But today life got even better. Or at least that’s what all of the barefoot running enthusiasts would have me believe. Today I did what I had at times promised myself I would not do: I bought a pair of the funniest looking “shoes” I have had the chance to lay eyes on. Maybe you’ve seen those healthy, glowing runners jogging through the park with what appears to be spandex and rubber gloves on their feet. Each toe has its own little pocket, there’s rubber on the bottom (not much) and fabric on the top (again, not much).

What makes this particular picture a bit odd, though, is that I am not a “healthy, glowing runner” and you are not likely to see me “jogging through the park.” I am probably one of the least likely people to be writing about my latest running footwear as I do not like running much at all. And based upon my behavior over the last few years one might believe that aside from weekly soccer matches I do not like exercise much at all (one would be mostly right).

Yet here I am with Vibram’s “Five Finger” footwear on my feet. The model specifically designed for running, no less. And I think I may even use them for their intended purpose someday soon. In a few weeks I am headed out west for a bit of a summer vacation (and to study for the NY Bar Exam) and I think it may be a good time to take myself and my fiver fingers out running. And maybe after that I’ll do it again. And with any luck,, I’ll do it again after that.

And maybe I’ll write about it. And maybe my mom will read it. And maybe my wife will, too. I can’t guarantee that it will be of interest to anyone who is not inherently interested in the goings-on of my life, but if it is, great.

I’ve been back in New York for a few weeks now. I got through the Early Interview Program that Columbia puts on. Essentially we spend four days at the Doubletree Suites in Times Square and interview with a number of law firms. After the interviews are over, the interviewer goes back to his or her office where they make a decision whether to invite you to their office for another interview, or to send you a politely worded letter saying that you have a promising legal future ahead of you. Just not with them.

At this point I’m waiting to hear back from the law firms. I’ve heard from some, but not from others. If you’re interested in knowing more specifically how things are going or my thoughts on any of the interviews, firms, cities, or anything, give me a call.

I spoke in sacrament meeting at church today. I got an email Thursday night explaining that the person who was supposed to speak would be unavailable this Sunday. I figured I had enough free time this weekend that I could put something together. I enjoyed having only a few days to write the talk rather than a few weeks like I normally do. It forced me to pick a topic, do my research, and start writing much more quickly than I normally would. The final product, though, was every bit as good as talks that I prepare when I have much more time.

With the free days I have in NYC, I think I may pretend to be a tourist. That, or I will go visit the Costco in Queens. You can make bets on which one I’ll actually do tomorrow. I want to visit Ellis Island (I’ve heard from a number of people that it’s one of the more interesting things to see), but I wasn’t sure if I have to get tickets, or what I have to get them for, or where I get them. I’ll have to re-read the webpage

And after reviewing the webpage, it turns out that I can’t get tickets to the Statute of Liberty part until September. Costco it is.

I went to San Francisco/Oakland/Danville for Matt Robinson and Chelsea Beckman’s wedding. It was a great weekend and I loved the SF area. Danville is a nice area a ways outside of Oakland that actually has some open areas, hills, trees, and beautiful homes. It also has the fanciest Costco I have ever been to. I thought about moving there just so I could go to that Costco. The Oakland temple was much prettier than I expected it to be (I’d never liked it in pictures) and the view from the temple was absolutely amazing. You can see all the way out to the Golden Gate  bridge. There were a number of parties/meals over the weekend and I enjoyed it all and was pretty exhausted by the time it was over and I flew back to New York. I considered my flight quite a bit shorter after talking to Adam Robinson who had a flight back to Taiwan ahead of him. I think it’s a 14 hour flight.

Once I got back to New York I started finsihing up classes and studying for finals. The previous post gives you the rundown of a typical day during the few weeks before finals and the two weeks during finals. I think I can safely say that this was the absolute worst month of my academic career so far and I hope that it will be the worst month I ever have to experience in my schooling. I was cranky, exhausted, and among the most boring people on the planet during that time.

After all that work, however, my finals weren’t that bad. They were 3-4 hours each and I had a final for Property, IP, Criminal Law, and Constitutional Law (in that order). I have absolutely no idea how I did on any of them, but they were much easier to take than last semester. I’m not sure how much of that was the extra work I put in preparing or how much was just that I had some idea of what to expect.

After I finished my finals I decided to get out of town for the weekend. Luckily I have a friend (Amanda Rosell for those who know her) who fairly recently moved to Philadelphia and invited me to come visit. I got to Philly Friday afternoon and wandered around the U Penn campus until she got off work. It’s a really nice campus with some interesting old buildings. I enjoyed just sitting on a bench and not having to do anything for a while. A nice change from finals. I spent the rest of the evening hanging out with Amanda in Manayunk (a suburb of Philly I guess).

