Spring Digging.

Spring is finally here!  Every Saturday in spring should be like today--a little cloudy, warm enough to have all the windows open and let the cat smell the outdoor breeze coming through the house, nothing particular on the agenda to take me away from a lazy breakfast and enjoying being in my home.  

Spring break was less than spring-like, and also less than break-like for me--I spent spring break working at my law firm job in Topeka and trying to get ahead on the semester's writing and research projects.  But I had spring on my mind and a little bit of free time on my hands, so I decided to build myself a garden.  

Until the dirt started flying, this was really only a partially formed idea.  Our back patio is built over what used to be a brick driveway.  The area between the patio and the street is the sunniest part of the property we live on, but was only about an inch of soil and grass on top of bricks.  

 Cj and I had talked about how cool it would be to have raised beds in that area, but had so far been deterred by the bricks, hours of manual labor, and expenses standing in our way.  But we came up with a relatively low-cost idea for building our raised beds, and I decided it was time to find out just how much brick-moving and manual labor was involved.

I started by gathering and stacking all the rocks and bricks that were mixed in with the soil on the surface.  Then I found the edges of the brick paving and decided the layout of potential raised beds.

Then I started digging up the bricks,
followed by more carrying and stacking:  

Meanwhile, I was gradually scooping up the thin layer of soil to expose those super cool Lawrence Kansas paving bricks around the outside of the garden area...

 Cj and I paid a visit to the City of Lawrence composting facility this morning on "Load-your-own Day" of the annual compost sale and got some morning exercise and a truckbed full of steaming compost.  Here's Cj mid-scoop at the compost mound, before a friendly hippie loaned us a second shovel so that we could scoop simultaneously:

We visited Cottin's Hardware to find some two-foot long rebar segments and chicken wire for the raised bed structure:

 

And then started filling in our new raised bed with compost and dirt from the excavation. It doesn't look like much yet but just picture it with plants all over... to be continued.

Meanwhile, I can't wait to get out and use our 

outdoor living room all spring, summer, and fall!

(This photo is from Rachel's birthday party on our back patio last July.  I want more of this, and soon...)

The Thing about Failure...

This post is about positive thoughts on rejection and failure.   

But first a little background:
That giant of a research project on the Ogallala Aquifer, which has consumed much of my homework time over the past seven months, reached its final deadline a couple of weeks ago.  I turned in a project that I was quite proud of, that I felt said some very important things, and that taught me a ton.  And if time and energy measured the quality of an end product, this one would be dynamite.

This paper, and those written by my fellow staff members on the law review, was eligible for publication in the Kansas Law Review.  But my paper didn't make the publication cut.   I was disappointed.  Sometime in the last year, my measure for success for paper writing became publication--not meeting deadlines, turning in a quality project, or making the grade, but publication in an academic journal.  

It was good practice in dusting myself off and getting over myself.  It's good to have a nice balance of success and failure in your life, I think.  Keeps you realistic, keeps your feet on the ground.

Since finding out, I have had the opportunity to turn a critical eye back at my paper, with the help of constructive criticism from some encouraging professors and generous fellow law students.  It turns out it's ok, but flawed; it turns out a lot more work could be done to make it live up to a standard of what I would be proud to see in a publication.  

The question is: Will I put that work into it now, and try to resubmit it elsewhere?  If I decide to do that, there's a good chance I could sink a lot more time into it without seeing much benefit--not many publications are willing to look at a student's work. 

This quote that I read on another blog helped me to accept this whole situation as just the way it should be, and to accept that my time spent was not (and will not be) futile.  This is attributed to Ira Glass, and quoted from Adulting (one of my favorite blogs these days):

"...The thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short, you know, and some of us can admit that to ourselves and some of us are a little less able to admit that to ourselves.
...But we knew that it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have… Everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.
Do a huge volume of work. ... Because it’s only be actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions."

Well... I'm taking that advice.  I realize that legal and academic writing takes practice.  This semester is an exciting challenge for me because I almost all of my homework is research and writing: I will turn in three more papers that constitute the same volume of work as this one before the end of the semester (including several drafts between now and then). 

And meanwhile this afternoon, I'm taking a break from abstract thought and computer screens (other than writing this blog post)... I'm gardening: another thing that I believe takes a lot of practice and persistence to get good at. 

Last year, in my first year gardening on my own, I had some successes (unfortunately, my best crops were eggplant and swiss chard, neither of which I am inordinately fond of) and some serious failures (like the tomatoes that sat on the plant, green, for two months, never ripening... weird).  I learned a lot. 

