Doomsday Cometh...

Here I sit, 10 PM on July 28, 2008. The next three days will determine if one of the worst summers of my life was effective. OK, so it was not that bad. I never had a chance to burn out because the way I study, I could only do 6-8 hours a day before quitting. I worked most of the days and took some reasonable time off, especially early in the 3 months. My breaks were:

Origins Weekend - spent all weekend in Columbus, 2.5 days at Origins (Sunday with Kelley and oh my did we buy a lot of new board games...come play with us!), 1 day and night at Villa's with Tom and Shep. It was really good to reconnect with Shep and see the guys, but it was time to get serious as the lectures were almost over for BarBri.
Fourth of July Weekend - My Mom finally came over to see the new house in Cinci and we went to Newport Aquarium (the season passes will be great to walk Paige around when we need to get out of the house), IKEA, and a Reds Game. Finally saw Griffey hit a home run, so that was awesome. And the Reds won, which sometimes is hard to catch.
July 19 Weekend - Lisa and Thomas came down from Cleveland to see the house and visit her grandparents. They stayed all weekend and while we did not do anything amazing, it was good times. I did work on one of the weekend days, taking the Simulated MBE.

So what was my study plan? No flashcards, no outlines, no listening to tapes over and over. Just my usual. Read, and then read again, and then read again. I could not handle the "big outlines," so I just memorized most of the Conviser Mini Review. And I did TONS of practice essays and a good number of practice MBE problems. At the end of my MBE prep, I was hitting 75-80% correct and my simulated MBE which is supposed to be hard ended up with 151/200. Anything close to that on Wednesday and I'll have lots of extra points to blow on essays if necessary. This last week was mostly essays and reading things over 2 more times. I was hitting 95+% of the issues presented and had a pretty good handle on presenting the law. Maybe not every exception to every rule or perfect legalese, but more than enough to pass. So I feel pretty good heading into it and hope that out of the 12 essays, we don't hit more than 2-3 I feel uncomfortable about. We will certainly see, as "doomsday" arrives. If nothing else, vacation is coming up and I'll be sipping some liquor on the beach all next week before having to go to work officially full-time. And then it will be over except for the waiting, until late October presumably.

As for the baby stuff (the only other major thing going on in life right now!), we got a scare today. Kelley has been measuring right around where she should based on our due date from her last period all this time, and even the ultrasounds were within a half a week. Well today we go in and she's at 33 or so weeks and she measures at 37. That means Paige in 3 weeks or so. Well they shcedule us in for an emergency ultrasound and it turns out while the growth spurt did happen, it's more of a 2 week jump. So maybe end of August instead of mid-September. In any event, doesn't look like we have a ton to worry about on vacation but Paige is measuring so that she will be "full term" and could be delivered normally this weekend. As it is Kelley's first, I highly doubt it. We will see. Everything else is OK with the baby.

So that's life, and after watching some Star Trek and the Mole, it's time to get as much shut-eye as I can manage in 8 hours. Hope I can funnel my good Magic-playing days at the Veterans Memorial and have another success this week.

To all my friends who will not read this until after the bar exam, best of luck! We'll see in October!