The Seversons

I have seen over 50 movies this year.  Just now, we went to see Wall-E.  It was the best one I’ve seen so far.  That is a pretty heavy statement.  I am in robot love.  It’s a very cute kind of love.  If anyone wants to buy me a slightly belated half-birthday present, just go here.

Even better, Wall-E loves Hello, Dolly!, the musical I was in senior year of high school.  So now Eric is stuck listening to me sing “Put on your Sunday clothes…” for the rest of the summer.  I may have done some singing in the theater.  I may also have been a smidge misty-eyed.

When we were kids, my Dad would take us to the annual Disney offering.  We never went to movies.  Except that one time or so a year.  And every time we went, Dad would have to sit through the entire credits.  Have you ever sat through the entire credits of a Disney film?  They’re as long as the movie.  The ushers would stand in the doors staring at us, wondering what we were doing.  Dad used to work for Disney when I was little.  Specifically at Disneyland.  I’ve heard many stories about when I was a baby and Dad worked long hours, so Mom would take me to Disneyland all the time.  Apparently I preferred Pirates of the Caribbean and Dumbo as a toddler.  My Dad also likes to reminisce of when I sat on the lap of Clarence Nash, who did the voice of Donald Duck; little me didn’t quite know what to make of Donald’s voice coming out of an old man’s mouth.  Here I am (apparently doing a striptease) for my favorite, Mr. Smee:

When we moved back to California when I was a bit older (long enough to go from being an only child to the oldest of 4) we continued to make visits.

There were many eventful trips along the way.  The time Sarah was in a stroller, got sick and puked, and we had to go behind the secret gate the characters come out of.  She may still be traumatized from seeing Winnie the Pooh pull off his head.  Until I was a teenager, one of the great achievements of my life was the time I got to ride Thunder Mountain twice in a row without having to get off.  There was the time Minnie Mouse recognized my Dad when we came back after several years, and all the kids gathered around in awe as my Dad introduced us to her personally.  (I’m pretty sure she spoke, something they are totally not allowed to do.)

There was Employee Night, when they opened up Tomorrowland just for us, and according to my Dad I rode Star Tours about 10 times in a row.  (Again, without getting off.)  I do remember it, there was hardly anyone there, we ran through the long line queues and rode with hardly anyone else on with us.  I still get a weird feeling of deja vu whenever I ride Star Tours.  I know in advance when we’re about to lean forward, backward, or to the side.  It’s kind of weird.  That night was the first time we were brave enough to go on Space Mountain.  Before that, the long lines always gave me too much time to be anxious.

I got to go to Disneyland with Children’s Chorale in 8th grade.  (I don’t have pictures of that either.  Being camera-impaired is not a new thing with me.)  I remember we passed the time in lines by sucking on massive gobstoppers and playing hand-clap games.  There were a handful of chaperones, but they mostly let us loose to do as we wished.  That was truly awesome.

Years later, when I was in high school, my family went to Disney World for the first time.  (Strangely, I haven’t ever found pictures of that trip.)  Philip sang the Meow Mix song from the commercials obsessively the whole trip.  You know, the one where all it does is go “meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.”  Needless to say people gave us strange looks.  (Philip as a kid had strange habits on rollercoasters.  Once he and I rode a ride where the whole time he screamed out, “Woody the Woodpecker!” over and over again.)

I am secretly hoping Eric will start marathoning again… but only so we can go to the Disney World Marathon again.  He only needs to do that one.  With all my Disney trips, I’m something of a Disney obsessive.  My family went all together most recently when we took a trip back to Disneyland a couple Christmases ago.  There is so much to do and so very little time.  I probably had a big stick up my butt because we weren’t. going. fast. enough.  Since then I have learned to lighten up.  At least a little.  I need at least yearly trips to keep the process going.  You may want to keep your distance.  If you mess up my fast-pass strategy, I may have to kill you.

