Surfacing

Sorry for the silence — I'm not dead or anything. Second semester just started off with more of a bang than a whimper. I've cleared a lot of space in my life recently and have been filling it (somewhat surprisingly) with school.

I guess a lot of people change their approaches to law school after getting first-semester grades back. I think the changes I've made have been less a reaction to my grades and more an attempt to avoid repeating the hellish experience of cramming for exams. Thus, I'm studying more, and especially studying more at school rather than at home (the very fact that I hate doing work there makes me much more likely to plow through it so I can get home, plus I don't have to lug books back and forth). Also, I think I'm finally starting to get over my shock at how many things we have to try out for here. You can't just sign up for stuff; everything's competitive. So I tried out to be a Dillard Fellow, and should hear back about that sometime next month, I guess. And I'm sacrificing the first three days of spring break to journal tryout. Between those two things and the brief we're working on for legal research, I'm becoming extremely friendly with the Bluebook.

I've also been cooking a lot more, which is great for a lot of reasons, and also occasionally comical. For some reason, I almost exclusively make dishes that I have never cooked before. Because I'm still pretty new at this, there are many such dishes. Wednesday night, for example, I decided to make chicken enchiladas. I had a package of boneless chicken thighs, which were on sale at Harris Teeter, and which I'd never worked with before at all. I stood around and pondered for about ten minutes how I should cook them, given that I was ultimately going to be shredding them, and decided to brown them over high heat in peanut oil, and then pour boiling water over them to cover so they could braise. (Is braise the right word? I don't know much about cooking terminology...) Anyway, the happy result of this technique was that after half an hour or so of braising, the chicken was both browned and tender enough to shred, and the boiling water had turned into chicken broth, which I then added back in to the shredded chicken along with taco seasoning. Then I had to address the fact that the only corn tortillas I'd been able to find were taco-sized ones. I ended up with a sort of enchilada casserole, with layers of chicken and sauce-soaked tortillas in a casserole dish, topped with cheese and sour cream. It came out pretty good, but from start to finish, with all the pondering and experimentation, it probably took about two hours. Somehow I always end up with the most time-consuming hobbies. At least this one feeds me.

Oh, if anyone knows how to make Con Law less painful, leave me a comment... I haven't thrown the casebook through a window yet, but I think that's mostly because it's 1600 pages long, and thus heavy.