but i don't start work for another month!

. . . aaaaand I just got my first student loan bill. Hi, splash of real-life cold water in the face.

ready or not?

I’m back from my vacation, (pretty) rested, tan, and, to be honest, a little at a loss. I’m currently sitting on my couch watching the Olympics, catching up on news and blogs, and feeling a little nervous, like I should be doing something else. BUT I SHOULDN’T. In fact, I have nothing on my plate right now—I am free as a bird. ((This is marginally untrue; I do need to make some very minor revisions to my paper and figure out what I need to do to submit it for publication. The revisions are a little bit of “work,” in the sense of requiring some kind of mental endeavor; the rest, I think, will be mostly mechanical (though I’m not really looking forward to those mechanics.) The point is still valid, though.)) I need to relax and enjoy this freedom, though, because it’s not going to last and soon enough, I’ll be missing it.

post-bar wrapup

I am human again.

After consuming not-too-much-wine on Wednesday night, I fell into bed at midnight, but woke up promptly at, yes, you guessed it, 6 am. I rolled over and went back to sleep, but it wasn’t a very good sleep, and I was up by 8. Which was OK. I spent most of the day at the spa being pampered, though I won’t go back to that spa for the nail services. ((My fingernails don’t take to polish very well, and I need a really careful manicurist to give me nails that will last more than a couple of days. Despite my manicurist saying her French manicures can last for 10 days with nothing more than a quick reapplication of top coat, I am already chipping this morning on the edges. I had a manicurist tell me once that I have very oily nails and they have to be properly and carefully prepped for polish. Notably, that manicure was the only French manicure I’ve ever had last more than a few days. So, anyway, it was a fine manicure, but I won’t have the polish in a couple of days, I can already tell you, and it was too expensive a service for me to pay for that myself. (I had a gift certficate for most of my services this time.) )) But never mind the nail services—the 90-minute massage was worth every penny, plus the generous tip I gave my massage therapist, and the facial was also terrific. I am not one of those people who ever finds a facial relaxing—hello, digging at my pores? Relaxing? No way!—but I don’t expect relaxation, I expect clean, glowing skin. And I got it; my skin looks terrific. Those two services alone really did the trick for me, leaving me feeling just relaxed and just pampered enough.

And since my massage therapist pounded the tension out of my back, I slept like a ROCK for 10 hours last night. Today I’m awake, refreshed, and, having nothing on my schedule but to go do some shopping, I’m thinking that feeling isn’t going to go away.

I may post again tomorrow, but probably not; and after that, I’m not sure I’ll be back. First, I’ll be on my bar trip, getting away to the tropics for some quality sunshine; after that, I don’t know what else I have to write about. I’m not as down on the blogging thing as I was way back in May, full of the stress of having just graduated with the bar yet looming before me, but I’m also quite happy to leave on a high note. I’ve started feeling an obligation to blog again, and that’s exactly what I don’t want—if I’m writing here, it should be because I want to be writing. I don’t know if I’ll want to be writing, much less if there will be any stuff going on in my life that I can write about.

Anyway, to everyone who took the bar this week, CONGRATS! It’s over; we can all forget about it until the results are out sometime this fall. To those who haven’t taken the bar, it’s not as awful as I’ve made it sound. It’s just an endurance race. Schedule a spa day after your bar ((I think the spa I went to may start offering a bar exam package—one of my techs told me I was the second post-bar-exam client she’d seen yesterday, and then she started getting really excited about the possibility of a package just for us. I’m honestly not sure what to think about that.)) to flush all the tension from your skin; it’ll be worth it.

Until whenever!