The rest of the weekend I got to go to Valley Forge (beautiful place but with some interesting historical re-enactors), Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Outlet Mall near Philly (it’s by a nuclear power plant – I’ll add photos later), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Rocky’s stairs), a small church branch a ways outside of downton Philly, Geno’s cheesteaks, the Reading Terminal market, and the King of Prussia movie theater where I saw Star Trek (very good). I could write a fair bit about any one of the things I did, but I’ll save it for another time. Ask me if you want to know anything in particular.

The last week I have spent in New York doing pretty much whatever I feel like doing. In most cases, that’s not too much. I have packed up my room and my bags so I’m ready to head to Seattle. I spent a day at the American Museum of Natural History and absolutely loved it. It’s my new favorite museum. One particularly interesting thing I learned there is that some native American tribes in the Northwest would dress up with their animal masks and completely cover themselves in animal furs and then run into the village to scare everyone. While the adults feigned fear and surprise, the masked men would kidnap the children and then take them to a special village to teach them about their history and other significant cultural information. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be kidnapped by a large hairy man with a scary wooden mask. Terrifying, I think.

Today I went down to Island Burger to try out what is supposed to be one of the best burgers in New York. It was a pretty good burger, but the Shake Shack still holds the place as “the best” in my opinion. Island Burger has a few dozen burgers to choose from that are on a sesame bun, sourdough bread, pita, rye bread, or some other bread. They have everything you can imagine, and I ordered one of my favorites: a burger with barbecue sauce, cheddar, bacon, sauteed onions on sourdough (yes mom, I know I should eat better).

When I first got the burger, I was confused. It was probably three or four inches tall and I realized that I couldn’t just pick it up and take a bite. Cutting it seemed equally hopeless as each time I would try the burger would fall apart. Seeing my predicament, one of the servers grabbed a steak knife and told me it might be easier if I cut it in half. I did and it wasn’t.

Eventually I threw caution and cleanliness to the wind and picked up the burger half in both hands and took a humongous bite. It was pretty tasty. The beef itself wasn’t seasoned much at all, but it was juicy. The barbecue sauce had a pretty strong vinegar-taste to it which i like, but I didn’t notice the cheddar much on top of the sauce. The Sauteed onions added a nice sweetness to the whole thing and I enjoyed the sourdough bread with two caveats. The bread had been burned to a crisp along one end of the crust, so I had to leave bits on my plate and the bread also soaked up too much sauce/juice to be a useful conveyance of beef and cheese. In the end, I think it is the second best burger that I have had in New York, but it just tries to do too much resulting in a confusing menu and an impossible-to-eat burger. The Shake Shack keeps it’s first spot because it has a very simple goal: to make the classic American burger better.

I’ve also watched a lot of Gossip Girl this week and caught up on a few other shows that I enjoy. Just a few more days and I’ll be on my way home for the summer. Until then, I have some very important business/napping to get to.

I’m sorry that everyone who reads this has heard from me a lot less lately than normal. I don’t have time to write too much, but I’ll let you know what I’ve been up to.

Yesterday was a normal day, so we’ll start with that. I got over to Mike’s apartment at about 10:30 a.m. (I think) and we started working on our property outline. We worked on that for a few hours, then got some lunch, then went back to property. We worked on that for quite a few more hours and then at about 2:00 a.m. I went to Koronet pizza, bought a slice, and went home to bed (after watching an episode of The Office). We decided to reward ourselves for finishing our property outline by sleeping in until noon. Then we started working on exams.

I don’t know how many hours a day I’ve been working, but yesterday was not out of the ordinary for the last week or so. It’s been a lot of hours of work, but I really do feel a lot more prepared

I have accepted a position for the summer with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office in their Seattle Torts Division. I’ll be working in Seattle, so I will be able to spend the summer with family and whatever friends are in the area. While I am enjoying New York, I will be relieved to be back in Seattle. Also, I will go see the Sounders play and I cannot even begin to tell you how excited I am. As everyone at my parents house knows, I get excited for every game and call every time something happens, at half time, and before and after the match.

So what have I been up to? On monday I had my moot court oral argument. Pretty much I stood up in front of three alumni judges and had fifteen minutes where they drilled me with questions about a legal issue that I have been working on this semester. It went surprisingly well, and I really enjoyed it.

