More Than Half Way There

After a marathon weekend of studying, I have my final three exams in the next three days. If I ever have the brilliant idea of taking this many credit hours in one semester again, someone should really sit me down for a good talking to. None of the exams is particularly overwhelming, but all of them together is just too much. The good news, though, is that I've finished 57% of the semester's exams and that's more than half way to the finish line.

Today is for the Ethics exam, a 24 hour take home. I anticipate that it will be detailed and require meticulous drafting, but that it will not attempt to trip the student up or pose trick questions, based on my experience with this professor as a 1L. In between spurts of activity on that front, I need to finish reviewing for the exam I have to take tomorrow afternoon, which is closed book. I would be completely unconcerned about this exam if it were NOT closed book, but I am afraid that I will not be able to bludgeon my hippocampus into cooperation after the strenuous schedule of the past two weeks. At some point I also have to cram in more studying for my final exam, which is also closed book. I would be worried about this exam even if we were allowed to bring in every possible note, book, or outline because we didn't cover much substantive material this semester at all. I can only come up with a handful of possible short answer-style questions from the material we covered in class, but it just doesn't seem like enough to call an exam, which means the professor-- another adjunct, and let me tell you, I've had enough of them after the crap classes this semester-- will have to make something up from whole cloth to test us on. [sarcasm]Hooray.[/sarcasm]

If I make it to Thursday alive, I plan to sleep for a year. Well, maybe only for part of the afternoon plus an early bedtime. There are other things I want to do before I head west for Christmas and not much time to do them in, as well as a handful of things that I simply MUST get done-- like, say, my dishes-- even though I don't really relish the thought. Where are the monkey butlers when you need them? I am also looking forward to running on my parents' treadmill every single day. I miss my regular gym schedule and can't wait to get back to it. That 5K isn't going to run itself, you know.

I still have a handful of Christmas presents to buy, mostly for my immediate family. I wish my parents were a little more technologically savvy, because an Amazon wish list would make it so much easier to pick something out for my dad that he might not return. Or not: he's notorious in the family for returning everything, usually for an item that is almost exactly the same, but not quite. For example, trading the dark blue button up for another button up in the same shade of blue, but with grey buttons instead of white. And what he doesn't exchange, he tends to put away "for a special occasion", then never use. It's quite maddening. I have a hard time shopping for men, anyway, because I think I have a fundamental inability to appreciate masculine taste in some ways. What I mean is this: with women, I have some general understanding of what generic types of things would be seen as a sweet gift. Not that this doesn't vary from woman to woman-- Hulio would likely be utterly at a loss of what to do with a basket of teas and coffees, no matter how high quality, but Luneray would probably have the teakettle boiling minutes after tearing off the wrapping (mentally, if not actually). But I have no concept, despite years of gift buying for men ranging from my dad to my boyfriend, to my boyfriend's dad, to a man assigned as my "Secret Santa" in the office gift exchange, of what types of things are the good generic guy gifts. (I have the same trouble, by the way, with boy names. Girl names generally evoke strong feelings or have some strong connotation attached to them for me, and there are many that I love or hate. If I were to wake up tomorrow with the responsibility of naming a foundling on my front doorstep, I could come up with a girl name no problem. The poor orphan boy left on my step would have to be named by someone else because boy names, with a handful of notable exceptions, don't really click with me on the same primal level.)

Anyway, back to the dungeon... I mean, to the library for me.