"After Bar"

I have been adding to my "After Bar" to-do list for months. Some items are fun: read a book for pleasure! (I remember that, long ago.) Others represent how much of the daily around-the-house / family responsibilities Derek has been towing for me. And perhaps the biggest chunk are all those long-term responsibilities that are on the bottom of everyone's to-do list (scrapbook the last year! Replace the window that broke before winter), except that mine have been collecting there for three months now, or really longer since Elaine was born four months ago, and only fairly pressing things have been attended to since sometime before that. Now I have until the beginning of September, when I start working at my firm, to get them done!

So, here I am at last, with this great weight lifted. I knew it was an albatross around my neck, but I don't think I could even recognize the extent that ("I should be studying") permeated everything. Even doing dishes is fun, when you don't have to get studying afterwards. It's rather remarkable.

So, you are thinking, 'but what about the bar?!' Well, it was on Tuesday and Wednesday; it's over. It is a very, very hard test. You know you missed lots of questions - some points which you maybe could have remembered from the thousands of points of law you tried to memorize, and others that came out of left field and you picked one of the three of four choices that seemed equally possible, and moved on. But that's OK, because you only have to get like 60% of the points to pass, and they "scale" the results so that about 80% of takers pass in Minnesota. So, I just hope that what I did sufficed. I'll find out in early October; it's in their hands now.

In the meantime, I am, for the first time in a very long time, not working, not going to school, not pregnant -- able to enjoy my two great kids and my husband, and, sometimes, just lay on the couch and read a magazine. Or not. Whatever. That's a beautiful thing.

-JRR