Today, for an example of my days this time of year, I got up at 7, got ready for class, had a break for an hour where I did reading for my next class, went to class, read during my lunch break, then had two more classes, and then I went home to write a self-assessment. I took a break to eat dinner and watch an episode of House, then I went to study with two friends from school. We studied from just before 7 until nearly midnight. I’ll get up in the morning and do it again. That’s pretty much my schedule until I get home, so I hope everyone understands why I don’t write very often. I’m pretty busy, but even more significantly, I’m not doing anything that anyone would want to read about.

Well, that’s all for now. Time for bed so it can all start over again in the morning.

I applied to a bunch more public interest groups last night and I’ve heard back from a few that are “considering” my application. I’m not holding my breath, though. I have a few more leads that look promising in a number of great places across the country, so I’ll let you all know how that turns out when something actually happens.

Big news, at least so far as I am concerned. Kasey Keller won MLS player of the week. The Sounders have gotten both player of the week honors (last week was Montero). It’s the first time a GK has gotten the honor since 2006. Keller is a player who I have admired for years, and I wanted to buy the same gloves he wore in the 1998 Gold Cup game against Brazil (I can’t find them online anymore. I’ll keep looking.) I am very happy that Keller has looked so good in his first two games in the MLS and I hope he continues to do so.

Had criminal law and intellectual property today. In crimlaw, we talked about the self-defense defense. Here are the highlights: generally, the force you use in self defense has to be proportional and in response to a reasonable fear for your own safety. Many states have a rule that requires a person to retreat rather than defend himself, although that rule does not extend to a person’s home (for the most part). In IP law we talked some more about copyright term extensions and then a bit about patent term extensions. We didn’t get to the material we read for the day, so no reading for class next Tuesday! Always nice.

I’ve been keeping pretty busy over the past month. School seems to be a bit more work than usual, and I’m still working on finding a job for the summer. I’ve had quite a bit of help (Thanks Aunt Roxann!) looking, but nothing solid has come through yet. I sent out another round of applications tonight, so maybe I’ll have some good news over the next week.

One thing that has gone spectacularly well is the start of the season for the Seattle Sounders FC! I’ve watched both their games and have been absolutely thrilled at how they are doing. Their play could definitely improve, but they work hard enough to make up for their mistakes. Freddy Montero is absolutely amazing (seriously, he’s phenomenal), but the entire attacking game is a lot of fun, really. Ljungberg even got in for 30 minutes on Saturday and he said that he is feeling really good and may start next Saturday in Toronto. It’ll be good to see how they do on the road, but I am optimistic. I’m trying to focus on school, but it’s tough.

Anyway, I just wanted to write so everyone knew I haven’t forgotten that I have a blog. I’ll try to get some more substantial updates in the next week or so. We’ll see how it goes.

Just a quick thought, I need to write another food review on here since it’s been a while since I’ve done so. Any recommendations of where I should go next, or is there any type of food in particular any of you would like to know about? Feel free to make a comment on here, send me an email, or give me a call.

I got feedback on my third draft of an appellate brief that I’ve been working on this semester in my legal writing class. I think the brief has been moving along nicely and the final product will be something that I can be at least a little bit proud of. If nothing else, I’ve learned quite a lot about how I should have approached the problem from the beginning and what I should do to make a better brief the next time I write. The biggest problems I have had is discussing cases in a natural way and then remembering to explicitly analogize them to the case at hand. For the most part, I spent a paragraph explaining the cases on some point and then I’d spend another paragraph talking about the details of my case. The connection between the two seemed obvious to me as I was writing it, so I forgot to say “As in Buda, there was very little formality during the interrogation of the declarant . . . ” Yes, that’s a poorly written sentence. The idea is just that I need to make those connections very explicit so that the reader has to do as little work as possible. A good assumption to make, although it is most often not true, is that the judge is lazy and then write accordingly. It helps me remember to do all of the work that I can for the judge. Put the dots on the paper, connect them all for him, and then tell him what picture that just made. In the end he may disagree with my dots, connecting, or interpretation of the picture, but that’s just how it goes sometime. Unless you’re Denny Crane. Denny Crane has never lost a case (see Boston Legal). I’ve got to do some more analysis in a few sections of my brief, but I don’t think it should be too difficult.

Last night I went up to the church to help clean in the temple. I thought it would be a nice way to spend a Friday evening, and so I signed up when the sheet came through at church. When I finally got down to the church at 6:00 last night, I reached into my wallet and realized that I had left my temple recommend at home. Even if it’s just for cleaning, you can’t go into the temple without a recommend. I headed back uptown to my apartment, grabbed my recommend, and headed back to Lincoln Center.

