HELLO! From the City of Gracious Living

Well here I was:

And now here I am:

Good Old Upland.  All hail to Upland's green and white, our mighty colors sing...

Anyway...

One year of law school has come and gone, and here I sit on a Monday at 9:45am in my jammy jams.  BORED OUT OF MY GOURD.  Me and the dogs can only watch so much "Untold Stories of the ER," (although one of the doctors on this show is www.damnyourefine.com) "Bridezillas," and "Andrew Zimmerns Bizarre Foods," before we get restless.  Also, if I see one more commercial for weight loss frozen foods, weight loss pills, or the Bowflex tred climber I think I'll just go completely banana nut bread sandwich.  Do I SERIOUSLY miss STUDYING??  ITS LESS THAN 2 DAYS SINCE MY LAST FINAL!  WHY CAN'T I ENJOY MY WEEK OF FREEDOM??

Maybe this is a telling sign of my true love for being a student.  I've always said if I had my way I'd just continue going to school for my whole life, wracking up degrees and knowledge bits.

So let me take this time to recap QUICK LIKE on this past year.
1.  For the most part, people in law school absolutely suck.  Maybe not the actual person, but their law school self just blows, yours truly included (only sometimes).  HOWEVER, if alcohol is introduced to the picture, they become not so terrible, and very so drunk.  Unless they need half a day to finish exams that take normal people only 3 hours to complete.  But whatever, I'm over it.
2.  Law school professors get off on being mean to 1Ls.  Even if it turns out that the professor is actually kind of nice like...in office hours or such...they still enjoy calling a 1L's name in class and and continuing to ask increasingly difficult questions until it becomes apparent that an ambulance may need to be called to resuscitate that poor student.
3.  As long as number 2 is happening to someone else and not you, being witness to number 2 can really lift ones spirits.
4.  Law school will teach you how long you can live on canned soup and how many wears you can get out of your favorite few pairs of sweatpants before your friends start standing farther away from you during conversation circles.
5.  The number one reason why people who go to schools like Harvard, Yale, NYU and any other law school not located 10 skips away from beach sand is because THEY DON'T GO TO SCHOOL 10 SKIPS AWAY FROM THE BEACH SAND.  You'd better believe I'd have gotten a lot more studying done if I was stuck inside away from the snow or stuck in the air conditioning away from hot sticky east coast summer weather.  Yeah that's right Yalies.  You get by on a weather technicality.  Feel good about yourself.

Whatever, that is enough.  For now, for the rest of this week, I'll live in jammy jams, I will go to lunches with my momma, and I get to spend time with this guy:

and this little miss thang:

And dream of re-furbishing my first piece of furniture.  It's this little desk that is currently this chocolate brown wood color and parts of it are falling apart.  It has been part of my bedroom set up since before I can remember and so, of course, it came with me to San Diego.  Instead of using it as a desk, I'd like to use it as a vanity.  It is too small to have big fat casebooks, legal pads, highlighters and post its spread all over it but is just the right size for a little stool/chair, a mirror and some catchall dishes/jewelry boxes.  It is very cute, and just needs a little bit of love.  I'm thinking it will turn white, and get a couple of these doodads:

Then all it will need is a cute little chair friend, and it will be good to go.  How delightful.  

Happy summer break!

Woohoo! Iomoi Tote giveaway from High Gloss Magazine!

Check this out and enter to win!

High Gloss Magazine, started by Paloma from La Dolce Vita (one of the blogs included in my morning blog sesh) is giving away a beautiful iomoi personalized tote, and if you go to that link you can enter to win!  GO! GO!

What in the sam hill am I going to do with myself?

I guess I basically ....ALWAYS...want to be a lawyer.  Always have and always will.  But aren't there some days when you want to be something else?  Or you want to be something also?
MONDAY
I come to school, I do my usual morning routine of email checking, foursquare stalking, fashion/design/food blog trolling before diving into some of my final torts homework.  Today I want to design houses, make your room pretty, your kitchen functional, your daughter's room the place to hang out after a long day of 4th grade boy drama.

TUESDAY
After 9 hours in the library and my final property class, I come home and spend about 3 or 4 straight hours looking at food.  Recipes, photos, ideas, instructions, baking equipment, my Williams Sonoma wishlist.  I go foodblog crazy on Savory Sweet Life, I am baker, Bakerella, FoodPorn (obviously), and Noble Pig.  I want to bake, I want to steam, I want to saute, I want to cream, I want to serve, I want to eat, I want to try.

NOW WEDNESDAY
Finish a practice property final exam and now allow myself the blog trolling.  Can't help but love where Jennifer at Art and Lair leads me.  So much art, so little time.  It makes me want to post up at the Getty right about now.  There is no better place in CA (in my opinion...save for maybe someone's smelly goody kitchen) in the summer than the Getty.  You can go on a weekday when no one else is there, buy yourself a peasant's lunch and lounge on the grass in the sun.  You do this after you spent countless hours wandering around all of the fabulous exhibits, gazing at art old and new wondering to yourself "What was that artist's life like while they were creating this?  Who did they love?  What was going on in the world?  How did they feel?"  I can get lost in that stuff.  I love getting lost in that stuff.

