Day 363

Tonight Carly and Chris came to stay with us on their way to a wedding.  We showed them around the house and spent the night downtown.  The highlight of the evening (for Rick) was a visit to the Brass Rail a real townie bar downtown that serves PBR and Schlitz. All in all a good night.

Day 362

I've been busy doing lots of projects lately.  Today was a sewing day.  I made pillows for our two chairs in the living room and also hemmed all of our curtains.  We only bought one panel for each of our small windows, so I split them in half and hemmed the edges so they still look like regular curtains instead of just hanging to one side.

Day 361

More SkipJack...

She sleeps in the weirdest positions.

Day 360

I saw this in an email last week and thought it was hilarious. I miss Groupon where I got legitimate deals.  It's so weird to me that there's no Groupon for Champaign.  Lame.

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Day 359

We got a bed skirt! Rick thinks this officially makes us grown ups.  I think we have a ways to go... like a headboard... or paint on the walls.  But it's a step in the right direction for sure.

Day 358

Our plans to hit up Ikea and a bike shop were thwarted yesterday when we found out the shuttle from the hotel to the wedding left at 3:45...for a 5pm wedding that was only 10 minutes away... wtf?  Our super early arrival did give Amber and I time to go on the tour of Colonel McCormick's mansion where the wedding was being held.  He apparently started the Chicago Tribune and WGN, which stands for World's Greatest Newspaper.  His house had some awesome metallic wallpaper, a secret bar and a serious gun and book collection.

The weather was almost as awesome as our wedding with some serious humidity.  After a 20 minute trek to the reception site we finally got the party started.  It didn't end for us until 3am.  I haven't seen 3am in years. I cannot believe we stayed up that late.

Needless to say, we came home and napped all afternoon.

Day 357

Our schedule is jam packed in August.  Last night we went to the Frasca company beer picnic.  Normally, Frasca has this band called the BratPack at all of their events but last night they had a DJ, who played some interesting mixes.  Later a band came on.  Rick was pretty sure they made up new lyrics to old songs because some of their songs sounded very familiar.

We headed home fairly early because today we are driving up to Chicago for a wedding.  Rick's friend Scott, who was his roommate when we first met, is getting married.  4 years ago I never would have guessed Scott would be getting married, and now here we are.  Weird.

Dave and Amber moved back to Champaign yesterday and are riding up with us to the wedding.  It's like nothing has changed.

Day 356

 Rick is in love with SkipJack.

 She likes him pretty well, too, as long as he's scratching her.

While Rick was gone today we bonded.  She's so cuddly.

Day 355

Introducing...

SkipJack!

We brought her home last night and let her out in the back bedroom.  She explored the room and was playing with Rick right away.  We thought she might be scared and hide under the bed all night, but nope, she was ready to play.  So, we ended up letting her out into the rest of the house after dinner and she sniffed around for awhile and then plopped herself down on the couch right between us for the entire night.  She was in heaven on the comfy couch being petted all night.

The funniest moment of the night was when she was up on the fireplace and we turned the tv on and she was so interested in the tv she walked right off the edge of the fireplace.

Day 354

We have another huge moth.  Weird.

Day 353

This giant moth landed outside our door sometime last night.  It's body is bigger than my thumb and it's wingspan is bigger than my hand.  I though about putting my hand next to it for scale in the picture, but I was too scared.  After a little research, though, I found out that this kind of moth has no mouth, so guess I really had nothing to be scared about.  It's called a polyphemus like the cyclops in Odysseus and it only lives for a week or so.  It doesn't have a mouth because it's sole duty as a moth is to reproduce. Very interesting.

Day 352

Tonight we went to the Humane Society again and picked a cat!  Rick is soooo excited.  Her name at the shelter is Elsa and she's a very pretty 5 month old tabby kitten.  We pick her up Wednesday.

Day 351

I can hardly believe July is over.  I thought August would never come.  Now that I'm done with the bar we have a lot of fun things coming up including more weddings and time with family.