This year, I am going to make a better use of my space and sunlight as possible, and I'm not going to make the mistake of having too few plants on hand, or letting the drought outsmart me.  This year is practice round two, and I will have a few failures again, but of course that's part of the process of becoming, and creating, and doing it right.

Biodiversity Law in Paradise

Today was exactly what Saturdays should be.  This morning CJ and I got up and cooked breakfast together, followed by a hike by the Kaw River (where we saw mountain UNICYCLERS... Just like mountain bikers, but with only one wheel.  Maybe among the top ten most impressive things I've ever seen).  We spent the afternoon grilling lunch and doing homework on the back patio in the unseasonably warm temperatures.

Warm sunshine on my face reminded me that I should reflect on my recent Caribbean excursion before it gets too far back in my memory.  This semester for me began with a 10-day trip to the US Virgin Islands for a class called Biodiversity Law.  Biodiversity is a word created a few decades ago to refer to the biological diversity of species, ecosystems, and genetic variation.

As a class, Biodiversity Law related to our current system of protecting biodiversity through laws and the court system, and discussions of what could be done from a legal standpoint to more effectively protect biodiversity.  It was very worthwhile to take this class on-location in the Virgin Islands, a place with both unique biodiversity and unique pressures from human development on its biodiversity.

Below are some pictures I took during our class excursion to Botany Bay on St. Thomas (check out  my professor's description of that day), with some facts, thoughts, and quotes (taken from my lecture notes) thrown in between each picture.

Biodiversity loss is an environmental issue, but it is qualitatively different from other environmental issues such as air and water quality.  Air can be cleaned up, and water can be purified, 

but injury to biodiversity cannot be un-done.  Once the genetic information evolved over years is lost, 

it cannot simply be recovered. 

"Managing the natural resources of the earth and conserving biodiversity are the major intellectual challenges of the 21st century. ...Unfortunately, the political battle for the environment will occur in courtrooms, senate subcommittees, op-ed pages and press conferences.  How well equipped are ecologists to inform the debates in these trenches?" Dobson, 2000

 The acronym "HIPPO" describes the current main causes of extinction in order: 

Habitat Destruction (usually by human development), 

Invasive species (often introduced through human activity), 

Pollution (by humans), 

(Over)Population (of humans), 

and Overexploitation (by humans)

"How much structure is needed? Imagine if the only function of this article was the transfer of information.  Many of the words could be deleted and you would still get the message.  It would (we hope) be less pleasant to read... But how many of the words could you delete before the meaning starts to get lost? ... [C]onserving one population of every species is rather like having one of each note in the Mozart concerto... How many species can we lose before we start to affect theway ecosystems function?" Purvis and Hector, 2000. 

The world's biological history exhibits an overall gradual rise in biodiversity punctuated by mass extinctions.  We are currently experiencing the 6th great extinction in the history of the world, 

and it appears to be entirely human-made.  

Do we, as humans, 

want to go down in history as being the "asteroid" 

that caused the 6th great loss of biodiversity?  

Making Christmas

 In my last post I mentioned how incredible it is to spend some time on projects and activities that don't involve reading, writing, or my computer.  Here are some of those projects...

First, I replaced my broken-zipper wallet with one made from scraps of a skirt I made last year.  The inside of the wallet is gloriously full of pockets, if only I could figure out a way to keep things from sliding out of their places... still working on the concept, maybe I'll get it right next time.   

 

I also took the big step of retiring my old versatile herringbone bag, which has seen me through many a good time and a long travel.  It had surpassed my ability to patch it up, so I saved the bits I thought I could reuse and said goodbye to the rest.  I lit some candles to help myself say goodbye :P

Below is an example of one of the trips it made with me, 

to visit my dear sister Rachel studying in London...

 I whipped up some cute stockings for Christmas time in Indiana... As you can see below, they were indeed hung by the chimney with care;.

 While in Indiana I got the chance to play lots of games with my fun new family.  Below is Jeremy winning the game of life as a teacher.  That's talent.

Also while in Indiana, my industrious sister-in-law Jenny held a soap-making workshop.  We kicked all non-goggled members of the household out of the kitchen, and emerged four hours later with four batches of soap. 

 We also took advantage of the fresh snowfall to go sledding on the hills of Goshen. 

And my final pre-Spring-semester project is this journal I made today.  My new years resolution is to keep a journal this year (which I haven't done regularly since before college) but with a twist: my journal entries will consist of my favorite memory from that day, and one thing I'm thankful for from that day.  And I'm going to try to write my entries in cursive, in the hopes that my current 4th-grade cursive will turn into something like my mom's lovely penmanship by next December.  Now I have a nice brand new journal to (hopefully) inspire me to keep up the habit. 