There’s been quite a lot going on chez Severson this last week.  I have started my next round of classes.  Well, class singular.  The second one may not start for several more weeks.  I’m back in the land of too much free time and I’m still figuring out what to do with it.

The biggest news is that Eric has been given the green light to prepare his thesis.  Basically this means all he has to do to graduate with his PhD is write up his thesis and defend it.  Writing up your thesis in the sciences isn’t quite the arduous task it is elsewhere.  Most of it is putting together things you’ve already worked on in papers you’ve already written.  So this means he doesn’t have to do any more actual science-y work, just finish his thesis.  It’s a big step and we’re very excited.  The plans are for Eric to go back for third year of med school in December.  He’s working on about 50 projects besides his thesis (if this surprises you, you don’t know Eric well) so he’ll keep plenty busy until then.

With this recent decision comes a change in our plans.  We’d been planning to take a little vacation in September when we figured Eric would be done with his defense.  Now Eric’s decided to do his defense in September and the vacation has been moved up.  So it looks like we’ll be going in about a month.  This isn’t quite as easy as the previous plan.  We’re moving from off-peak to exactly peak season, but that’s okay.  Eric has decreed that there shall be beaches involved and I have decreed that we will not set foot on an airplane.  So it looks like we’re heading down to Panama City Beach in Florida.  Plans should be solidified by the end of the week.

We have been relatively busy for us.  Last weekend we decided we needed to get out and do something.  So we went to a Braves game on Saturday.  There is actual photographic evidence of this, but I can’t find the little card thing that I use to put the pictures in the computer.  I’ll add the pic later today, hopefully.  The decision was very last minute, we bought our tickets only a few hours before the game.  We were very high up in the stands, but right behind home plate and had a great view.  We decided to keep it simple and take public transit, then make a little hike over to the field.  And I found out that they allow you to bring food and drinks into Turner Field, which was shocking.  I thought no one let you bring anything in anymore.  So we didn’t have to turn over our life savings to get a single hot dog.  We brought Chipotle and sodas and were very pleased with ourselves.  The game was very boring for a very long time.  The only runs were scored in the first inning before we got to our seats.  Our team was down by two.  And then all of a sudden things got very intense in the bottom of the 8th, right before we were planning to leave.  We ended up winning and the last couple innings were very exciting so we felt we got our money’s worth.   Then, of course, was the epic trip home, which kind of deserves its own blog post for all the insanity involved.  But we did learn that there is a much easier and completely deserted route for us to take home that we will use in the future.  So, if any of you feel like flying in for a Braves game, we are experts now.  I hope you like Chipotle.

We had thought we’d go on a hike Sunday morning.  And not a little beginner hike, but a moderate long one.  But… we got home pretty late from the Braves game, we’d been doing a lot of walking around in the heat, and we just slept in instead.  It would have been an all-day excursion.  But we are going to go this coming Sunday, though we’re taking it easy on Saturday this week.

We are very very excited about Wimbledon.  When Eric and I first started dating, that summer we watched the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open together.  Last year we were at my parents’ house during the US Open and pretty much camped out on the couch to watch a bunch of matches.  Watching a whole lot of matches in one tournament is great because you get very invested in players you didn’t know before.  We no longer have cable so we can’t get Wimbledon, but there’s not much else on these days, so we’re planning to take some trips to the sports bars to watch it.  I will be rooting for Nadal to beat Federer, finally.

I have been working out like a fiend.  (That’s why we have graduated to the more difficult hike.)  I am taking today off because I’m a little sore, but I’ll be right back in tomorrow.  I am now doing another one of Cindy’s videos, this one her post-natal workout.  I know I have not had children recently, but I heard it was the best one.  And it is.  It kicks my butt very very hard.  When I do it I am literally dripping sweat.  This does not really happen to me very often.  Eric has learned I’m prone to heat stroke because I don’t sweat.  I am still building up to full capacity (those women can do way too many lunges and squats) but I feel very good.  Even better, I noticed the other day that I am skinnier.  I haven’t actually weighed myself, but I don’t need to.  Whenever I gain or lose weight, there is evidence of it in my cheeks.  They are relatively big cheeks for anyone to have.  They’re from my dad’s side of the family, and whenever a large group of us get together, the amount of cheek present is unbelievable.  One of my cousins and I easily passed for sisters as kids simply because of the similarity of our massive cheeks.

