What a long, strange trip

I’m typing this post from my living room in Ann Arbor, on my new and lovely IBM t41. After a bizarre and sometimes difficult month of packing, traveling, and moving, I made it to school in one piece with minimal scratches on my furniture and even more minimal trauma to the kiddos.

Despite all my planning and efforts to obtain tranquilizers to make the trip palatable for Phoebe (evil of the two cats), she ended up traveling for three days in a carrier without any drugs, as she wouldn’t eat them. Unfortunately, there wasn’t exactly room in the cab of the moving truck for two cat carriers, so Phoebe ended up riding in the Subaru trailing behind us on a car trailer. The windows were down, the sun shade was up, but for Phoebe, life was a shit sandwich and it was lunchtime for the entire trip. Ah well, she made it without too much terror. I think she probably would have appreciated being set down somewhere other than the curb outside the Motel 6 in Louisville, as she moved too much and managed to tip the entire carrier on its side, thus covering herself in water and dirty cat litter. Can’t have it all.

I dropped about $500 on books today, and I think I might end up buying a few hornbooks before the semester is over. The main books for contracts, criminal law, and property and entirely manufactured to make us feel good and important—heavy little tomes with fakey leather covers and gold-emobossed titles. Oy. At about $96 a pop, they’d better look neat. You can kind of go nuts buying commercial study aids for this stuff, and so far I only own two pocket versions of Black’s (a general legal dictionary and a criminal legal dictionary). I hear we get access to monstrous dictionaries through Westlaw and LexisNexis, so I’m not entirely inclined to go buy the biggie-sized version just yet. For the price, I can eat a double cheeseburger and fries at the heavenly Blimpy Burger across the street fifteen times, which seems like a better deal. Damn, those Blimpy Burgers are quality. The slogan (“cheaper than food”) is a little off-putting, but the burgers are divine.

High on my current priority list is a map of this town—these fucking streets run the opposite of straight, and they have a rotten habit of changing names in mid-intersection. Bleh. Thanks to some bullshit directions from the cocksuckers at Wal-mart, I got lost somewhere in the Superior township (actual name, I’m not being a smartass here) for about 45 minutes. All I wanted was the $30 microwave they had, but no dice. I miraculously found my way back to the interstate (after thoroughly proving that no Wal-mart exists on Hewitt road in Ypsilanti) and decided to bag the search for the microwave for the night.

Orientation starts tomorrow. The people are wonderful, the town is fun, and the weather is perfect. Life is good.