And that's that.  End of break.  Tomorrow my classes start again... sort of.  At least one class does: Biodiversity Law, which takes place in the US Virgin Islands.  I know, bummer.  I'm not sure what to expect, but my bags are packed, including two swimsuits, hiking boots, snorkeling gear, and a 1000-pound 1000-page textbook.  I fly out tomorrow!

Of Outlines and Bricks

Law school finals ended Friday, and I am officially half way through law school.  It's time for some much-needed reflections on this whirlwind semester.

After going through three cycles of finals, which comprise all or most of my grade in each class, I'm fairly certain that law school finals basically only measure how skilled one is at filling one's mind to brimming, dumping it on a page (in the most orderly and concise way possible, of course), wiping the mind clean, and starting all over again for the next final. 

With each final, my textbook and my carefully-organized notes for that class become my complete life and being for a space of two or three days.  My process is:
1) take notes by hand throughout the semester,
2) type up my notes,
3) spend hours and hours formatting, refining, bolding, adding to, and whittling down those notes,
4) print out the notes, highlight through them, and index them with brightly-colored tabs. 

By the time I am finished, my notes have become the all-important Outline, and I'm privately convinced it is a genius work of art.  The process with statute books is similar: strategic tabs and highlighting are an absolute necessity.  There is nothing more beautiful than a nicely tabbed statute book.  Like this one (I took this picture just before my 9am Secured Transactions final):

I walk into a final feeling like my textbook and Outline are my very best friends and absolute lifeline.  Then, three hours later, I carry those same objects out of Green Hall and dump them, to be forgotten, in the back seat of my car. 

It makes me sad, to see them lying there abandoned...  But they are abandoned out of necessity: law school just doesn't leave you much time to ponder or appreciate newly-gained insights. 

One of my time-consuming tasks this semester was editing other people's (sometime poorly-written) footnotes in articles submitted for publication in the Kansas Law Review.  During one of my frantic editing sessions (they never struck at a convenient time, but then again, there's never a convenient time to edit footnotes for four hours), I came across a quote in a book that provided a lovely metaphor for my semester, and maybe for law school generally: 

The author analogized bits of information to bricks, falling all around you.  At a certain rate, you can use those bricks build a wall, placing each brick as it falls into its place on the wall.  But if they begin to fall at too fast a rate, and if there are too many bricks all around you, you will never be able to find space to build a wall, and the bricks are useless.

I felt all semester that I was being buried alive by my metaphorical bricks of information.  The classes I took this semester were really quite interesting, exactly the kind of thing that I was happy to spend time reading and thinking about.  But I had to cram each new fact or idea into an unfilled sliver of my brain to make space for the next onslaught. 

About half way through the semester, I gave up attempting to mentally organize and process the material that I read through each night.   There was just too much.  It was frustrating knowing that I could be getting a lot more out of my classes, if I could just find some space to build a coherent structure out of my thoughts. 

But maybe that is for after law school.  Maybe law school is just to show you the bricks, impress you with how many there are, and hit you over the head with them a few times so you at least remember where they are in case you need to come back for them later.  If you're lucky, maybe you'll walk out of each class with a brick in each hand? Hm (I like analogies).

Well, now that I'm not trying to process so much new info every day, I'm starting to feel unoccupied space opening up again, both in my schedule and in my mind.  My goal for next semester is to use at least one idea a month as inspiration for a blog post here, in the attempt to feel that I've at least partially processed and refined a few thoughts from my classes. 

Meanwhile, I'm spending some time during my break working on projects that use other parts of my brain, and it feels great--I hope to do a post on those projects in the next week or so.   But if you don't hear from me before next week, I'm wishing everyone the mental space and peace of mind to enjoy family, enjoy break, and enjoy Christmas.

I.L.A.*

My mission this weekend was to accomplish as much of my homework for the week as I could before the week ever starts.  20 more pages to read in my Native American Natural Resources book and I will have all of my class homework for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday finished!

Scout helps me with my homework by napping in my bag of textbooks:


I did get a little bogged down my Environmental Law reading.  I love acronyms* for their convenience and cleverness, but the legal system REALLY loves acronyms.  Especially, as it turns out, environmental protection statutes.  I was just starting to get used to the acronyms for NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act ), but today I tripped over the following acronyms that popped up in only three pages of reading on the CAA (Clean Air Act):

NAAQS: National Ambient Air Quality Standards
SIP: State Implementation Plan
PSD: Prevention of Significant Deterioration
NSPS: Nationally Uniform New Source Performance Standards (apparently they didn't think that "NUSPS"was any good, but I personally like it better)
RACT: Reasonably Available Control Technology
LAER: Lowest Achievable Emissions Rate
BACT: Best Available Control Technology
BART: Best Available Retrofit Technology
and, last but not least, NESHAP: National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants.

