YAY! YAY! YAY!

I ROCK. I’ve got mad negotiating skillz, because I talked our landlord down from what he wanted to charge us to something in the 50%-of-that range (though I agreed to make part of it nonrefundable, as a concession).

In other words, we can bring Himself home as soon as we can work out the timing! I am SO EXCITED.

whimper

So our landlord is supposed to call tonight to discuss amending our lease and collecting our pet deposit, so we can go ahead and get our dog. (Who, I have decided, I am going to call Himself. Not because I think he is going to dominate us, but just because he’s one of those animals that is definitely a big personality in a little body.) So, anyhoo, I told my landlord yesterday to give us a call tonight, sometime after 6, since when I called yesterday, he was on his way into dinner. (He was very short with me, in fact.)

It’s 8 now, and I am beginning to think he won’t call. Not because it’s been two hours, he’s NEVER going to call! but because I just have that feeling. I’ve never spoken with him after about 4pm, and I have certainly never spoken to him in the evening. I get the feeling he’s just not one of those landlords who does his landlording at night. During the day, on the weekends, sure, but not at night.

So that means I am going to have to call him at work tomorrow. And if he still can’t talk, I’m going to have to set up a specific time for him to call me back and discuss this thing. Because I want to take care of this before we leave town this weekend (which is making everything more stressful), and I want to let the owner know that we are going to be able to take Himself. I don’t want Himself to end up in rescue. I want him to end up with us.

Maybe this is a strategy by our landlord–wait me out till I am so freaked out and stressed that I just flat out agree to pay the ungodly pet deposit.

Good things and annoying things, on the home front

This morning I dropped off the keys to the old apartment. The office doesn’t open until 10, but the doorman had opened the door so that all of us moving out could drop off our keys and forwarding address. There were fifteen other scraps of paper and little envelopes of keys scattered on the desk, and one of them was ours.

In other moving news, though, our landlord would like to charge us an UNGODLY pet deposit, so we are in the midst of negotiations over THAT. Hopefully there won’t be any further problems, and we can get that mess worked out so we can bring our new dog home next week.

Weekly Law School Roundup #29

In the aftermath of the bar exam, I present to you the 29th edition of the reincarnated Weekly Law School Roundup, presented to you with (very) random song lyrics. (And when I say very random, I mean VERY VERY RANDOM.)

• It’s like a heat wave! (Transmogriflaw)
• And looking up/I noticed I was late (Death in the Afternoon)
• Oh, he’s leaving/On that midnight train to Georgia… (Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil)
• Knock three times on the ceiling (Screaming Bean)
• There you stood dressed up like Nebraska (Passionate Discourse)
• His son is working for the Daily Mail (Here is No Why)
• But every time I try to pull up/They pull me right back down again (Phocas and Francis)
• Everything’s gonna clear up/And the sun will shine/Everybody’s gonna cheer up/cause its redemption time (Peanut Butter Burrito)
• Guess I’m just a stubborn kind of fellow/Got my mind made up (Barely Legal: The Blog)

And that’s it for this week’s roundup! Look for it next week at Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground (now with more electricity!) and, in two weeks, back here.

dog is my copilot?

Thanks for all the good-luck waves–it looks like things are going to work out with our “opportunity,” namely, we are on our way to adopting a very sweet dog! I am very excited–he is surprisingly mellow for his breed, housebroken, not much of a barker, and generally just a very lovable fellow.

Of course, because this is ME, I am up at 4:30 in the morning thinking about it.

I am worried, mostly, about leaving him home during the day for stretches of time. He’s not a puppy (in fact, he’s nearly middle-aged), so my concern isn’t about potty training or destructive behavior. But I am concerned about him getting bored or lonely or sad. And I know that thinking about my potential schedule for this fall isn’t terribly fruitful–it’s not going to be a normal schedule, and will only last for one semester–but still, I worry.