Unfortunately, I have to hit the books one last time this week and take the MPRE on Friday.  I actually took (and aced) the MPRE 2 years ago after my first year of law school.  Unfortunately, in Illinois you have to wait to take the MPRE until after you've completed 2 years or 60 hours of law school.  So, my awesome score...doesn't count.  I can't even explain how angry I was to find this out, but there was absolutely no way around taking it again, so I sucked it up and signed up for the August exam.

Studying this week should be interesting.  I'm  pretty sure I have zero focus left to put into studying for this.

Day 350

After sleeping in while Rick and his mom went for a bike ride, we helped get things ready for the big bash.  It rained a little bit and was super humid, so we spent a good portion of the afternoon and early evening in the lake.  I managed not to get bitten by any fish the whole time.  They have some vicious blue gills in their lake and we fed them a whole bunch of fish food before everyone came over to try to stop them from attacking haha.  Although, i did get attacked by Dakota a few times. For some reason she thought we were BFF's.

Day 349

Tonight we are headed down to Rick's parents for their annual summer BBQ.  I'm super excited to just hang out and celebrate being done.

It is so nice to be able to do other things and not feel guilty that I'm not studying.

Day 348

Today I did all the things I've neglected for the past 2 months.  It was great!
Slept in. Did laundry. Cleaned the house. Cooked. Showered. Watched ridiculous amounts of HGTV.  Relaxed.  Breathed.

Day 347

Day two of the bar exam - check.

I did 400 multiple choice questions today.  Please, shoot me now.  Thank god I get to go home now and drink beer, relax and think about nothing.

Day 346

Day one of the bar exam - check.

Today was the Illinois essays, the multi state essays and the performance test.  It was hard.

On a more positive note I got to eat lunch outside on the river with beautiful weather and a great view.

Day 345

After spending one night in my own bed I headed up to Chicago this afternoon.  The drive was surprisingly traffic free for Chicago.  After checking in I realized that I could see the giant Crate & Barrel on Michigan Ave. from my hotel room.  Is this a sign I should quit studying and go shopping?

I cannot wait for tomorrow to be over.  I've never been so anxious and nervous in my life.

Day 344

Heading home today and time for the final freak out before the bar.  Yikes.

After being in Seattle we were sad to leave the amazing views, but happy to leave the craziness of a big city.  We decided we had the best of both worlds when on the way home the clouds looked like mountains in the distance...if you squint a little.

You know this is central Illinois because it is flat as a pancake and there is zero traffic.

Day 342

Today Rick and I flew to Seattle for my cousin Molly's wedding.  As we were coming in to land in Seattle the pilot suddenly zoomed off and started circling around.  Rick told me that was weird and something must be wrong.  Sure enough, the pilot came on the speaker a few seconds later and announced that the plane's flaps were 'indicating' or something like that and that we were having to loop around so we could land on a longer run way.  We landed super hard and fast and when we turned off of the run way we saw about 4 firetrucks and an ambulance were escorting the plane to the gate.  Scary!  Rick said it wasn't a big deal and they probably had to declare an emergency just in case something happened.

So that was our exciting arrival in Seattle.

Day 335 - Day Day 341

The past week I have been studying for the bar 24/7... ok not really, but close to 12 hours a day.  So, even though it feels like a cop out I just don't have time to keep up the blog.  Not to mention I would have nothing interesting to say that doesn't involve things like commercial paper and administrative law.

Day 334

Rick and I tackled some serious yard work tonight.  He caulked on the roof, cleaned out the gutters and assembled our new hose caddy... apparently this required about 2 engineering degrees to do because the directions were so complicated.... luckily Rick actually has 2 engineering degrees haha

Meanwhile I tackled the weeds.  There were weeds literally as tall as me.  It was ridiculous.  I bent my new hand-shovel trying to get some of them out.  The really tall ones were these weird wheaty looking things with some serious roots and then there were all kinds of prickly ones, which just makes me even more mad.  If you're going to grow in our yard, you're not allowed to poke us.  Not cool.

Anyway, hopefully it's cleaned up for awhile because I don't have any more time to weed between now and the bar exam.

Day 333

Happy 11 Month anniversary! Hard to believe it's almost been a year.

