Something Moore

The other day my cousin Brent emailed me a few questions about law school. He did very well on his LSAT and has been accepted to a couple of different law schools. One of his primary questions centered on the cost of it all. That got me thinking about all of the unexpected costs they don't tell you about. While schools are pretty straight forward about their tuition and fees and provide good estimates of the cost of living in the area there are all sorts of hidden costs to law school that they just don't tell you about. Here are some examples of my unexpected costs:

Books: $800 / semester
BarBri: $2000+
PMBR: $800+
Bar Application: $800+
New Computer: $2000+
- Replaced hard drive
- Replaced keyboard (3x)
- Replaced mouse (3x)
- Replaced battery (2x)
- Replaced power cord (1x)
Backpacks (new one each year b/c it wore out)
Student organization fees

Not to mention an untold number of pens, highlighters, note cards, tabs and whatever other office supplies are necessary to get through finals. Anyhow, I think this is the sort of information that law schools should include in their information. While tuition and books are good to know it's all the other expenses that just add up. CRAZY!

No, I'm not going to write about what you were thinking. Of course Obama's big election is big news, but in my selfish way I'm going to write about my self. So the topic of the day is office politics. I would like to start this by saying I'm happy at where I'm working and what I'm doing. But office politics is one of those sneaky little things that just shows up no matter where you are. It's part of human nature (sometimes for good sometimes for bad). Anyhow, I've found myself being drawn into office politics and becoming frustrated by some of the issues. Now, I realize I'm just an intern and am not all that involved, but office politics is one of those tricky things that can suck you in if you are unaware.

So today I was reading my friend Ann's blog and her topic really hit home. The motto she adopted is "You can't make things tough enough for me to complain." You see the real danger of office politics is that is leads to grumbling about how so and so did this or it's unfair that this or that happened. Instead I should respond by looking to myself and fixing what's wrong with me. Stop complaining and get back to work. Just being a dilligent employee and focusing on the things I can fix instead of the things I can't change. Anyhow, thanks Ann, I think I shall try to adopt the same motto in my day to day living.

I should start this post by noting I have wonderful loving parents and I grew up in a very supportive home. However, my parents believed that one of their jobs as parents was to mess with their children's minds. Take for instance Ogday. What is Ogday you may ask? Well when my sister was little we were listening to the Beatles song "Eight Days a Week" and she asked my father what the eighth day of the week was to which he replied "Ogday." The next question of course was well when is Ogday. Now there is some debate as to exactly when Ogday is but it falls sometime between either Tuesday and Wednesday or Thursday and Friday. Why have you never experienced an Ogday, well you've slept through it of course. These were my parent's explanations to Ogday. Furthermore, when we said the days of the week if we left out Ogday dad would say we forgot it, but if we said the days of the week with Ogday we would either be told we put it at the wrong spot or there is no such thing as Ogday. See, my parents were truly warped.

Another wonderful addition to my vocabulary was the word ootz. What is an ootz? Well it's a piece of an orange that you get when you peel an orange and pull all the little slices apart. One slice is an ootz. This is one of the words that was just accepted in my family. If you offered someone a bite of your orange it was an ootz. In fact I believed this was just the term to use until I was in college (yeah you heard that right) when I offered my roommate and ootz to which she replied "what is an ootz?" I was quite sure this was a real word so I searched high and low only to discovered I had yet again been hoodwinked by my parents. However, I continue to use this word and have introduced many a person, including Clay, to the term ootz.

So last night Clay and I were talking and I mentioned I had a great orange yesterday and he then asked me "well how would you spell ootz?" This had never really occurred to me. I figured I would spell it "ootz", but since this is a made up word perhaps there are alternate spellings. Maybe it's spell "utz" or "outz" or "uts" or "uuts". Who knows? I've never made up the spelling of a word before. This got me thinking the first people to encounter the "how would you spell this" problem would have been the Egyptians. I'm sure it went something like this:

"How would you spell 'Pharaoh'?"
"I don't know, maybe we use a osprey symbol?"
"What about a circle?"
"Sure that looks good."

So, since the ootz issue has never really been settled I believe the proper spelling is "ootz." However, I would like to point out that "Ogday" is spelled correctly. I know this because may mom named her blog "Ogday in Montana" and since she was the first to create an official spelling she gets to spell it "Ogday".

P.S. I am lobbying to get "ootz" into the dictionary so please feel free to use this in your daily vocabulary in order to spread the word!

Entering my last semester of law school I received a special surprise today. So, every semester we have to "bid" for our classes. This is because (as is true in every university) some classes are crazy popular and fill up very quickly. The fair way OCU has decided to deal with this is by having the students bid on classes. This semester there was one class I really wanted, Intro to Legal Practice. I wanted to take this class so that I could leave with some practical skills. While law school, like all education, is great on theory, it is dismally short on practical application. However, as luck would have it Intro. to Legal Practice was wildly popular this semester with other students hoping for that same bit of practical knowledge before braving the real world. Unfortunately, when schedules were released I did not win my bid for Into and I had to settle on Banking Law (I'm sure a good class but not a subject that tickles my fancy). Then today I got a surprise, someone dropped Intro and there was 1 spot open. However, I received the email at 1:30 and it was sent at 10:30 so I was pretty sure I did not get the slot. But to my surprise I GOT IT!!! Woo Hoo! And consequently, I have a perfect record in law school having been admitted into every class I requested. Pretty good huh!