When I got there, the first thing that I did was join a group of people looking for the room in which everyone was leaving their coats. There was supposed to be a person watching that room, and since things in New York have a way of wandering off if you don’t watch them, everyone wanted to leave their things there.  We found the room, and the man who had helped us find it asked if anyone would take the spot of the person watching the room so that he could go and clean for a while. Because it looked like most everyone else had travelled further or come with a spouse to do the cleaning, I volunteered to sit around and watch the coats. I was told that someone would come and replace me in an hour or so.

There was a baby grand piano in the corner of the room so I sat down and tried to play a few hymns. The sound of me pecking at the keys undoubtedly ruined any fond memories the passers-by had of those particular hymns, but it was nice to pretend that I had at least a small amount of piano ability left. When I got bored with the piano, I tried to play a game on my cell phone. I lost interest in that a few minutes later. So there I was, in a large multi-purpose classroom with nothing to read and nobody else around. A quick search of the floor led me to a waiting room for the Church’s public affairs office and the table had a pile of magazines on it. I grabbed a copy of the National Geographic and went back to the coat room to read.

Now that I had the magazine, time started to fly by. I learned about gold, the exploration of the North Pole, and some wildlife preserve in Russia. After reading the article on gold, I decided that I didn’t ever want to buy any gold jewelry (watches included). Mining for gold is one of the most wasteful and silly things that I think I have ever heard about. I forget the numbers, but it takes tons and tons and tons of rock just to get enough gold for an average wedding ring. Much gold mining these days is done by finding microscopic traces of gold in rock and then just pulling all the rocks out of the ground, grinding them up, and getting the gold out. The rock is then put into giant piles all over the rain forest or pumped into the bottom of the sea. It really seems like a strange thing to do. Also interesting is that India is by far the highest consumer of gold in the world. They purchase more than twice the second highest consumer (China) which purchases slightly more than the third highest (the United States). Eventually it rolled around to 9:00 and most of the people had collected their coats. I didn’t end up getting to clean in the temple at all, but I enjoyed the time I had to read anyway.

This morning I got up and got ready to go back to the church to help with the lunch for the Manhattan Stake Women’s Conference. We were making and supporting lunch for more than three hundred women. By the time I got there at 11, the first shift of people (two guys from my ward and a professional chef from another ward) had already cooked the actual soup for the lunch and done quite a bit of the other prep work. We spent the next 60 minutes cutting up loaves and loaves of bread, plating piles of desserts, filling a few dozen pitchers of water, and arranging it all on long tables in the multi-purpose room of the church which had seating for all of the women at the conference. Mostly because of the excellent direction of our chef, we got everything prepared and on the tables with 15 minutes to spare. We took that time to clean the entire kitchen and had everything clean that could be clean before anyone started eating lunch. For the few people who looked inside the kitchen, there were few signs of the work that had been going on over the past few hours.

Supporting the lunch was as much work as the prep. We had to refill water pitchers, chafing dishes filled with soups, bowls of cheese, bread baskets, and whatever else there was. There was a constant flow of things from the kitchen to the tables and back. While it was a fair amount of work, I enjoyed it as a distraction from the daily grind of law school. I didn’t have time to worry about the elements of capital murder, or the particular arrangements of property rights in a particular case, I just had to find food that was running out and refill it.

The cleanup from the lunch took a few hours and was evey bit as much work as the prep. There were gigantic pots to clean, pitchers to wash, and ladles to scrub. There were trays and baskets and bowls. It seemed as if more dishes and utensils were coming back into the kitchen than we had used to prepare and serve everything. After a few hours, however, we (there were a number of people in addition to the guys who did prep who were helping out throughout the serving and cleanup) finally got through everything and were able to go home. My feet hurt, and I felt like it was a day well spent.

My feet are feeling better now and I’m thinking it’s about time to do something productive. Lucky for me it’s also time for dinner, so productive work can wait for a bit while I try to figure out what I’m going to eat today.

Apparently every weekend I’ve had is actually a fee simple subject to condition subsequent where wanting to hit my head against the wall has a future interest in the power of termination. Who knew?

So if you know what all of that stuff in the previous sentence means, then I am very sorry because that means at some point you either read about it or had someone explain it to you. Really, though, I kind of enjoyed learning about all these sorts of interests in property that can be divided among people or by time and the conservation of estates.