Here's a special sample from my reading: "The three emission standards (under the CAA) applicable to sources that are required to apply for permits under the nonattainment, PSD, and visibility protection programs (now why not just call that "VPP" while we're at it, hhhmm???)--LAER, BACT, and BART--are not technology-based in the same sense as the mobile-source standards, the NSPS, and RACT for existing sources."

...I think this might be why environmental lawyers focus on becoming experts on only one environmental statute.

This extra push on homework is my attempt to make a little more room for my other law and non-law projects I have going this week, some of them more fun than others, for example: skimming the 50+ articles that I have waiting to be read for the two 30-page research papers I will write this semester, practicing piano for my part in Chelsea and Jacob's wedding this weekend, volunteering at the new Ten Thousand Villages opening up in Lawrence (Hooray!), soaking up the joy of having some of my favorite people in town for the wedding (DOUBLE HOORAY!), and catering snacks to the 5th floor of Green Hall every day for the 30 person staff of the Law Review (Hoo...! .......wait a sec...).

That's right, it's my week to provide my hard-working peers with snacks.  Another "perk" of making the Kansas Law Review.  Actually I really love snacks, so I'm willing to do my part if it means I always have access to a little pick-me-up when I'm hungry halfway to lunch, or falling asleep at my study carrell reading Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, or both.

I took a break this evening between Secured Transactions and Environmental Law reading to cut a few veggies for tomorrow's veggie-hummus-tray masterpiece:

 Mmmmm doesn't that look tasty? The snack menu gets less healthy from here but I thought I'd at least start the week right. Notice also the multiple mugs from tea and coffee, the basil from my garden still waiting to be turned into pesto, and my binder of articles for Law Review research (I don't know why there's a broken clothes-hanger on the table, you'll have to ask CJ).

Alright--20 more pages and then it's to bed with me.  Who's ready for another big, fun week?!

Hm, this research is making me thirsty...

October comes around too quickly this year.  The other day someone asked me if I was already halfway through my semester and I gasped "NO!" ...I might be in denial. 

This evening is a nice break, of sorts, from homework.  I don't mean I don't have homework tonight, I just mean I have a little bit of time outside of homework for myself: time to write, time to pick tomatoes and peppers from my garden, time to play a game or two with CJ.

What has been soaking up all my time? I am researching water rights issues in Kansas.  You know, I'm self-conscious enough about my nerdiness that I usually assume I should just stop right there, but it really is a fascinating topic... Let's see if I can sum it up:

As a state, Kansas adopted a permitting system for water that allocates each water user a certain amount of water annually, and if the water runs low (for example, during a drought), then water rights users with "younger" permits are cut off until the supply of water picks up again.  This system works great for streams and rivers, which have a finite but renewable supply at any given point, but......... it turns out that it doesn't work quite so well for underground water supplies, like the Ogallala Aquifer.  Unlike rivers and streams, groundwater remains available in any amount it can be pumped, which means that there is no built-in mechanism to limit water use to only a self-sustaining amount, and which allowed Kansas to willy nilly grant permits to anyone who could put the water to a beneficial use. 

It didn't take long to realize it might not be a good thing to be using up the water in the Ogallala Aquifer at over ten times the rate it could recharge itself. The problem is that those water permits magically turn into private property when they are granted, and no one is too keen on the state telling them they just have to stop pumping water now, or even reduce the amount.  In fact, Amendment #5 of the Constitution says that Kansas can't just take away people's property unless they pay for it, and Kansas probably can't or doesn't want to pay to buy those water rights back, so, maybe we are stuck. 

On the other hand, if nothing is done to stop the rapid decline, a lot of Kansas is going to be without water at some point in the not too distant future, and when that happens, all those pieces of private property in water permits are not going to be worth anything at all.  We are pushing voluntary conservation measures, and they sure are conserving some water, of course, but... Voluntary conservation just isn't coming close to the kind of change that would have to happen to keep the Ogallala around for more than a generation.  Is there any legal way that Kansas can or should squirm its way around the 5th Amendment, allowing it to make the tough calls on water usage?  Does Kansas have any obligation to preserve value of property in water for later by infringing on property value in water now?

Quandary.  I'll leave you hanging for a while on that one... partly for the suspense factor, but partly because I'm pretty conflicted about the answer.

Ok, I really did try to keep it short, but my quick summary turned into my entire blog post.  I hope you liked it.