RIP Frankencar

My car was towed away to the great junkyard in the sky last night. Herr Austin Frankencar (Austin for short) had character. I should have known that it was a harbinger of doom when I named the car after the six million dollar man. As much as the car was nothing but trouble for its short 18 month time with me, I'm still kind of sorry to see it go.

Austin is a 2000 VW Jetta TDI. I purposely bought a diesel car because I wanted to use biodiesel. My main reason was because I want to reduce dependence on foreign oil, but the mad science aspect of the chemistry of home-produced biodiesel appealed to me, too. (I never did get around to making my own, though.) The environmental benefits of reduced emissions were icing on the cake.

The car spent three weeks in the shop right off the bat and then was in and out of the shop for the first few months of ownership. The previous owner had severely mismaintained the car (including jamming spark plugs in the radiator hoses and reinstalling the engine backward). I had to replace the transmission right after I bought it. I had a few months of good use and then it was back to in and out of the shop. My mechanic, only half jokingly, offered to blow the car up for me. Back in February, the front bumper fell off and has been held on by duct tape ever since. I decided I didn't want to pay to fix it.

Book Review - Make the Bread, Buy the Butter

I recently read the book Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese. It's half cookbook, half memoir. Reese chronicles her efforts to make tons of food items from scratch after losing her job. She documented the cost of the homemade version, the cost of the store bought version, and how difficult or annoying it was to make the item herself. She chronicled both her successes and her failures.

I found the book to be both funny and useful. I especially liked her empirical approach to the issue. Since I'm saving up to buy a house, I don't want to waste money on things that are more trouble than they're worth. Plus, I'm not someone who finds great joy in cooking. I like to take on a big project now and then, and there are some things I find fun to do, but mostly I see cooking as a chore - something that I do simply because it needs to be done. I do, however, have a bit of a mad scientist streak, and this book appealed to that part of me.

Reese enjoys cooking way more than I do, so her calculation falls a little more to the "make" side of the equation than mine does. However, I was surprised by some of the things she said fell in the "buy" category. Burritos and jam both fell under "buy" for her. While I love a good taqueria burrito, they're not that hard to make at home. And homemade jam is far superior to anything at the store and costs about the same.

Several times throughout the book, I found myself surprised that anyone would think to make certain items homemade. There's a recipe for pop tarts, for example. I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy it is to make ricotta cheese. I'm going to have to give it a try sometime. She has a marshmallow recipe that I want to try as soon as I can figure out what to use in place of the gelatin to vegetarianize it. (I'm thinking either pectin or agar-agar.)

I skipped most of the meat chapters, but I did start reading the one on chickens with the hope that I could find some egg recipes. But halfway through a rather graphic description of killing a rooster, I decided to skip the rest of that chapter, too.

In all, I recommend the book. There's something for the urban homesteader, the person who loves to cook, and the mad scientist.

False alarm

I just got a call back from the hospital. It turns out that my toe isn't broken. It's just badly bruised. So, instead of wearing a walking boot for 4-6 weeks, I just have to wear flats for 2-3 weeks. I'm thrilled.

Plus, I get to keep up my never-broken-a-bone bragging rights.

Broken Toe

I have a history of bumps and bruises and sprains. I did a lot of sports as a teenager, and I was constantly injuring myself. Miraculously, I never broke a bone, even when my injuries should have caused fractures. I figured I was blessed with an ultra-resilient skeleton.

My streak of good fortune ended on Thursday. I was at the beach, and I was walking barefoot. I stubbed my toe on a rock. I checked it out and saw that I wasn't bleeding, so I went back to building sand castles and hanging out with my friends, not sparing a second thought to my toe.

On Friday morning, I woke up, and my toe was purple and tender to the touch. I figured I bruised it a little worse than I had thought, and I didn't think much of it. It was too sore to wear regular shoes, so I put on some flip-flops and went to work. By the time I got to the office, I couldn't even walk on it without pain. I propped my foot up at my desk and continued with my job.