I know that millions of Americans have dogs that they love who stay home all day and do just fine. So why am I so worried about our potential baby? That’s pretty much what he does now, is stay home all day. And even for this fall, there would only be one day, potentially, that he’d be home alone for a longer stretch. But how long is too long of a stretch? Some websites say 5 hours alone is too much for a dog, particularly if he’s crated. What if he’s not crated, but confined to a certain room in the house?

I have wanted to get a dog for the longest time, and this particular opportunity is almost so perfect it’s fate–the owner travels too much to take care of the dog properly and needs to find him a good home, he was just on the verge of calling the local breed rescue organization when I called him in response to an email a friend forwarded to me, the dog himself is so wonderful and obviously well-loved and treated (and he travels well), he’s an adult dog, which is what we wanted to get . . . the list goes on and on. But now, faced with bringing him home, I am so worried that we won’t be good enough for him. I worry that we will be bad dog owners. Unfounded though this worry may be, it is completely consuming me.

[Come to think of it, I’ve been very obsessive over little things like this lately, so I worry also that I’m becoming sort of neurotic. Still, isn’t it marginally better for me to be up in the middle of the night worrying about whether we’ll be good dog owners than whether or not our paint will look good?]

So the good luck waves worked–he’s a good dog, he’s trained and so sweet, the owner seems to like us and approve of us taking his baby, so it’s really just a matter of turning in a pet deposit and bringing him home (maybe for a short trial, over a weekend, if the owner is willing). No major glitches so far. Keep up the waves, though, for my mental health, if nothing else.

request

So I just found out about an opportunity that’s really exciting, and I don’t want to say too much about it in case it doesn’t work out for some reason, but any “good luck!” waves you might want to send this way would be cool.

i need a break from summer break

So I’m in this place right now where my projects for my summer jobs are coming to completion, and my class is starting to get busier, and a variety of administrative things are coming due (like loan paperwork, class selection, OCI stuff), and yet I am feeling almost bored.

I almost don’t know what to do with myself. I worked all day today–on stuff for work, stuff for OCI, stuff around the house (four loads of laundry)–so I don’t want to work on stuff for class tonight. But I don’t want to just sit and watch TV. And I don’t want to read, since it seems every book I pick up lately is about a woman who makes the worst life choices I can imagine, and those stories make me want to throw the books across the room. I hoped we might go out tonight, but Mr. Angst is feeling sick, and we’re going out tomorrow, so I’m just sort of sitting around doing not much.

The end of the summer is turning out to be . . . sadder, maybe? . . . than I expected. Frankly, I’m ready for school to start, to get back classes, to see my friends on a regular basis, to have social structure again. Meh.

dream an impossible dream

Ladies and gentlemen, it is possible.

I had a productive meeting with career services today. I got good advice, some of it stuff I actually hadn’t heard before, some of it stuff that wasn’t just common sense. I actually feel a million times better about my strategy for OCI now, and I have a plan!

Yes, Virginia, sometimes career services can help you.

a letter, because letters let you vent passive aggressively

Dear Shitty Downstairs Neighbors:

Yeah, I know you’re all moving in a month. That’s great — you have NO idea how excited Mr. Angst and I are that you and your drum kit and mix table will be gone by September 1. This does not mean, however, that we are willing to sit by and listen to you beat on your drums and play your music louder than any human being should have any tolerance for — in the middle of the evening, no less! Play your damn drums, but play them during the day, when we are AT WORK.

Let me give you a tip: if your music is so loud that you can’t hear us beating on your door, it’s TOO LOUD. Further, because you have seen our reaction to your loud music — more than once! — I will bear no responsibility if Mr. Angst goes postal on you one of these days. Moreover, if he has a heart attack in the next five weeks, I will immediately blame you, because I have NEVER seen him get as angry as he does when you beat on your drums and blast your music in the middle of the evening.

Downstairs Neighbors, we want your final weeks here to be as pleasant as possible for you and for us, though, of course, mostly for us. So keep it the hell down and I won’t call the cops on you.

Thanks!
Your (Legally Educated) Upstairs Neighbors

P.S. If you ever again make this much noise the night before I have a TEST, I will figure out a way to lock you out of the building.

to all taking the bar this week…

GOOD LUCK!