commotiocordis

In the Philadelphia airport right now. LOL at how I've not been posting all the stuff before this that I've been meaning to write up, so nobody has any idea why I'm in PA. Went to Corning NY for the reunion, then up to Rutland(ish) VT for the aunt's house staying (where she'd lost the password for the wireless internets, so virtually no access for me at all there--add that to the no air conditioning and me having to sleep on the couch, which would be fine if the aunt hadn't been getting up ungodly early every day, thus waking me up at same ungodly hour, and scenery or not, I'm happy to be out of there), and this morning we drove down to Albany for me to catch a flight here (Philadelphia) to get a connector back to St. Louis. At 6:30, gah. I tried to get them to switch me up to the 4:45 one here, but since I had a checked bag, I couldn't. I was like "I could run back and get the bag like everybody else and recheck it on the new plane!" but no, because they would have been done unloading by then.

Got here rather surprisingly early--I assumed that planes left when they were scheduled to leave or later, not earlier, but we were up in the air a good 12 minutes pre-scheduled departure and touched down right at 2:50 (Eastern time--I finally got all my watches and computers and such switched perhaps day before yesterday only to have to switch it all back when I get home). So I have to hang out for the next 3 hours or so, but I found a spot with a power plug (not my terminal, but who's really going to check that?) and the airport has free wireless, so I'm content. Not so content in that flight sickness has not quite subsided, however. I should have figured that I'd be sickly, but I didn't realize how much dipping and bobbing and majorslantage (that seriously OMGfreaked me out the first time--when I thought about it, I immediately knew that the plane had to do that to turn, but it didn't stop the pre-thought OJEZUSWE'REGOINGDOWN shudder). I took a bunch of pictures out the window and such, but I don't think I have the cord or I'd stick them on right now. Perhaps, we will check when I finish typing.

First flight plane was seriously the smallest ever. See pictures to eventually (hopefully) be attached. Nine rows of seats, pairs on each side of the aisle with the last (9th) being a bench at the back of five seats. No bathroom either, which is funny, because we (mum, Kaci, and aunt Anna who all rode the hour and a half or so down to Albany with me) were listening to NPR on the way over, and they had their "We give you three news stories and you tell us which one's real" bit and it was about airplanes/airlines, and one of the two fakes (that we all thought was the real one) was about one airline possibly taking out bathrooms from their planes on flights less than 2 hours. Looks like it's already happened--THIS MEANS I WAS RIGHT, ANNA. I was supposed to be in seat 8D, but there was only one lady for the whole back bench, so I asked her if she'd mind me sneaking back there with her. She did not, and thus I was able to get a couple of out-of-window shots too without squishing the woman I was supposed to be sitting next to. And got essentially 2.5 seats to myself, as it was window-emptyseat-her-empty-me-empty-window. I really hope that some sort of the same situation will be possible on flight 2, as that's the one where I'll be in the air around sunset time, which is really when I want to be able to get the out-of-window pictures.

Wicked good timing with the flights, though. We bought the ticket on the 7th, and if we had waited until the 9th, I would have had to cough up $15 to check a single bag. And since it's before methinks August 1st, I still got a free Diet Coke on the plane.

Gah, stomach, stop being queasylike. You're on the freaking ground, what the hell?

Cool things about this airport. The food. They've got an A Bon Pain, which I'd been wanting to try out because of their whole menu of < 200 calorie foods. They have a smoothie place with < 100 calorie smoothies, too, which is win. I might end up trying both at some point, as no lunch was had (due to driving to and then being on a plane), though admittedly the breakfast happened around 10am, and thus the hunger has not returned (killed by the airsickness?). And it's all guaranteed to be street price, which means it's not going to kill my wallet (or, you know, will anyway because Philly's street price can't be cheap, but at least it's not going to be hugely more).

So sadness about the not getting on the 4:45 flight back to STL, but I have stuff to do, so it's cool. And I'm still getting home significantly sooner than the 13 hours of driving that it would have taken were mum ready to go home (I've got to work on Monday doing this teaching assistant gig for a summer camp for gifted 1st and 2nd graders, she loves Vermont too much to leave after only 5 days) or the 25+ hours of Greyhound bussing or train that was the second choice (Anna found the flight, thank god, and it was only like $20 more than the by-then sold out train and actually less than the bus). Though AIR CONDITIONING, PHILLY, WOULD BE NICE. It's probably just warm because I'm in the terminal area, where they've got the connectors to the outside and all, but it's 88 degrees in the outdoors and not a whole lot cooler in here.

O LAPTOP PLZ STOP THAT. It just had a popup thing telling me that Windows Media Player found somebody else's (the lady sharing this outlet with me, permaybehaps?) computer and can share files with her. NO THANKS, LAPTOPPY SIR. This unsecured network thing does not happy make me, especially since my Norton Anti-Virus trial that came with the computer ran out a few days ago. Scary.