When I recently felt myself getting fatter, my cheeks were right there to confirm.  They got bigger and rounder and made my face almost moon-shaped.  The other day I noticed that my face has gone back to its normal oval shape.  I know Eric knows me well because he agreed that my face looked thinner.  This is excellent news.  It also keeps me very motivated.  The other day Eric gave me an opportunity to eat Steak ‘n Shake and I said no.  And I didn’t even want to, which means my body actually likes what I’m doing to it.  Shocking.  Next stop, skinny pants.  Though I wouldn’t expect that overnight.

Finally, I am thinking of taking sewing classes.  There’s a place in town that offers a few of them on Saturdays in August.  But I’m not sure about the cost involved.  I have to buy supplies, pay for the classes, and I don’t actually have a sewing machine so I’m not sure what the point of all of it would be.  But I don’t really see the point of getting a sewing machine if I have no idea how to use it.  I’m thinking maybe I should wait a year or so before I get started and save some money up in the mean time.  I’ll think about it.

Okay, time to finish up this incredibly long entry.  We are off for a steak dinner tonight to celebrate.

There are many things peculiar to the blog world.  Tagging is one of them.  Someone somewhere decided to make people tell you stuff about themselves, and then they’d tell other people to do the same thing.  I have somehow avoided tagging for most of my internet career, but I have finally been tagged.  (I should have known it would strike once it got in the family.)  I am not a strict believer in the rules of tagging.  I will not tag any of you, my dear readers, just like I never passed along chain letters back when they came through the actual mail.   I will also feel free to alter the tag as I see fit for my own nefarious purposes.  (Or non-nefarious purposes.  Those are okay, too.)

I was tagged by my sister (you can go to her blog and see the widget of her floating baby, which has happily changed from creepy alien form to something resembling a human, I’m greatly relieved that she’s not giving birth to something from The X-Files).

5 things on my “to do” list: (I have the most boring to-do list in the history of time)

1. Go to the library to pick up a book that I put on hold.  I’m actually waiting to see if any others come in, as I’ve always got a few I’m waiting for.
2. Fill out my expense form from my last classes so I can get a sweet check.
3. Clean, etc.  (This is always on the to-do list.  So much so that it has its own to-do list which barely ever changes because I always get caught up in something.)
4. Call the State Bar to see if it’s cool for me to still be “active” even though I’m not actually practicing and shouldn’t technically practice as I possess no malpractice insurance.  If yes, then I can eventually transfer anywhere once I hit reciprocity requirements.  If no, then I save money for bar dues and CLE’s, plus no more of CLE’s which are lame and boring.
5. Watch the last episode of The Sopranos.  (This isn’t really on my to-do list, but it’s turned into a chore in my mind so it might as well be.  I hate all of them, which I have realized may actually be the point.  I wouldn’t really know, I kind of missed the boat on this one, but I always got the impression that everyone got a real kick out of it.  Oh well.  But I feel obligated to see it through for just one more hour.)