Apparently I still look like a teenager, though...
A sales lady came to the door today while I was at home studying.  When I opened the door she asked if my parents were home. lol

I'll give her a little slack because when I'm studying I tend to neglect my appearance slightly and I have been in super serious study mode for awhile now.  So, I'm not really sure whether it was a compliment or an insult.  I'm just going with funny, because I need funny in my life right now.

Day 332

Our yard is in full bloom with lilies.  I wish I was a better photographer and could take some pretty pictures to frame.  They're sooo pretty and huge, the biggest lilies I've ever seen.

Day 331

The visit to the humane society was a whole new experience to me.  When we first walked in we saw a huge cat sleeping in his cage with this sign...

It says, "Staff will feed me, I'm on a special diet." I could not stop laughing.  It's hard to tell from this picture but this cat is HUGE.  Poor kitty.

Then I found this cat.

More uncontrollable laughing.  How can he sleep in that position? His head is upside down?  He looks like he's doing one of those fancy dives like in the Olympics.

Day 330

Rick and I have been in negotiations over whether to get a cat.  Rick loves cats (weird I know) and I'm pretty indifferent... leaning towards Team Dog.  After watching a lot of 'cute kitten' videos on youtube Rick convinced me to get a cat.

We'd been debating about the best time to do it and decided to just go to the humane society and check things out this afternoon.  After a cursory inspection of all the merchandise we fell in like with an orange cat named Romeo.  He was very playful and snuggled right up to us through the cage.  When we asked to take him out and play with him we learned he had already been adopted... Rick was heartbroken.

He quickly recovered, though, when we found another kitten he dubbed 'replacement kitty'.  Replacement kitty was fairly cuddly and full of energy.  His real name was Lupin (Harry Potter reference) and he was a pretty gray color.  After some serious play time we decided to take a night to think about it and do some more research.  Lupin is only 4 months old and we think we might need one that is a little older since we won't be home much to play with it, but he was soooo cute.

This was the best picture I could get of him.  He did not like to sit still and he was kind of a spaz.  If we get him he should fit right in :)

Day 329

This weekend Rick went down to Edwardsville to ride in the Tour de Doughnut.  This is sort of a family tradition with his parents and they ride in it every year.

Two years ago Rick talked me into doing it.  I am not a bike rider, but I figured 30 miles couldn't possibly be that far and I could for sure do it, no problem.  I went on one 'practice ride' with Rick that resulted in a lot of whining and a sunburn, but I was still pretty confident.

The morning of the race we got up super early and headed out to the race.  As we were waiting in line to start it started to rain.  Then thunder and lightening.  Then hail.  I was soaked and freezing and the race hadn't even started. The race ended much better than it began and I quickly dried out, but it was waaaay harder than I thought it would be.  I was pretty proud of myself for finishing haha

Anyway, I couldn't go this year because I had to stay home and study (insert stupid bar exam comment).  So, Rick and his mom decided to ride super fast and see how fast they could do.  Overall they got 83rd out of 1600 riders!  And Rick's mom got 2nd in her age group and even got a medal!

Day 328

I have this weird habit of leaving glasses of water around the house.  I try to drink a lot of water throughout the day and I always think I'll re-use my glass and not fill up the dishwasher with glasses.

This morning I came into the kitchen, found my water glass from last night, went to take a drink and found this...

That's a spider.  In my cup.  That I almost drank out of.  Not cool.  And when I dumped the water out the stupid thing was still alive tried to escape out of the sink!  Needless to say, he met a watery demise.  And I got a new cup.

Day 327

The Tour de France started last weekend and Rick has been watching religiously.  I've been sitting with him while I read outlines at night and watching the finishes because they're the most exciting part.

We've been picking a horse for who will win each day and so far Mark Cavendish is my man.  One day Rick picked this guy named Thor (pronounced tore, although the literal pronunciation is so much cooler).  Apparently they call this guy the God of Thunder which is totally hilarious considering his name is Thor.  They interviewed him after a race and he sounds just like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Day 326

Last night I woke up to Rick swatting the air above our bed.  When I asked him what he was doing he said, "there's a bug in our bed" me: "seriously???" freaking out about the bug.  Rick repeats that there is a bug in our bed and starts furiously swiping at the sheets like he's trying to get a bug out.  me: "Like a spider!?!"  Rick: silence...
Oh Rick and his crazy dreams.  He didn't remember a thing this morning.