After work, I decided to go get it checked out. I don't have insurance, so I went to the urgent care clinic attached to the local hospital. They give a discount to uninsured patients who pay cash at the time of service. I waited for a bit, and then the doctor saw me. He took one look at it and said that it was broken, but he sent me for an x-ray just to be sure.

After the x-ray, the nurse taped up my foot and gave me a walking boot. She felt sorry for me, so she didn't charge me for the boot. She showed me how to tape my toes to splint them, and instructed me to change the tape every day. I have to keep them taped for 4-6 weeks and wear the boot until I can put regular shoes on without pain.

It was a total freak accident, and I spent some time thinking about why I ended up with a fracture. Then I remembered my vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D helps in the absorption of calcium, so my deficiency probably weakened my bones. Note to self - be better about taking vitamins.

I'm really glad that the clinic is so affordable. I ended up spending only $90, which is a real bargain for a broken bone.

It's going to be a bit inconvenient to get to work. My choices are to take BART and then a bus that drops me off a block away from work, where I have to walk uphill, or to drive and park in a garage two blocks away from work, walking up that same hill. At least I've figured out how to navigate stairs.

When my foot heals, I'm throwing a dance party to celebrate.

Update 7/9/13: False alarm. The radiologist called back and said that it's not actually broken.

Economic impact of the BART strike

Anyone who lives in the bay area is aware that BART (commuter rail between the east bay and San Francisco) was on strike for the past week. The strike has now been (at least temporarily) ended, after 5 days. I'm sure lots of people will be analyzing the aggregate economic impact this has had, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being very expensive.

I decided to analyze the economic impact that the strike had on me personally. I ended up coming out ahead.

The strike lasted for one work week - July 1 - July 5.

I drove to work alone on Monday. I usually drive on Mondays due to a standing appointment on Monday nights in a location where BART doesn't go, so there was no economic impact there. Thursday was a holiday, and it would have been a holiday even without the strike, so there was no impact there either.

That leaves three work days (Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday) to analyze. I drove a carpool with co-workers for those days.

If I had taken BART, my cost would have been $46.41 for the three days. ($10 per day for BART fare, $3.50 per day for bus fare, $1.50 per day for parking at the BART station, and $0.46 per day for the diesel to get to the BART station from home.)

The cost to drive on Tuesday was $19.75. ($10.25 for diesel, $2.50 for bridge toll, and $7 for parking.) Wednesday and Friday cost $12.75 each because I got free parking. So, the total commute cost for the three days was $45.25.

I'm already $1.16 better off. But wait! My carpool people contributed to the commute. I didn't ask for any money, since I would have been driving anyway, but when they offered, I didn't turn them down. I ended up getting $35 in donations.

I did have to get up extra early to avoid traffic, but I was compensated by getting to leave work early, so that's a wash.

So, my total savings due to the strike came to $36.16. Not bad.

Job Searching Blues

I find job searching to be kind of annoying, but I'm at it again. I'm finally out of the bar exam limbo, so I'm ready to stop temping and start getting something stable. My current temp assignment, which I rather enjoy, ends in July. So, it's time for me to start pounding the pavement again.

Job searching is kind of like dating - awkward and expensive, but people keep doing it because eventually there's hope that everything will turn out right and there will be a good match somewhere. Just like a date is better if both people like each other at the same time, a job interview is better if both the company and the candidate like each other at the same time. And there's the whole "it's not you, it's me" thing going on.

I'm juggling two completely different job searches at the moment. The first is an academic job search. I would love to land a full-time position teaching in a college or university. The second is a job search in the world of business. Academic jobs are hard to come by, so I'm broadening my horizons. I'm looking at either a higher-level HR position or an in-house counsel role. A job as a lawyer for the human resources department of a tech company would be ideal, as it would combine my HR in tech companies background with my legal background.

Most of the jobs I've found in the past have been through recruiters, and very few have been through my own efforts. I find it kind of ironic that the HR person doesn't know how to find a job on her own. :-)

I Passed the Bar!