5 Snacks I Love:  (Go figure, this comes up while I’m trying to get in shape and not think about snacks.)

1. Popcorn.  I love popcorn.  Yesterday we got a free one at the movies, which I ate even though I am trying to be healthy as noted above.
2. Gummi Coke Bottles.  Maybe not on my top5 really, but I saw them the other day and thought that I would like to have some.
3. Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars.  I made some of these for Eric, thinking he’d like them.  He ate zero.  Didn’t even try them.  I ate them ALL.  I haven’t made them since.
4. Banana Cream Pie.  Okay, officially not a snack.  But I love pie.  And I’m not much for snacks.
5. Upper Echelon Oatmeal Raisin Cookies.  If Eric ran for president and I had to send a recipe to  magazines, I would be happy to pass this one down from my Mom.  (The “upper echelon” part is my own touch, as some of you know.)  Eric has never actually had these.  I have never made them because our oven is not an oven but a furnace that makes our apartment 20 degrees hotter.  They will soon make an appearance when we finally get our little convection oven.

5 Things I’d do if I suddenly became a millionaire:

1. Get a personal trainer who makes home visits.
2. Buy cute clothes after said trainer got me back to my regular size.
3. Go on vacation!  This is my favorite thing to do.
4. Start planning our next vacation.
5. Tell Eric to figure out what to do with the rest of the money.  (Yes, I’m really serious.  I doubt I’d do anything different than these 5 things.)

5 Jobs I’ve had:

1. Girl at Domino’s Pizza.  This was my high school job.  Our place was the one that served the Air Force Academy, where most cadets aren’t allowed to leave.  It was a heavy business.  Many boys much older than I was flirted with me to try to get me to deliver their pizzas even though I didn’t have a driver’s license.  I would always warn the drivers taking the pizzas which one were the tools.
2. Girl in Stockroom.  I had this job for two years in college.  I sat in a little room that was probably full of hazardous fumes, dispensing chemicals and supplies to snotty pre-meds.  (This was when I decided I would never marry a doctor.  So much for that.)  Mostly, though, we just acted superior, did crosswords, and laughed at the letters to the editor in the school paper.  (To be fair, this is a tradition among most students at the Y.)
3. Girl Who Watches Your Kids.  This must be included since I was a babysitter longer than I’ve been a lawyer.  It got me a few thousand dollars in the bank that I saved for college.  Babysitting didn’t pay terribly well where I was.  If I made more than $20 in a night, it was a coup.  So making a few thousand dollars required countless hours of watching kids movies while my fellow teenagers were partying.
4. Girl Who Types.  My law school cohorts wondered where my speedy typing skills came from.  (Note, fellow alums, my certificate for Fastest Typist in the West is still in my possession.)  A summer of data entry right before law school certainly helped.  In my heyday I was clocked at above 120 wpm.
5. Girl Who Goes to Prison.  Always my best story job, even better than being a PD.  My first day I sat with the girls who opened prisoner mail every day, and I got the single best story I ever had in my life.  Which means it’s time for a tangent!  So, most letters we received were from prisoners seeking legal assistance, which is what we did.  But we couldn’t provide help with many different things so we had to sort and tried to respond to whatever we could.  Most letters were about appeals and we had to sort through these to see if we thought there was anything to it.  I started a letter that went the way most did, that the person was innocent of the crime.  For a while I followed along and thought, “Hey, this guy may have a point.”  He’d been convicted of murder.  I’ll paraphrase his story.  His story began, as most do, with a fight over the phone with his girlfriend.  He decided he needed to get over there right away.  So he got in the car to go.  As he was driving away, the owner of the car came out after him.  (Yeah, it took me a couple readings to be like, wait, what do you mean the owner of the car?)  You can probably guess how it went from there.  Sadly for my correspondent, felony-murder is definitely on the table when you’re stealing someone’s car.  But mostly I was impressed with how easily he glossed over the whole car stealing bit.  I wondered how long he’d taken to phrase that particular gem.