Meanwhile I fell back asleep and had my own crazy dream that I just didn't finish half the bar exam.  Talk about a nightmare.  I'm so, so, so ready for this to be over.

Day 325

Back to the grind today.  It's never fun to do after a long weekend, especially when the grind is 6 hours of lectures and 10 hours of studying a day.

I didn't do so hot on my practice test, but I was close to the average, so I guess I can take solace in that.  Needless to say, my study motivation has skyrocketed thanks to some serious fear of failing.

Day 324

Happy 4th of July!

Rick and I got to see some fireworks last night from our backyard.  We're pretty sure they were the Country Club's fireworks.  Maybe next year we'll have people over and camp out in the church parking lot for a better view.  I love fireworks and I always get foiled in my attempts to see them.

Tonight we went to a BBQ at one of Rick's co-workers house and I made some apple pies.  We thought they were really good pies, but unfortunately everyone else made pies, too, so we ended up with a whole pie to bring home.  Oh well, more for us.  The BBQ was really fun, but we had to bail when the baby/pregnancy talk started.

Day 323

I've been scouring craigslist for some nice, grown-up dressers for our bedroom.  This past week I found some great ones, but they were being sold by a guy who lives about 45 minutes north of Champaign.  I managed to talk him down $100 on his price, Rick was proud.  He's usually the barterer in this relationship.

Yesterday, we drove up to check them out in person and pick them up. I'd put the address in my phone, but it pretty much led us to the middle of a cornfield.  So, I called the seller.  This guy had no idea where he lived.  He gave the worst directions ever and kept changing them as we went.   Finally we found his house.  He had a ton of stuff for sale in there, including three trampolines.  Totally Sketchy.

So while we're very happy about our great deal on the dressers, we think there's a fair chance they were obtained illegally by this dude.  Oh well.

Day 322

Today was Dave and Amber's wedding day.  They got married in a very small ceremony at a building on campus.  It was a very nice wedding with just their immediate family.  I think they had a day almost as hot as our wedding day and super humid, it was brutal.  Rick and I were glad we could bail out afterwards and not stick around for pictures.  We felt a little awkward since we were the only non-family there, but their families were very nice and even included us in a few pictures.

We met up with them later for a few drinks at the Esquire.  Amber even sported her wedding dress to the bar, which garnered quite a bit of attention and excellent service from the bartender.

Day 321

Today was the big practice test for the multiple choice part of the bar exam.  6 hours and 200 multiple choice questions.  This is my favorite way to spend the Friday before the 4th of July.  Over the past 4 weeks I've been learning what feels like everything there is to know about Contracts, Constitutional Law, Evidence, Criminal Law and Procedure, Torts and Property.  I've been doing alright on the practice questions, so hopefully this test reflects that we'll see.  I felt like I did a good job of narrowing it down to two choices, but not so sure how I did beyond that.  Too bad you don't get a point for ruling out the two wrong answers.

Now that it's over I'm going to take the rest of the day and tomorrow off and just enjoy the holiday.  I'm putting off grading my test til Sunday.

Day 320

Tonight Rick's friend Dave and his girlfriend (soon to be wife) got into town.  They're getting married on campus this weekend and crashed at our house for the night.  We took them to El Toro for dinner and ordered some giant margaritas.  I had to let Rick finish mine since I'm taking my big MBE practice test tomorrow.  Bummer.

Then I had to go to bed early while everyone else hung out on the deck.  The bar exam is ruining my life.

Day 319

Ice cream update:
It's frozen and delicious!

Day 318

We finally got around to using the ice cream maker attachment we got for our wedding.  After 45 minutes of churning it was still like soup.  The directions said it should be frozen at this point, so we weren't sure what to do.  We decided to stick it in the freezer for the night and see what happened before calling it a total loss.

Day 317

Giant lawnchair discovered on one of our daily weekly trips to Menards.  This thing has 6 cup holders!

Day 316

Last night Rick and I had dinner at our neighbors' house.  It was delicious food and we actually had a really good time (Rick was skeptical about it).

