaned the pieces of drywall and roof that had found their way into the bucket out of the tub and, well, then I wasn’t quite sleepy anymore. I grabbed a Klondike bar out of the freezer and cozied up on the couch to document these recent misadventures for the blog.

In between bear battling and job hunting, I’ve been trying to work with LEEWS, which has caused me to have serious jitters about becoming an attorney. I mean, people are going to trust me with their problems and expect me to provide satisfactory solutions. What if I suck at it? Of course, I have to survive law school first…

1L FEARS
1) Cornell’s notoriously small class size will = lots of annoying gossip.
2) Law school will be full of inescapable phony people.
3) I will become boring/uninteresting/neurotic.
4) I will have no time for the activities that I love.
5) I will be in the bottom of the class.

1L GOALS
1) Keep up my running.
2) Top 10%
3) Keep my easygoing nature in tact.

1L PREDICTIONS
1) By the end of 1L I will look something like this:

2)…and I will manage to land somewhere in the middle of the class.

Well, the wind just kicked up to complement the symphony raging on outside. I’m going to try to get some sleep.

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