I noticed as I signed into my blog that I had 17 views on Sunday which is an unusually high number for me in one day. I took a bit closer look to see who in the world has been visiting. Sure enough, there was something quite a bit different on Sunday. If you take a look below this post you’ll see my short, uninteresting rant about NBC Press: Here TV which I linked back to the TechCrunch article that had the clip embedded. As I scrolled down the page I noticed that my blog was listed in the “responses” section below the article on TechCrunch. I think that this is both very cool and also very strange. It turns out a total of 4 people clicked from TechCrunch (huge numbers, I know), and another 8 clicked through from a site called “Alpha Inventions.”  So 12 people that visited my site have no idea who I am and have each lost a few minutes of his or her life that they can never recover. Since I’m now something of an internet phenomenon getting double digit hits on my site one or two days on the occasional week, I’ll have to ramp up the quality and relevance of what I write on here.

Now that I’ve made my commitment to a higher standard of blogging excellence, what am I going to write about? My very mundane week in law school. Let me sum it up for you: I read some books, went to church, watched some TV, ate a few meals a day, and bought a chair off Craigslist.

Actually, I think two of those things deserve a bit more explanation.

I have been looking for an Ikea Poang chair with a black/brown frame and some sort of a dark colored cushion for quite some time now. I check Craigslist once or twice a week (like my weekly trips to Marshall’s in Harlem) to see who’s got a chair for sale and how much they are going for. Usually there are a number of the light colored chairs in the $40-$50 range, but a new one is about $80, so that really doesn’t seem like a big enough discount to get me to bite. I logged on to Craigslist to kill a few minutes the other night and typed Poang into the search box. Sure enough, a number of postings from that day appeared on the screen. Four or five down from the top I noticed a Poang chair on the Upper East Side for $10. It had the black/brown frame. It had the dark brown, high-end cushion. I emailed the seller and it was still there; my night was looking up.

I hopped onto a subway, then got a bus across the park and arrived at his apartment about 40 minutes after I had emailed him. I went in, looked at the chair, gave the seller his $10, and took the chair back down the elevator with me. After a few minutes of taking the chair completely apart, I crammed it all into a large Ikea bag I got from another Craigslist person and stepped back onto the street to catch a bus back across town. In the end I had spent 90 minutes and $10 and I had my chair. I now have two chairs in my room. They are only 18 inches from one another. Maybe I didn’t need two chairs . . .

The other thing worth mentioning from this last week is that church was more interesting than normal. That’s not to say that it’s usually uninteresting (I actually like the ward here very much), but this week we had the four newest members of the ward each get up and speak for about 5 minutes each. They were phenomenal. It was obvious that more than one of them had some serious nerves going on; they were speaking to a group of 200 people about the principles of a religion which they have only recently joined. The content of their remarks was top-notch, really. What was more interesting to me, however, was the wide variety in presentation and approach that they displayed. Normally people who have been part of the Church for a number of years approach a talk in a fairly routine way. Sometimes it is interesting, sometimes it is less so, but there are usually few surprises. Each of the speakers last week, however, took a unique approach. One relied fairly heavily on personal experiences and was very casual yet insightful, another spoke more on principles with less personal experience and scriptural or other authoritative backing, a third had very short, pointed remarks, each of which related personal interpretation tied directly to a scripture, and another shared a number of personal and unexpected experiences from growing up that put his conversion into a unique and very personal context. It opened up my thinking about preparing a talk for church.

Oh, and Lost was pretty good this week. American Idol was very disappointing however, as Megan Joy Corkrey did not get chosen for the top 12. She has another shot in the wild card judge’s choice round, however. I’m not going to say any more about it because I am not about to become that guy who blogs about Lost and American Idol. I really can’t afford to be that guy . . .

The part that shocked my came up about 4 minutes in. The moderator said “there will be this idea that you can have the users of something become more involved in the creation of that thing,” to which one of the panelists commented that it’s a slippery slope and you can’t allow “mob rule.”

I wonder, though, if any of them remember that twenty or thirty years ago (I don’t, I read about it) that’s exactly how the internet was. People formed communities, created their own rules, and governed them by themselves. Users of something creating the thing itself? Crazy! Where did Facebook get the idea to do that on the internet . . .

Many people viewed the internet itself as a place where the users created all the rules which were not subject to “Governments of the Industrial World . . . weary giants of flesh and steel.”(see the Declaration of Cyberspace Independence.) I’m not about to write a history of user-governed communities on the internet (I dont know nearly enough to do so), but I am shocked and bothered that NBC’s technology news show is so taken by this “novel” idea that user input is a new thing. Of course Sarah Lacy tossed in the a reference to “Web 2.0,” so she’s got to know her stuff, right?

An upside was that FB’s Chief Privacy Officers sounded like he understands quite a lot more than the people from NBC. At least the people controlling the website that controls my life have some idea of what’s going on.