5 things people don’t know about me:

1. One of the other reasons I’m so good at typing is that it’s a nervous habit.  I type on my hands.  My palms are the key pad and my fingers will just go at it.  I can also tell you some of the words that take up all 8 (and only those 8 ) fingers.  Captions, pontiacs, spalding, etc.  Apparently I’m not the only one who does this.
2. I also have a similar habit of turning letters into numbers (a=1, z=26) and adding and subtracting a word until I can reach a multiple of 5.  This habit is very complicated, but I still do it pretty at least a few times a day.  For example, my name, Jessica, becomes 10, 5, 19, 19, 9, 3, 1.  Add the 3 and 1 to get 4, subtract that from one of the 19’s to get 15.  Subtract the 9 from the other 19 to get 10.  Now with a 10, 5, 15 and 10, you can wind up with a 5 or 10, aka a J or T.  Extra bonus for adding up to Z, or 26.  I know I’m crazy.  You can lock me up.  Worse, I do it all in my head within a couple of seconds.  I also do it so quickly now that the letters have basically become numbers and I can quickly tell you that R plus H equals Z.
3. For months I tried to get a nickname for Eric but never got one.  However, we do constantly call one another “baby.”  So much so that we never call each other by our names.  This is genetic.  My parents call one another “dear” and that’s it.  Even when they fight.  They have no variations.  Eric and I do, but the variations are probably worse than the “baby” part and you’re probably already squeamish from the mush quotient.
4. I am something of a nicknamer.  I cannot help this.  It’s also genetic.  I ended up with one of the more embarrassing nicknames in my family which I had to reveal to all my college roommates since my Mom would blurt it out whenever anyone picked up the phone.  Fine, I’ll tell you, it’s “gander.”  As in a male goose.  No, I’m not a boy.  Don’t ask me.  It has multiple diminuitives and I respond to all of them.  My Mom still calls me by them regularly.  I have always liked Russian because nicknames are built into the language.  I have already come up with an abundance of nicknames for my children.  In many ways these are more important than their actual names since they will come out of my mouth more often.  Nicknames will be given as appropriate and are subject to change.  This also applies to pets.  My last cat started grandly as Lord Byron and ended up through a long string of changes as “The Burrito.”  But I think it fit him well.
5. Don’t mess with my pens.  Eric is one of those who bites and mutilates pens.  I am very picky and love my pens dearly.  He just got chewed out.  Again.  He isn’t even writing anything!  I think he’s just trying to sabotage my pens.  And mutilate their poor little bodies.

And that is the end of the tag, which a slight change.  And hey, at least it’s another blog entry so I don’t have to figure out what to write for a few more days.

You know how sometimes it seems like the universe just hates you?  Lately I am getting this vibe.  It’s a variety of factors, really.  The heat itself feels pretty oppressive.  And the heat is driving the bugs inside.  In two days we saw 4 rather large roaches making themselves at home in our apartment.  Last night it was a rather bizarre looking centipede-type thing that had taken residence on a wall.  I’m not the type who does well with bugs.  But they’re really secondary.

The biggest problem I’m having these days is my utilities.  Just the basics.  Last week we had a power outage that we never found out the cause for.  It was at least an hour long and came right at the hottest part of the day.  So there we were, no air conditioning, no fans,  no lights, and dinner still going on our gas stove.  This wouldn’t have been so bad except apartments usually don’t excel at the lighting concept and so the kitchen was totally dark.  Eric set up a bunch of tea lights around the room so I could continue my work, making our kitchen look kind of like one of those romantic scenes in a teen drama.  (Why candles are supposed to equal romance, I’ve never quite figured.  Don’t they really just equal a fire hazard?)  I used our single small flashlight to check the color of the meat to make sure it was done.  All the while, we had our handy dandy battery-powered temperature thingy by the door telling us just how hot it was.  It has been bad enough lately that the Outdoor reading is –.-, which I finally figured out means that we’ve crossed the triple-digit threshold.

But I would gladly take regular power outages over the other problem.  Twice this month our water has gone out without warning for several hours while they work on pipes.  And it doesn’t go out on days where I’m out and about and don’t even notice.  No.  It happens on days where my entire plan consists of sitting at home and using water-powered appliances to get cleaning and chores done.  The first time was bad.  I hadn’t showered and so I couldn’t go anywhere.  I couldn’t do anything around the house.  And having your own bathroom off limits is just inherently wrong.