And it is thoughts like that...they ALMOST tempt me to throw this legal education out the back door and go back to art history.  Oh what I wouldn't do to just be a student forever, have unlimited tuition funds and just learn learn learn.  Maybe that will be Thursday's dream occupation:  from interior design to food to art to STUDENT.

I guess I technically have the student part down right now.  Speaking of which there is a property attack outline calling my name.  What do you wish you could be also?

Thanks for getting your act together, Sandy.

Sheesh Sandy, it took you long enough!  Check out that beautious sunset.  It had better be beautious after the poo weather we've been getting.  Random rain will get you out of the house in your cute plaid rain boots only to set the sun out again by the time you're done with morning class, and then start raining on you again when you head out for a fun Friday night.  That, my people, is just plain rude.  THANKS A LOT, WEATHER.COM.  

But me and my little apartment are left with this pretty view at dusk.  A girl can't complain.  It is Sandy Eggo, afterall (clever name cred goes to The Great Becky Seldonious Maximus, fellow transplant Sandyeggan).

This crazy Saturday found me sitting up in bed all the live long day working on outlines and getting distracted by thoughts of the pretty new weather we had.  Alas, outlines trump playing outside...at least for the next two weeks.  However, this time next week, Exam #1 will be completed and only 3 more will stand between me and a week full of bliss.  I'll be back and forth between sunny SD spring cleaning my little apartment and lounging at my family home with these beautiful creatures:     

I cannot wait.  For now, off I go to dinner with my man friend.  Au revoir.

Trial Run! - AND UPDATE!

OK cowboys and indians, lets see if I can be a real grown up blogger and keep this thing going.  I've decided if I can do enough posts in a month to prove to myself that it is worth buying into the blogging world (with the $5 I have in my bank account...bye bye groceries!) then I will go ahead and start this stuff for real:  buy a domain, start setting up ads, and being a real life big girl bloggerwoman.

It would be awesome to start by talking about my most recent kitchen adventure, but the pictures are still stuck on my camera and need to be uploaded...they will pop up here later on.  It was the Big E's birthday yesterday (homeboy is aging rapidly).  I'd recently read many many articles about cake pops and being a budding baker I thought YO...lemme try that.  The Eli is a drummer, so I thought I would try making cake pop drums!  A quick google image search gave me the perfect idea for his cake.  Here is what I found, thanks to kathyphantastic:  

Perfecto!  Eli's got this shirt with animal on it that says "Less Talkin, More Rockin!" so this could not be a better suited design for his birthday surprise.

What I did change is the sparkle on the drums, since his dream drumset has a blue sparkle shell.  Also, I made a 2 layer cake and cut round one of them so that I can use that extra cake for the actual cake pops.  I put what was left of the smaller circle on top of the bigger one so it acted as kind of a platform...a stage if you will...for Animal and his drumset!

LESSONS LEARNED:
-  Cake pops aren't the most difficult kitchen adventure, however don't underestimate the amount of timing needed to do it right.
-  Also, you need to give yourself a try or two before you're really able to figure out how to work with melting chocolate:  You don't want to under melt it because then when you dip the cake pop it will pick up too much chocolate, get really heavy and maybe fall apart.  Also, when cake pops are too heavy, and you happen to want to set them up in a cake (like I did) the cake may not be able to support their weight and things can fall apart!
-  Make sure you have everything laid out (any decorations, a space for dipping, a space for the dipped dudes to settle) before you get going.
-  A note on decorations:  regular sprinkles are both cute and tasty however for those of you who are adventurous and tend to get a little wild in the baking aisle at Michaels, watch out for edible glitter and the like.  While it will probably work great for your decorating purposes, it will almost definitely turn your mouth colors.  (My apologies for not photographically documenting the test bite I took out of one of the drums that turned my entire mouth bright blue...)
-  Don't underestimate the power of foam or styrofoam!  Without a place to lounge while they are drying, these pops will make problems for you.  I thought I could outsmart the need for foam by creating some contraption that they could sit on by I was sorely mistaken.  

AFTER ALL THAT HERE IS THE FINISHED PRODUCT!

cake pops pre-dip...one ball for each drum of the set

...bummer...looks like there is some left over for snacking...

un-iced cakes...please notice the hand print in the big cake from when I tried to remove it from the pan and failed due to my lack of non-stick spray...creepy ghost hand...

the finished dude!  do me a favor and ignore the filthy kitchen.  focus on the cute little "animal" hiding behind the drum set.

he travelled with us to the birthday dinner at Cafe Coyote, which (as a side note) is exactly the place to go if you are in San Diego and want the best Mexican in Old Town.

Things ended up working rather well, if I say so myself, for it having been my first expedition into the cake pop jungle.  I ended up making quite the cute little drumset complete with two cymbals (idea from kathyphantastic again!) and Eli was quite pleased.  However, that jerk turns out to be watching his womanly figure or some such nonsense so, sadly, the cake was left for me to finish off.  Big bummer.

UPDATE ON THAT...most of the cake pops are gone.  Delicious sadness.

Cake pops will definitely happen again one day.  Most likely after finals are over.  Most definitely after finals are over actually.