I found out all about the previous owners of our house because our neighbors have lived here for a long time.  We also realized that there is no way we can over-improve our house because there's is gorgeous.  Totally redone kitchen and family room.

Tree Update: Rick took it to the recycling center and it only cost $12 to get rid of.  He also saw a man in a wetsuit and scuba mask riding a bike with his flippers on on the way there.

Day 315

This morning Rick and I went on a walk and we met a real live adverse possessor!  Seriously, I only thought this stuff happened in bar exam questions and property class!

We were walking along and saw a guy chopping up wood and loading it in a trailer.  Rick stopped to chat with him because he thought we might be able to get rid of our wood that way.  The woodsmen was a real chatter box.  He told us all about how he adversely possessed some land from the railroad because he's been mowing it for years and keeping his extra wood on it.  He called it imminent domain, but I knew what he really meant haha.  He also told us all about his trailer house with a jacuzzi tub and motel carpet... he referred to it as the Taj Mahal. Rick decided he must not know what the Taj Mahal is haha.  Anyway, we practically had to run away to get this guy to stop talking.  It was an interesting walk.

Day 314

Tonight we went to the rodeo.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures to document it.  It was actually really fun.  Our friends invited us and I think we were both a little skeptical at first, but when we found out it was BYOB we were in haha  Leslie invented the awesome Rick Ridings drinking game.  This guy sponsored the whole thing, so everytime they said his name we drank.  It was a very successful game.

We also saw the rodeo queen, who Rick said (not very nicely) looked like her horse.  We saw a guy get knocked out bull riding.  Rick saw a friend from high school.  And we saw a lot of red neck people from Piatt county.  All in all an excellent night.

Day 313

Our yard is full of lilies.  They're everywhere and so pretty.  I cut some today and brought them inside so we can enjoy them up close.

Day 312

And the tree saga continues...

So, after calling around last night and finding out that it would cost several hundred dollars to have someone clean our tree up and haul it away, Rick took matters in to his own hands and just yanked that branch down.

Our really nice neighbors lent us a saw and helped for awhile.  Eventually we got it all cut up and in piles

Today we loaded it in the back of Rick's truck (good thing we didn't sell it yet).  And we found out we can take it to a landscape recycling center for about $50 bucks.
Go us! We just saved at least $350 dollars.

Day 311

Last night during dinner there was a little storm going through.  Nothing big just some rain and thunder... or so we thought.

I looked out the back door and saw this...

This massive brach, like a fourth of our big tree, had broken off

Here's the hole it left

You can't even see our house!

It was an interesting evening.

Day 310

Our new house has some serious landscaping.  It's actually one of the reasons we liked the house so much and bought it... it has a beautiful yard.  The problem is that yard requires A Lot of maintenance.

At our old apartment, Rick was in charge of mowing and I weeded the tiny little patio area.  It never took me more than 10 or 15 minutes.  Tonight Rick went out to mow, so I decided I should go pull some weeds because our flower beds were looking a little ragged.  It ended up taking both Rick and I a full hour to weed all the planters.  It was so humid, too, I was sweating like crazy.  And then of course one of our new neighbors came over to introduce herself and I looked terrible... oh well.  

Anyway, now our front yard looks great!

Day 309

One late night experiment with electricity and about 5 trips to home depot later...

Rick did an awesome job.  We did the whole thing by ourselves and it looks amazing.  I'm so proud of us.  In total, we painted the walls, installed a new light fixture, countertop and faucet, and hung all new fixtures. We have plans to update the flooring in the future, but this was enough for one weekend.

Looking into the bathroom from the hallway.

This is actually the old vanity, we just painted it black and put new nobs on it.

New light fixture, and old mirror painted black.  There's actually a giant rectangle cut out of the sheetrock behind the mirror.  We think it was maybe for a medicine cabinet, but its pretty small for that, so we have no idea why it's there. Anyway, we're probably going to upgrade to a new, bigger mirror eventually and will be able to better center it over the sink and still cover the hole... or maybe we'll just fix the hole.

Close up of the new granite countertop we got a steal of a deal on, and our new faucet.  Rick picked out the faucet all on his own... he did a good job!