It happened again yesterday.  This time it happened at the worst time possible.  I was in the shower and had just put shampoo in my hair.  Seriously.  I am not even kidding.  The water pressure suddenly dropped and I assumed maybe it was because the dishwasher had gone into a rinse cycle or something.  This was my fatal mistake.  At my parents’ house, the shower will often lose water pressure momentarily when someone turns on something else, and I generally wait it out since it’s usually 10-15 seconds.  This time, I turned around, looked at the water and kept looking.  I looked far too long.  I looked for so long because I was thinking, “Wait, is it getting worse?” because I thought it seemed like it was gradually getting less and less pressure but it was difficult to tell without staring.  And then, too late, I realized what was happening.  And by the time I tried to stick my head back under the now tiny stream of water, there wasn’t near enough of it to get the shampoo out of my hair.  Reader, it was tragic.

I was told it would be less than an hour once I called up to my complex.  So I squeezed out as much soap as I could from my hair, put it in a towel, and waited.  And since I assumed the best I waited by watching short tv shows that could be nice little 40-minute markers of time.  This was great in theory, but since the outage lasted over 3 hours, I ended up watching far too much.  But giving in and turning on a movie was like admitting that I would never get to shower.  And yet again I had laundry to do, dishes to wash, errands to run, and couldn’t do any of it.

I never did get to shower.  The water turned on 15 minutes before I had to leave for work.  At this point, I just needed to make sure I could brush my teeth.  And even with the water on, it was scary looking for a good 5 minutes and the hot water was still not working right when I left.  It was not a pleasant day.  If the water goes out again, you can bet I will spend my time plotting my revenge against anyone in the office of my complex.

For now, I must get back to all the stuff I was going to do yesterday.

So you may remember back in March when I started trying to work out again.  I tried going to the gym before the wedding, which didn’t work at all.  And these days, with the crazy summer heat already in full swing, I don’t want to have to leave my apartment if at all possible.  So I’ve been continuing with the workout videos, trying to find ones that don’t drive me crazy.  Except, of course, for the month of May where I pretty much went without and just got fatter.

So June is upon us and I am actually going to get it together.  Classes are winding down, it’ll be a while before I get a busy schedule again.  I had a few new workout videos waiting for me once Eric took care of the electronics and I tried them out.  It seems we finally have a winner.

Cindy Crawford was never a likely candidate for me.  I chose her video only after seeing positive feedback about it.  I thought I would just ignore the pretty model part of it and see if the exercises were any good.  There are lots of caveats to throw in, so I can’t give my full endorsement.  Mostly I like that it’s a very reps-and-sets oriented workout.  Actually targeting specific muscle groups and such.  Granted, Cindy isn’t exactly the paragon of form.  But the moves are difficult enough that they take my full attention and I don’t watch her or the crazy camera work. Of course, if it means I can get out of my fat jeans, I will be even more in Cindy’s debt.

The most noticeable problem is that Cindy cannot just sit in a gym and do the workout.  She does that, in a sports bra and shorts, but she does the same workout in a one-piece on a beach, and then also on a rooftop.  We must cut back and forth.  Cameras circle, lame 90’s music plays, we change to black and white to color.  It’s really obnoxious.

But Cindy in the gym is very charming.  She is exactly what I asked for in my previous post.  I believe my direct quote in what I wanted to hear from someone in a workout video was:

She’ll say, “This one is really hard. Your arms are going to be killing you when it’s over. But that’s why we’re here.” She and her little minions will not make the moves look effortless, instead they will be visibly exhausted. “We’re supposed to do 8 more. I’m not sure I can handle 8 more. But let’s at least give it a shot.”

