You're (Unfortunately) Not a Kid Anymore When...

My sweet tooth and I are very good friends, and for a long time it has encouraged me to give it free rein in the mornings... preferably with some pie or cinnamon rolls, but, in a pinch, by munching on Trix, Reese's Puffs, or Cap'n Crunch.  Mike and I bonded over Blueberry Muffin Top cereal, and I've always stayed as far away from Raisin Bran and Rice Crispies as I could.


Lately, however, I've undergone a transformation.  While I still would NEVER turn down pie for breakfast (ok, so maybe I would if it was mocha or blueberry or a very mushy pumpkin without whipping cream), Reese's Puffs aren't so tempting anymore.  Instead, Mike and I load up on cereals with words like "almond", "grain", "oat", "morning" and *shudder* "fiber".  The worst part isn't even that we've been duped into buying them... it's that we're so deluded that we actually think they taste good.  I've taken to eating cereal just in the morning, but also again after I get home from school.  The dishwasher is full of bowls and spoons, proof of our new habits.


Clearly, we have a problem... and I think I've decided the perfect solution.  We'll stage an intervention this weekend in front of the TV - enough subjection to advertisements for sugar bombs and cocoa kernels and we might regain our sanity.  


P.S.  It has occurred to me that my face in the last picture looks far more MySpace than Chaplin, and definitely does NOT make me look ridiculously happy.  I must have been thinking about that parade :)

Three Reasons to be Ridiculously Happy

1.  It's still Spring Break, for another 48 hours and 4 minutes

2.  Thanks to the motivation provided by this delicious-looking photograph taken by my cousin, I have a giant container of homemade oreos sitting on my counter!

3.  At the outlet mall, I picked up this amazing hat for a mere $2.  I feel like a plaid Charlie Chaplain (despite the fact that this is most definitely a trilby, not a bowler - yay Wikipedia for clearing that up).

\

Granted, I can think of other reasons to be happy too, like having good health and a place to live and whatnot, but they're currently being cancelled out by the fact that it is literally raining on my parade.  Or at least on the parade that we would be downtown watching right now, were it not raining.

The Problem with Living in a City that Embraces Alcoholism

Like most former Utahans who have been forced to venture out into the wilderness of the eastern half of the United States, Mike and I miss Cafe Rio a lot. At least here in Indiana, there's not much Mexican food at all - the only popular Mexican restaurant chain in the area has gross, overpriced food, and even the people who love it admit that they really go for the cheap margaritas.

So every time we fly home to visit family, Mike and I make a point of stopping by Cafe Rio. He always gets a pork burrito, but I tend to mix things up... the burritos are good, but so are the salads and the tortilla soup and everything else on the menu. When it comes time for dessert, though, I insist that we get tres leches. If they're out (which happens far too often) then we hit up another Cafe Rio later in the trip to make sure we get some. Luckily, Mike loves it too, but I think my affection for the dessert borders on the frenzy otherwise reserved only for heroin addicts and meth moms.

To be sure, I've tried making the dessert myself a few times - my life would be much easier if I could conjure up tres leches on demand. Duncan Hines makes a mix that results in a decent cake, but I'm pretty sure you can't get them out here in the Midwest (I've definitely looked). The few from-scratch recipes I've tried were only theoretically edible, and ended up being a waste of whipping cream and sweetened condensed milk. In short, it's a sad, cruel world.

The other day I was pining for tres leches instead of doing my Fed Courts reading, when suddenly I had a brilliant stroke of inspiration. I opened up the internet and Googled "tres leches South Bend IN". And, believe it or not, the results showed that there is a local Mexican restaurant that's supposed to have good food and has tres leches on the menu. Less than two hours later, we were there at La Esperanza.

The food was delicious, and while not dirt-cheap, there were plenty of filling options in the $7 range. It was Mexican food as it's supposed to be - like it is in every random "Dos Amigos", "Del Sol", and "El Burro Agradecido" in Utah (no idea if those are the names of real Mexican restaurants... but hopefully you get my drift). We'll definitely go back next time we're craving Mexican food. But overall, the trip was a disappointment, and not just because our server allowed us to run out of water early in the meal and only came back when we were finished eating.

No, the real problem was the misrepresentation of the tres leches. Sure, they had it, and from the picture it looked pretty delicious (although not as good as Cafe Rio's). But thanks to the description, Mike and I didn't try it. A moist cake soaked with three milks and topped with cream and berries sounds delicious. A moist cake soaked with three milks and wine... not so much, no matter how many strawberries they thrown on top.

So here I am, still craving "real" tres leches and determined to eat one every single night I'm in Utah for my summer internship (which might leave me unable to fit into any of my suits, but it'll be worth it). Until then, if any of you want to commission a refrigerator truck to send a pallet of tres leches my way, I'd be most grateful.

Yay!!

As you may be able to tell by the new layout of my blog, which manages to be cute and use my favorite colors (black, teal, and purple) without being overly girly, my brother rocks. Especially given the fact that during the creative process, I must have changed my mind about a hundred-million times. I would pontificate further on his awesomeness, but I just finished a reading assignment of death, and tend not to be at my most eloquent at 2:16 in the morning after reading over 50 pages on federalism, preemption, and jurisdiction.

Thank you, Bronson! I definitely owe you one.

