10 DAYS!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously people, 10 freaking days and I am done law school. Woot.

That is all.

On the path to realising a life-long dream!!!

And no, I'm not talking about graduating law school and becoming a lawyer, although that technically would also be applicable. But right now I'm thinking of something that is, at the moment at least, WAY more exciting to me: I have tickets (along with my mother and sister) to see LEONARD COHEN in June. Yeah. For those of you who are not fans, and who maybe don't realise the magnitude of this, Leonard Cohen has not toured for about 15 years. He pretty much once vowed to never tour again, and the only reason he's doing it now is because his old manager basically stole of all his money. So the poor man now has to go out and work instead of relaxing in his late 70's. Very sad for him, but so, so, SO ridiculously happy for me. I never thought I would have this opportunity. I grew up listening to Leonard Cohen, and loving everything he'd ever sung or wrote. The man is a Canadian hero/legend/god. He has helped to shape the culture of our country. And I am going to see him live, in a fairly small venue, in less than 3 months. I know I've just tried, but words cannot actually express the excitement and disbelief that I am feeling right now.

I had originally gotten tickets for the show on June 3rd, because that was the only show that was planned when the tickets went on sale. Then the next day I had a panic attack when I figured out that June 4th is the date of my 2nd Bar Admission exam. But I had decided I was going to go to the concert anyway, because I can write a Bar exam again, but I can't see Leonard Cohen again (at least very likely not). And THEN... fate smiled on me. Okay, I don't actually believe in that stuff, but this situation could potentially have made me believe in it! They created another show on the 4th. So I got tickets for that, in the hopes that I would be able to sell the tickets for the show on the 3rd, and I did sell them the very next day to some of my family members. Everything worked out so perfectly, it's actually a little creepy... but I am NOT complaining!!!!!! :D

That's the only thing worth writing about right now, partly because it's pretty much the only thing going on in my life that's at all interesting to others, and partly because no other news compares to this - at least to me.

That's all folks! :)

Cuba - Reading Week 2008

All right, now comes the obligatory 'I went to Cuba and here are pictures to prove it!' post. I'm going to keep it short and sweet... at least I'll try!

I went with 3 of my friends from law school, and I think we picked a great group - no quarrelling and getting on each other's nerves at all. We stayed at the Occidental Grand, at the Playa (Beach) Turquesa, near Holguin. The resort was absolutely beautiful. Rather than being one large hotel, it was a series of villas with about 8 - 10 rooms per villa, plus the main buildings, lobby, restaurant, etc.

Here's a picture of one of the villas (they all looked exactly the same, but I could get a better angle of this one than of our specific villa)

The resort had a series of 5 or 6 pools, starting at the top and each cascading into the next, kind of like a really long waterfall. The beach at the hotel was absolutely beautiful, and restricted solely to our resort. The pools were also amazing to sit by. One pool had a little island with a tree in the middle, and it was a wading pool, and by the edge it was so shallow that the lounge chairs could be placed in the water. SO relaxing!

Here's a partial view from the beach (yay for photo stitch function!)

And a couple pictures of the pools:

The food was pretty good, especially at some of the a la carte restaurants (there were 5 a la cartes, and we were allowed to eat at all 5 included in the all-inclusive, but only once each). There was also the main buffet area, where we ate breakfast and most lunches. I'm not going to put pictures of those because really, who cares?!

The rooms were very cute and cozy - which makes them sound small, but they weren't - and had the best balconies, with the most comfy lounge chairs, ever.

There were also lots of very fun excursions to go on, to explore the area and do activities. We went on the Catamaran excursion, where we took a bus to a Catamaran, Catamaran to a snorkelling area, then went to an aquarium area and swam with dolphins, then had a very delicious lunch and took the Catamaran back and the bus back to our hotel.

A couple of days later, we did the 'Country See Excursion': we were picked up at our hotel in jeeps, drove to a little town close by where we got to tour a cigar factory (no pictures of the inside allowed, though), then drove to a local farm where we got to drink coffee that was as fresh as it possibly can be and eat a mid-morning snack of a variety of fresh (coconut, pineapple, banana, grapefruit, fresh honey, sugar cane, etc. - just picked that morning). After the farm, we drove to a horse ranch, where we went horse-back riding. After that, we drove to the marina (same one where we caught the Catamaran) and went jet-skiing. Then we had a yummy lunch, and drove back to the hotel. It was a long day: left at 8:30, back at about 4. Our guides wanted to take us to Holguin to show us the night-life in Cuba, since it was our last night there, and while they were very nice and it would have been fun to go, my one friend was really sick (she'd gotten bronchitis while we were there) and didn't feel like it, plus one of the guides had (unwelcomely) fallen in love with another one of my friends, so we passed on that opportunity!

These are the jeeps that we drove around in for the day - we were lucky and got to have a guide driving us. His name was Orlando, and he spoke excellent English and knew a lot about Cuban economics and politics, so he told us a great deal about his country... it was very interesting, and much better than just driving our own jeep and worrying about hitting the millions of potholes!