I found out on Friday afternoon that I passed the bar exam. The press release is here. It still hasn't sunk in yet.

I still have to pass the background check, which will take another 3-4 months depending on the backlog. I could have filed it sooner, but I wanted to wait to see if I passed the bar first. (I didn't want to pay the fee for the background check if I ended up failing.)

Hopefully in a few days it will all feel real. I'm glad it's over; I don't have another bar exam in me.

Bar Exam Diaries - Arizona Edition - Day 2

I decided to take the light rail this morning, so instead of walking five blocks, I walked a block and a half. My blistered feet appreciated it. I also folded down the back of my loafers to make my shoes backless for the day. I ended up bruising the bottom of my heel due to stepping on the back of my shoes, but that hurt way less than rubbing the blisters would have. (I'm totally wearing my flip-flops tomorrow. I would rather stand barefoot on the airport floor in all its unsanitary glory during security screening than wear those loafers for another nanosecond.)

We were told to arrive at 7 this morning, and I arrived at 7:05. I went through security and headed to my seat to engage in another hour and a half of staring at the walls, finding patterns in the ceiling tiles, daydreaming, calculating that I've spent 11 days of my life taking the bar exam (I was too demoralized by that to even think about calculating how much time I've spent studying for it), daydreaming some more, and wondering if there's a time-warp in the exam room that makes time move more slowly while waiting for the exam to start but more quickly once the exam is in session.

At 8:30, instructions began. The head proctor delivering the instructions looked and sounded just like my criminal procedure professor. Sadly, he didn't hand out candy to the examinees like my prof would have.

The test began at 9. Today was fill in the bubble day. My mind wandered a bit halfway through because I got bored. I quickly got back on track and finished with time to spare. Then I got some lunch. I found a cafe nearby that serves soup, so I had a real lunch today.

After I ate, I wandered back to the convention center. I ran into some of the other test takers, and we talked for a bit. Then we went back inside for the afternoon session.

The afternoon session was less boring than the morning session, and I finished about an hour early. I turned in my test and left. I took the light rail back to my hotel, stopped at a taqueria to pick up some dinner, and then ate.

I'm glad it's over. The end of the exam was a little bit anticlimactic. In California, the last day of the exam is a performance test, and since it's administered on a laptop, everyone has to stay until the bitter end. So everyone leaves as a group and there's this cheer because we're all celebrating together. But since Arizona's last day is multiple choice, I got to leave when I finished. I walked out alone with nobody to celebrate with. I did run into another test taker while waiting for the light rail, and we chatted a bit, but it's not the same.

I'm flying home tomorrow. I'll find out my results in May. I'm glad it's over.

And if the Arizona bar wants to use this helpful marketing slogan I've devised, they're welcome to. "Only 67% as miserable as the California bar!"

Bar Exam Diaries - Arizona Edition - Day 1

I set my alarm for 5:25 in the morning, and when it went off, I was annoyed. Now I understand why toddlers scream and throw temper tantrums when they're tired. As I was up and moving around in my exhaustion, it was actually physically painful. My body insisted that it wasn't quite 4:30 in the morning, and it wanted to be asleep.

When I booked my hotel, the website said that it was 5 blocks from the convention center. Well, just in case you ever need to know, 5 blocks is way longer in Phoenix than it is in any city in the Bay Area. Where I come from, a 5 block walk will take 3-5 minutes, maybe as long as 7 if all of the lights are red. Yeah...my hotel is a 20 minute walk from the convention center. Oops.

Bar Exam Diaries - Arizona Edition - Day 0

I feel like I've been stuck in the movie Groundhog Day, but instead of reliving February 2 repeatedly, I'm living the bar exam over and over. Tomorrow is the first day of the exam, so here I go again. May this time be my last.

I spent the night at my parents' house, and my mom took me to the airport this morning. I flew out of San Jose. They've really fixed it up, and it's a nice airport now. It had been 10 years since I had flown out of it; it used to be the old rundown airport in the area. I got through security in 5 minutes, and I wasn't subject to the usual indignities.