Wrapping It Up

So the advent of March has made me aware of just how lazy a blogger I've become. The hiatus has also made me decide to revamp the blog a little bit - after all, mikeandlashel.blogspot.com should really be about more than LaShel complaining about her homework once every several weeks. So stay tuned for new content and, if I can talk my techie brother into donating an extreme blog makeover, a snazzy new layout as well.

But first, before bringing in the new, we'll wrap up the old. It always makes me sad when I'm reading a random person's blog and they describe a conundrum or an exciting upcoming event, and then never mention it again. So I'll comb through later entries looking for hints on whether their dog ever came back or they got the big promotion at work, but to no avail. My own life is not nearly that exciting, but here are some random updates just in case there's a stranger out there wondering:

I did end up dropping a class - the one taught by the "greatest living legal philosopher" which turned out to be a fortunate choice because he retired a few weeks before the semester started because of health problems and the class wasn't offered after all.

My summer to-do list was semi-successful. I did the write-on and ended up on the Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy, we enjoyed the swimming pool at our complex twice before moving to our new, deluxe apartment, and we traveled everywhere on our list except Washington DC. The writing a novel, watching movies in French, and getting ahead on coursework decidedly didn't, but it was a great summer nonetheless.

The British Museum collection was amazing... Victoria is a beautiful city. In fact, I was so enamored that it was disappointing to find out my legal education is not transferable to Canada.

The Venus Fly Trap, as predicted, died a hasty and inglorious death. I'm pleased to announce, however, that our marriage somehow managed to survive.

Luckily, the IRS, after months of investigation and endless letters, concluded that Mike and I were truly poor enough to not owe them any money. Yay!


Long story short, the special meeting called by the journal wasn't about my lack of morale, but because the elected leader of our journal was suddenly no longer a student at the law school. Speculation as to why continues to abound.

And there you have it! Stay tuned for further exciting adventures :)

The Case of the Missing Casebooks

As anyone who knows me well enough to read this blog probably knows, I love bookstores. In my perfect imaginary world, I would spend two or three nights a week curled up on an easy chair at Borders with cocoa and a new book (and somehow magically not feel guilty about exploiting a commercial establishment with my loitering, merchandise-using, freeloading ways). There is, however, one trip to the bookstore that I generally dread - the one that heralds in the beginning of each new semester. Spending seven hundred dollars on books is my idea of heaven, except when that seven hundred dollars only buys four dense casebooks and their statutory supplements on such enthralling matters as Partnerships, Corporations, and Other Business Associations.

This semester I was able to buy my Federal Tax Law casebook online (saving $70), because the professor kindly informed us of the ISBN for the required text over a week ago. I hadn't heard anything about the other books, though, and deciding that there weren't enough days left to order the books online and have them shipped in time to safely be able to complete my reading assignments before Monday's classes, I headed to the bookstore, warily armed with my credit card and expecting the worst.

I quickly located the section with the law school textbooks (the wall is very easy to spot - laden with hundreds of hard cover casebooks [all around 1500 pages and uniformly bound in impressive shades of blue, red, and black with gold lettering] a quiet shopper can hear those unlucky shelves moaning and lamenting their fate like the damned souls in the Divine Comedy). I began looking through the tags on the shelves, indicating the various classes: Not-For-Profit Organizations, Administrative Law, Federal Courts... After a few minutes, I came across paper-bound books with pictures on the cover and realized I was no longer in the right section. Concerned, I began retracing my steps, peering more carefully at each tag. As before, I did see the Federal Tax casebook on the shelf, but not a hint of any of my other five classes.

Finally defeated (with irrational fears going through my head that every class I had registered for this semester had mysteriously been cancelled) I approached a bookstore employee for help. Somewhat annoyed that I didn't have my course numbers with me, she led me over to a computer and began inputting my professors' names.

"Medieval Legal History?" she asked. "The professor informed us there were no books needed for the course." One by one she looked up all of my classes, and each time informed me the same thing "The system says there are no required texts."

A few hours later, I began to get emails with course syllabi, each one including a message from the instructor that there were no required texts and he (the pronoun evidences my university's gender issues, not mine...all my professors this semester are men) would be emailing us attachments containing our reading assignments each week. So even though it means less impressive-looking tomes to use in torturing my own bookshelf, I think I can live with buying some $2 binders and using my free printouts rather than having to spend money on casebooks. Now I just need to convince my husband that the $700 I had set aside for textbooks should still be spent at a bookstore, on a shopping trip with a more enjoyable purpose :)

Ugh

In one hour and thirty minutes, I will be swept up in an epic battle against a business law final. While at the beginning of the semester, I might have had delusions of obtaining victory, my goal now is merely to survive.

As a self-professed nerd, I'm usually a little bit excited to take tests. While I complain about them excessively and have my fair share of exam anxiety, I'm a bit of a junkie for the thrill. There's something strangely exciting about getting the chance to show off how much you've learned from reading that 1400 page casebook and attending class all semester. This test may be the first one in my life that I've honestly dreaded entirely.

Every self respecting law exam is in an essay format, which gives you a lot more room to show off what you do know, without having to focus too much on the things that you don't. Business Associations, however, culminates in a three hour exam of short answer questions - the cruel kind.

Take, for instance, this sample question from an actual final my teacher gave a few years ago:

"John says shareholders should be glad that, in setting executive compensation, directors are not permitted to be wasteful. What do you tell him?"

The correct answer? "He's wrong - salaries are reviewed under the business judgment rule and will be overturned only if they amount to waste"

Double Ugh...