Easter Tidings

We had a pretty fun Easter this year. I was kinda surprised. I don't generally enjoy these family gatherings too much (aside from the food), but this really was a lot of fun. I wasn't too thrilled about getting up early to help cook, but I did offer, so I felt obliged to wake up and help. And the cooking itself was actually pretty fun. I just spent the first 15 minutes of it in a sleep deprived haze. Also, we were out of normal flour, so we had to make pizzas (that was my job) with wheat flour. I like original style better, but it still was pretty good. What I did not realize until after the first batch was that wheat flour puffs up a lot more than regular. So the first few pizzas were more dough than topping, but thereafter I rolled them flatter.

So it was good that I helped my mom cook bc we were cooking right up until the wire. When my aunt, uncle, cousin, and grandma arrived, we were still going. They helped us finish in fact. The food turned out delicious (yum... leftovers!), and I really enjoyed talking to my extended family. That's not always the case. There was plenty of the polite catching up (so you're graduating? how nice) that isn't so fun, but there was some interesting stuff too. It's not the sort of thing I would normally be so into, but my Aunt Helen had a lot of interesting things to say about interior design. Aside from designing/building her own house, she does it a little on the side for fun. Well it's a job. She does get paid, but she doesn't really need the income and it's not the only job she does. She said she's only doing two houses right now. She doesn't want to do more than that (even though there are other clients lined up for her). Apparently, she's a very good interior designer. I must admit, her house is really nice. It's really unconventional and interesting in ways that really work. For example, her coffee table is an old bellows, the kind that must have been for a blacksmith it's so huge. You don't even realize it at first. You think it's just a strangely shaped coffee table. Then you look closer. A lot of things in her house are a little like that. It is filled with antiques. And the upstairs... damn! They have so many antiques I'm shocked they can even fit them all in there. My Uncle Al travels around the country looking for antiques. A lot of the people with antiques are little antiquated themselves. They don't know much about ebay or internet selling, so he gets really good deals by coming to them. He bought a collection of guns that were worth a fair amount off of this one guy who wasn't even in the market to sell until my Uncle Al visited him in his home.

But all that antiquery aside, my aunt knows her stuff when it comes to interior design and it was really interesting listening to her talk about it. She pointed out a few things in my house that I'd never really thought about. We have some really nice stuff. One thing that caught my eye was the ceilings and how they kinda curve near the top instead of being pointy corners. I imagine that was pretty hard to do. I never thought about it before. Once I started looking, I noticed that there are a lot of interesting curves to my house. Then my Aunt Helen started talking about various pieces that would complement some of the locations in my house and I found myself getting pretty interested. It was also very interesting when she was talking about some of the "don't"s that she's come across while working with some of her clients. A lot of the time, there's a lot of preexisting blunders when she gets there and she has to figure out a way to get around that. It was also interesting to listen to how she deals with clients who don't realize when they've made a mistake. She was talking about this one lime green paint that she had to get rid of or about this laundry room that had really dark wood (most laundry rooms are light colored and clean and she had to work around this really dark wood and marble flooring). Now aesthetics has never been my forte, but I do like puzzles, and the way she described it, it almost was a sort of puzzle. She also gave a bunch of hints and tips on how to get something looking nice. For instance, she said it's a really good idea to buy a small pint of whatever paint you're thinking of using and putting a little of it on the walls before definitively decided on that color. With the different light and the surroundings of your house, sometimes a color can look a lot different than it does in the store. And since you're going to be painting over it anyway, it doesn't matter if you get a little paint you're not going to use on the walls. This was a mistake that happened to one of her clients who had painted a room periwinkle blue. I like periwinkle blue. It's the sort of thing I might pick out for a room when faced with a bunch of colors in a color palette. But when you think about it, a periwinkle blue room is a bit too much periwinkle blue.

My aunt wasn't the only one I had interesting conversations with. I had a very funny talk with my cousin Michael, but I think all the humor may have been on my side. He's applying to law school, but he's not looking so hot. He's having a lot of trouble with the LSAT. He's not a terribly good test taker, but I think he isn't the brightest person I know either. He really wants to go to McGeorge, a law school in Sacramento. It's a pretty good law school too. It's in the top 100 in the nation, but it used to be pretty bad (like 3rd tier, which means as low as they can get and still bother to rank you- 3rd tier schools aren't ranked by number I don't think. I believe it's barely a step above being accredited). I was telling Michael that even though it didn't use to be that well ranked, I thought it deserved to be higher than it was. One of the rankings for colleges in general is attrition rate. The snooty places that make it hard to get in but then allow everyone to graduate are the places that score very highly on that scale (which is probably why the scales were made that way). McGeorge allows in just about everybody (or at least they used to- considering how much trouble my cousin is having getting in makes me think that they don't anymore). In fact, (assuming you score well on the LSAT), they'll let in someone who never even attended college. So it's not that hard to get in, but after the first year, the bottom third of the class is dropped. Then after the second year, the bottom third of what's remaining is also dropped. If my math skills aren't too rusty, that means they drop 5/9 of the starting class. Talk about attrition. But if you think about it, that means that graduating from McGeorge really means something. They'll give just about anyone a chance, but to actually get through, you'd better prove yourself. Considering the number of connections my uncle has on the board of trustees for McGeorge, I'm a little afraid to ask what Michael got on his LSAT to make it difficult for him to get in. I believe he got about 130 the first time he took it, and he didn't mention his score the second time around. Just to put 130 in a frame of reference, you can score between 120 and 180.

But anyway, my point in mentioning how poorly McGeorge fares on the attrition scale was to let Michael know that it's a better school than it appears, but when I told him about dropping the bottom third, he got this scared, panicky on his face. It's true that if he goes to McGeorge, he's going to have to work hard the whole time he's there to stay about the bottom third both times, but it's not really fun to be the one to tell him that. I was kinda surprised that he didn't know. His mom knew. I started to doubt myself when he looked so surprised, but his mom said the same thing later on.

I do feel kinda bad for being the bearer of bad news, but the deer-caught-in-headlights look on Michael's face was kinda funny too. But now that I think about it more, I mostly just feel bad for him. He wants to follow in his dad's footsteps and become a lawyer practicing in Stockton (he will undoubtedly get a job at his dad's firm if he can only pass the bar), but that's going to be really tough. I really do want him to achieve his dream, mostly bc it will make him happy, but also partly bc I'm afraid of him entering politics as a backup plan. His family is very well connected and political. That close personal friend of theirs on the board of trustees for McGeorge met with Cheney when they were deciding on appointees for the supreme court. They ended up deciding against her because she was too similar to that one female lawyer that Bush recommended who got shot down. She also happens to hold a judgeship just below the supreme court (circuit judge or something like that). And this is just one of their numerous political friends. Very numerous. I would really rather not have Michael in politics.

So I had a pretty fun time this Easter. My mom said it wouldn't have happened without me. I was the one who asked what was going on for Easter when nothing was planned. And I helped my mom when she was a little overwhelmed by cooking. That's a nice feeling. So I'm going to get going and enjoy the rest of my Easter instead of spending forever and a day writing. Right now I've only spent forever and I'd really rather not waste another day when I don't have to. :p