The flight to Phoenix was uneventful and took about an hour and 15 minutes. After landing, I took the airport shuttle to the light rail station, and then I took the train downtown. It was a quick two block walk to my hotel.

I got settled in and ordered a pizza for dinner. Then I watched some TV. I'm going to bed early tonight because I have to be at the convention center at 6:15 tomorrow morning. (For those of you keeping score at home, that's 5:15 California time. Why couldn't the test be two weeks later, when CA and AZ are in the same time zone?)

I'm feeling pretty good about it this time. Here goes!

Something wrong with the universe

"If there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe!"
Dr. Beverly Crusher (Star Trek: The Next Generation - Episode 4x05 "Remember Me")

When things go wrong, I tend to spend a great deal of time thinking about what I did to cause the problem. If I did something to cause the problem, then the world is a controllable place. Controllable places are safe. If things are controllable, then bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people.

But sometimes things happen that aren't controllable. Like the bar exam.

Here's the state of affairs:
1. I attended a good law school.
2. I did well in law school and graduated.
3. The only motion I've written that has gone before a court has won.
4. That motion was part of a team effort that ultimately resulted in the overturning of a wrongful conviction.
5. I'm excellent at standardized tests.
6. I have an IQ of 164, the same IQ that Albert Einstein was reported to have.

Given all of this, the bar exam should have been a breeze. But no. I've failed the [expletive deleted] test three times!

The first two times I failed, I tried to figure out if I should have studied harder or something. But now I'm convinced that the problem isn't me. I'm smart, I'm well educated, and I'm good at the law. So, clearly, since there's nothing wrong with me, there's something wrong with the universe test.

And now I have to figure out where to go from here.

The Final Frontier

One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting on the couch with my mom watching the news coverage of the Challenger explosion. I was too young to fully grasp what was going on (I was a few weeks short of my 4th birthday at the time), but I was fascinated by the prospect of a spaceship.

I got a star chart for my birthday when I was 5. When I looked up into the night sky, I decided that one day I would go there. When my classmates would make fun of me and say that being an astronaut was only for boys, I pointed to my childhood hero, Sally Ride, to prove to them that girls could be astronauts, too.

When Discovery launched in 1988, my mom let me stay home from school to see the launch on TV. Throughout the rest of my childhood and early adulthood, I would watch every shuttle launch. I learned everything I could about outer space. I loved going to planetariums, and I loved looking through my dad's telescope.

When it became clear that I was too short to be an astronaut, I decided I would be an astronomer instead. By the time college rolled around, I had changed my mind and decided to become a lawyer, but I was still fascinated by space. I worked in the astronomy lab on campus and was a teaching assistant in the introductory astronomy class.

While I was a TA, my class was following the experiments onboard the shuttle Columbia. I remember waking up on the day it was supposed to land, turning on the radio, and hearing the tragic news that the shuttle had burned up on reentry. The mood in class that week was somber as we considered the sacrifices that people have made for the advancement of human knowledge.

Around this time, civilian space flight was starting to look like a viable possibility for more than just a few super rich people who could afford to pay the Russians millions of dollars. I decided that one day, when the price gets lower, I would still live my dream of going to the stars.

When the space shuttle fleet was retired last year, it felt like the end of an era. Then this summer, Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong both passed away. Today was the final flight of the final space shuttle, Endeavour, before it goes to its resting place in a museum. The shuttle did a flyover of the SF Bay Area, so I walked outside to say goodbye to such a huge piece of my childhood.

I took a few pictures:

Endeavour over Mountain View, CA

Endeavour over Mountain View, CA

I hope that even though there will be no more space shuttle flights, that we will still continue to reach for the heavens, so that the sacrifices of the crews of Challenger and Columbia will not have been in vain.

Ad astra!

Wanderlust

I'm feeling restless.

I'm torn in two directions. On the one hand, I've never stayed in one place for very long. On the other hand, I yearn for permanence.