And that is exactly what Cindy is like.  She stops!  She drinks water!  She gets sweaty!  She can’t do boy push-ups!  She does not like having to do another set!  She hates it that the last exercise in the set is always the hardest!  Cindy and I are really in it together.  And Cindy tells me not to worry if I can’t do all the sets at first.  And that I don’t have to go very fast.  For these things, I love Cindy dearly.

But she is still a model.  And when she’s doing her workout on the beach or the rooftop her hair is loose and she throws it around and I swear she’s on the cover of a magazine.  This could bother me, but I’ve decided to accept it.  Normally when I work out I wouldn’t want anyone anywhere to see me.  I look like a fool, an ugly and sweaty fool at that.  But if Cindy looks so sexy during a workout, then I can imagine that I do, too.  There’s no mirror to tell me otherwise, after all.  And a little delusion goes a long way.  I could use the boost since I am getting my picture taken this afternoon for work.  (Meaning it will probably go on a website and be visible to far too many people.  Frightening.)

More on our comings and goings in the next day or two.

Things are winding down, which I appreciate greatly.  I had one of my insane weekends where I taught and taught and taught constantly for two days, which leaves me with a scratchy voice and a tough time forming complete sentences.  But the down time for my long weekend gave me enough time to read nearly an entire book.

I read The Nine, the big Supreme Court exposé that came out a few months ago, when I was lent a copy.  It was one of the first lawyerly things to do since I kind of stopped being a lawyer.  Actually, I don’t technically know if you can stop.  And I need to call the State Bar to figure out what to do with my status.  Staying active means paying for and attending CLE’s.  (Lame and Expensive.)  Going inactive would mean that I wouldn’t have enough practice time to get reciprocity in most states should we move.  The odds of us moving to a state with a difficult bar are minimal (and if we end up in Texas or Georgia it’s a moot point) but I’m still not sure about how I feel.  Nevertheless, for now I’m still on the rolls of the bar.

As for reading The Nine it left me feeling less lawyerly than I’d anticipated.  Mostly because it wasn’t that awesome.  I suppose most of my opinion, though, is based on my lawyerly background.  (I think I may break the record for using the word lawyerly the most in this post.)  See, I had a great Constitutional Law professor.  And he was my 1st Amendment professor.  And nearly all of the cases discussed in the book happened before I was in law school or while I was in law school and we reviewed every one of them.  (Much to our chagrin, in many cases.  There was a brutal question on our final about Bush v. Gore that I don’t think people have quite recovered from.)  So there was very little that I learned from the book.  Except that Scalia and Ginsburg’s families get together for New Years and stuff.

I also felt like it was a massive case of oversimplification.  He had such a specific thesis he wanted to make (especially when it came to O’Connor leaning liberal) that he only showed a handful of cases.  And of course they were all the ones that suited his thesis.  5 or 10 cases don’t make a court, my friend.  O’Connor leaned right the vast majority of the time and it’s not like the left is her biggest fan.  No one is her biggest fan.  Her precedents are incredibly frustrating.  (Almost as frustrating as the we-don’t-overrule-anything-Roberts-Court we’ve got now.)  The secret with balancing tests is they just let you do whatever you want.

Still, I suppose I can recommend the book to some extent.  It would be an interesting point of view for non-lawyers (all you laymen out there) who don’t keep up with the court’s comings and goings.  For me, there was only one case mentioned that I hadn’t read.  And there was tons about the appointments of the last couple decades, but it seemed to be there to take up space.  He never really made what seems to be the most important point when it comes to appointments–that you seem to need the kind of experience now you didn’t need 20 years ago, and it looks like it may stay that way.

Maybe I should go read a few Court opinions.  Perhaps that would help me feel lawyerly again…  Then again, I am happy these days.  And thus I avoid reading things that will upset me.  Last year’s bong hits 4 jesus case upset me to no end, so maybe I should just spare myself the trouble, eh?

Ah, who cares.  Lawyer, shmawyer.