(More personal than political today, so if it's not your cup of tea, I recommend today's George F. Will article in the Washington Post.)

With a little less than three days to my first exam, things could be better, but could be worse. You can see the Exam Watch countdown to the right, accurate to within four hours because I didn't compensate for time zones in my programming. Breaking them down:

Torts: Probably the weakest match between my skills and my courses, I've put off dealing with this until necessary. I'm still outlining negligence, quite a few days behind schedule. Still, it's beginning to come together, and by Tuesday I should be doing what I can to prepare. Annoyingly, this is my first exam of my first year of law school, and there's no practice exams available: Prof. Torts is in her first year teaching. (She's done admirable work to compensate for this by giving us significant review/tutorial help, but it still does little to exterminate the butterflies in the stomach.)

Contracts: Outline and review notes almost completed, and I did some mock-examing yesterday. I'm either doing quite well or incredibly badly, since there didn't seem to be that many issues in each of Prof. Contract's questions, and those there were I could analyze without much trouble. Given the amount of time I've got to prepare, I'm not sweating that hard.

Civ. Pro: I've done the least preparation for this, but it's a one-day takehome at the end of my exam period, so I'm still feeling OK about it.

Time Schedule: The time schedule's looking strange, since I'm working mostly from about noon to about midnight. Still, it's when I'm most productive.

Work Schedule: My project plan says I'm 6.5 days behind schedule and will be OK if my exams start when they end. I know enough from my days as a project manager not to get too worried when MS Project says 26 hour days are necessary.

Health, Sleep, and Happiness: Oddly, I'm still feeling pretty positive, despite the occasional gripe. I'll tell you on Wednesday whether this is a result of rational and composed sanity, or if I'm ending my weekend still in denial. It helps that I've set sane deadlines, established pretty low standards of success, and spent as much time talking with friends as I could reasonably spare.