When I was a kid, I moved around a lot. By the time I was in 5th grade, I had gone to 5 different elementary schools. It was pretty miserable always being the new kid. As an adult, I've moved every year or two. I've always stayed in the Bay Area, but I've lived in multiple cities.

The Bay Area is my home, but I'm starting to feel like there's no real reason for me to stay here anymore. When it comes right down to it, the only reason I'm still here is because my job is here. I'm in a job that pays the bills (barely) but doesn't make full use of my skills. It's not a terrible job, by any means. It's a pretty inoffensive way to earn some money, but it's not what I want to do for the rest of my life.

I'm not responsible for anyone but myself, so I have the freedom to go anywhere without having to consult anyone else. It's so tempting to pack all of my belongings into my car and head out into the great unknown to start a new life.

Maybe I've spent so much time moving around that I don't know how to stay in one place. Or maybe I just haven't found the right place yet. Or maybe I'm really looking for a metaphysical place, not a physical place. Maybe if I had a fulfilling job I wouldn't spend so much time daydreaming about the green grass on the other side of the fence.

If I get a job teaching at a law school, the chances are pretty good that I'll end up moving. But that's at least a year or two away. I'm not sure what to do until then.

Bar Exam Diaries - Third Time's a Charm Edition - Day 1

I got a good night's sleep. My alarm went off at 6:30, and I got out of bed about 6:45. (I'm a bit of a snooze button addict.) I checked my email. One of my friends texted me at 7:15 to let me know that she was awake and didn't need a 7:30 wakeup call. I showered and got ready for the day. After my shower, I decided to eat breakfast. I opened up a container of yogurt and tried to eat it, but the smell was so off-putting that I couldn't do it. It made me sick to my stomach. I'm on an antibiotic because of the burn on my hand, so I'm guessing I'm in for another round of antibiotic induced nausea. Fun.

I ended up eating some of the snacks I had brought instead. So I started the day off with Pringles, Oreos, and wasabi rice crackers. Breakfast of champions. After breakfast, I headed downstairs for the test. The test center was much more organized this time around. I didn't see any chaos. I had a different proctor this time, which relieved me. I like the proctor I had the last two times, but I think I would have been embarrassed to have to face him again. (He remembered me in February. I guess there aren't too many redheads taking the bar in Oakland.) My proctor this time is a grandfatherly old man with a cheery disposition. When he was checking my ID, he said, "Looks just like you." I responded "I hope not!" and then we both laughed.

Bar Exam Diaries - Third Time's a Charm Edition - Day 0

Here we go again. I had always heard stories of people who take the bar exam multiple times, but it was never supposed to be me. That's supposed to be something that happens to other people. People have tried to cheer me up by saying, "You're smart. You'll pass this time." I appreciate the sentiment, but clearly there's more to passing the bar than being smart. (Plus, I'm reasonably sure my intelligence has remained unchanged between last July and now.)

It seems like my body decides to get ill or injured right before every bar exam. Last July I had an eye infection, and the antibiotics I had to take to treat it caused nausea. In February, I was in a car accident the week before the test. Not to be outdone this time, I burned my hand rather severly last week. I only just regained the ability to hold a pencil this morning.

I wasn't able to get much time off work, but my employer is pretty good about flex time and work/life balance. So I worked from home today and took a long lunch that consisted of traveling to Oakland to settle in to the hotel I'm staying at. I signed off of my email at 5:30 and put up an out of office auto-reply for the next three days. (I'll still have to log on every night and catch up on the day's messages, though.)

After I checked in to the hotel, I went to the grocery store to get food for the week. It's cheaper and faster than eating out. I really wish I could go swimming, but my hand hasn't healed enough for that yet, so I'll have to find something else to do.

I'm feeling pretty good about the test this time. I'm in a good place emotionally. The first time I took the bar, I was freaked out. The second time, I was so fed up that I just didn't care. This time, I'm prepared and calm. I'm ok with the outcome, whatever it is. If I pass, great. If I don't pass, it's not a big deal. I don't really need bar membership to be a professor. But I think I'll pass. Third time's a charm.