Fruit:
Horse-back riding:

I didn't take any pictures of jet-skiing, because I didn't want to take my camera out on the water! But I do have a picture of the marina employee who took me out on the jet-ski, when they found out that I didn't want to drive myself:

The guy on the left (the older gentleman) is the guy who took me out - he spoke literally no English, and I spoke very little Spanish, but we got along just fine, and I had more fun with him than I would have alone, since he wasn't scared to go after the big waves! The guy on the right is one of our guides, Ariel - the one who had a bit of a thing for my one friend.

Here's a picture of the 3 us of (our 4th friend was back at the hotel sick), and our two guides - from the left: Ariel, Jo, Jan (I'm just giving short names on purpose), me, and Orlando. Fun day!

Those are all the important pictures to show. I also have most of my pictures up on facebook, and I'll probably create a yahoo or photobucket album, so if anyone wants to see more, just let me know!

Anyway, Cuba was amazing, and our resort was fantastic - I would highly recommend both! Oh, and I also got to buy some great Cuban cigars for WAY less than you'd spend in Canada, so that was good too! :)

So very sad, and a loss to the artistic community

Maybe it's weird that I'm blogging about two people that I have never known. But I do believe that (certain) actors contribute in an important way to society, and this week we lost two of them, so I felt that I should at least mention it.

Brad Renfro passed away a few days ago. He was in one of my favourite movies of all time (The Cure), but also in a bunch of excellent movies like The Client, Apt Pupil, Tom and Huck. He was a great actor. And yet another child actor down the tubes!

Of course, the second one wasn't even a child actor, just another example of what Hollywood somehow manages to do to people - Heath Ledger. This one is even harder to believe, because whatever substance abuse problems he had he managed to keep on the down-low - until today, of course.

Anyway, RIP to both of them, they deserved to be remembered for their art.

It's a brand new year!!

It is a brand new year. Not that you'd know it by looking at my life. You would think that being in law school would make my life exciting, or at least interesting. You would be SO very wrong. Don't get me wrong, I still love law school (at least, I love learning about the law). But it just feels so very repetitive and everydayish. I don't write in this blog because I have absolutely nothing to say that anyone wants to hear about. I don't email or call people, because I have nothing new and exciting or interesting to tell them. Hell, I even only talk to Adam like twice a week, because I don't even have enough going on in my life to talk to my boyfriend about!

I got my grades back from the fall semester, and I got my very first C range grade of law school (a C+). I'd totally had this hope of getting through all of law school with no C range grades, and that hope was squashed. And of course it had to be squashed by the worst professor I've ever had in my entire post-secondary career. No, I'm not saying that because of the mark he gave me. I'm pretty sure the entire class eviscerated him in the course evaluations back in November - I know I for sure did (and since he didn't see those remarks until after the exam, unfortunately I can't blame it on that!). I've never had a professor who actually taught in the form of asking questions, which he then never actually answered. Seriously. The majority of his slides would ask questions. Usually professors do that so they can initiate class discussion, and then will tell you the answers. But apparently that made entirely too much sense for this guy. Why answer the questions for the class? It's not like law students are paying ridiculous amounts of money to be taught the law, right? No, no, we're apparently paying ridiculous amounts of money to teach ourselves the law. At least according to this dude! Anyway, needless to say I'm bitter about this mark. I could have taken it better if it were more my fault, like I just hadn't understood or hadn't studied enough. But having it be at least partly someone else's fault and not being able to do anything about it is frustrating. But since there's nothing I can do about it, I just have to work extra hard now to make sure I graduate with at least a B+ average still, so that I can still do my LL.M. down the line.

My other grades were good. I actually got an A- in a really hard course, which I wasn't expecting, so I was very pleased about that. I really shouldn't complain, because I'm sure there are very few law students who don't get at least one C range grade in their 3 years of law school. Plus obviously I am aware that in the grand scheme of things, on a scale of 1 to 100 of how much things in your life can suck, this would be about 0.5. And that may even be too high.

In other news, um, nothing. I'm taking a course this semester that I really like: biotech law. It's so interesting, and it's taught by the prof I work for who I really like and respect, so really it can't go wrong. I just take this one course for the month of January (one aspect of my law school that I really like is the special January term), then our regular Spring semester starts after reading week.

OH MY GOD. I can't believe I almost forgot about reading week. I'm complaining about how nothing in my life is exciting, but two days ago I booked a trip, along with 3 of my friends, to Cuba, for the first week of February! How frigging exciting is that? I'm seriously going to quit my whining right now, cause I'm a doofus for forgetting that I'm going to get to do something so seriously awesome. I have never had a trip with the girls, and I think this one is going to be absolutely amazing. Another friend of ours was in the same place over the Christmas vacation, and she LOVED it, so I'm really excited. There's swimming with the dolphins, and horseback riding, and snorkelling/scuba diving, and really nice beaches. And warm. My god, I will be looking forward to that, since winter came in with a vengeance this week! It would have been nice to do another trip with Adam, but I'm sure I'll have plenty of time for that, and I'm really looking forward to hanging out with the girls on the beach.

Okay, I think that's it. I suddenly have no more energy to write, so this post is over. Woot.