Re: Spring Break. I knitted some eggs. And flowers, but the eggs are cooler looking. I stuffed them and everything (except for one of them, which I've yet to get around to sewing up and stuffing). I read a bunch of fic, which I hadn't really been doing much of lately, so that was nice. Mock trial'ed the entire last weekend of it, which was fun but hell.

Re: Mock Trial. Like it says above, Friday/Saturday/Sunday were all that. And as usual, were filled by very little sleep, as you're not home until late on Friday, you've got to cram for the side switching that night and get up early Saturday morning to go back down there and argue the other way. Ditto Saturday night to Sunday. Add to that my weird sleeping schedule (so I was in court when I would normally be asleep) and I calculated it all out and I had something like 260fl oz of Diet Dr. Pepper over Saturday and Sunday (most on Saturday) just to keep me awake, LOL.

We only took 4th this year, which pissed me off more than a little because a) it was only by the judge's ballot (who didn't like one of our lawyers pretty obviously) and one point on one of the jury ballots that we didn't get to move on, and b) the reason we lost the trial that kicked us out was because we'd lost to that team once before this year and we got scared. Twas a snooty rich school that has won state something like 5 out of the last 8 years now, but I don't think that they're actually that much better than we are (they're scripted as hell, so you knock them off script and they're gone).

But I got screwed by a bad call (so says my team’s lawyer coach, who, with several other lawyers, wrote the case) by the judge on an unfair extrapolation, which meant I had to spend most of my cross time fighting the witness on that and had to cut myself way short on the other stuff I wanted to get to so I wouldn't leave our last crosser with only 3.5 minutes for an entire examination (like happened earlier in the series of trials)--which didn't hurt my score because I handled it well, but in the course of the overall trial, it made it harder for them to find for us at the end because it ended up helping the other side's case; as much as they say that it's all about the points and who would actually win the trial doesn't matter, you can't divorce presentation from outcome completely. Idk. I felt that I did decently and my scores reflected that (though they weren't nearly the best I'd ever gotten), though the u.e. thing rattled me pretty badly at the time—you sit down thinking “Oh shit, I just blew that,” because it didn’t come out as strongly case-wise for my side as it should have, but the fighting is where most of the points do come from. And fighting I can do.

Still. Moar things that went wrong on Sunday. We had one lawyer screw up the side switching (or something) during that final trial, and end up crossing one witness with what were essentially the direct examination questions for our side's counter witness, and I had to fight my witness a few times when she got again, methinks nervous, and wasn't following where I was trying to go/tried to fight me like I was her crosser. which were the two big things that I can pick out as what I felt hit us the hardest. Plus, two major points for my closing didn’t come out in trial for various reasons, which means I had to rework the thing to try and make it sound like we’d presented a strong enough case to win if it were a real trial (which we didn’t, due to the fact that it’s a weaker side to begin with and we missed those two points). But I think a lot of my closing points came from being able to do that, however, because the opposing closer very obviously didn’t for her side and was talking all kinds of smack that very severely skewed both the stuff that the witnesses actually said and stuff that they didn’t actually ever say. It was nuts, though; I don’t think I’ve ever heard such skewage from a closer before. She was like “And you heard them say this” and I was all “Ummbutwhat? I’m pretty sure not.”

Saturday’s either first or second trial, they all run together in my head, first trial was unbelievably fun, though, because. . . erm, the other team wasn’t any good. Well, sufficiently good that it wasn’t boring and we got a chance to use some of our objection responses and stuff, but their witnesses weren’t great at fighting on cross, which is always my favorite part anyway, and thus I was able to sort of kill my witness to, erm, death. I wanted video of that one—we never seem to get anybody to video tape ours for whatever reason, which is sad. I always think of it afterwards (only on the good trials—on the bad ones, you want all tapes/cameras/recording devices as far away as possible, LOL) and it never gets done. And the other teams, when they tape it, never manage to get the tape to us like the MT rules say they have to if we ask (I’m looking at one team here in particular that’s done it to us two years in a row, thanks). I had my mp3 player sneakyrecording all or most of the trials over the weekend, though, so I’m going to go back through and listen to them at some point and perhaps pull out bits of things to put up for fun.

We recast throughout the competition again, though, as on Friday night we were freaking out because our opener wasn't there yet when the trial was supposed to start and we had divvied up her parts to just try to do them without real preparation. It's not like we couldn't have, as evidenced by the fact that we’ve had to do that several times over the course of this season, more or less including Sunday, but it's crazy nervewracking to have to try to examine a witness you've never worked with before; even though you know what you need to get out there, it's easy for a witness and a lawyer to trample on each other's toes accidentally if they're not at least a bit familiar with each other's style. She showed up that night maybe 2 minutes before the judge walked in, but there seemed to have been family issues on the way there that nobody ever got the details of that both were the cause of her lateness and had her shaken up enough that she did really poorly, so we ended up absorbing her roles anyway for the next time we went that direction (which was Sunday's, thus also partially explaining the semi-suckage that trial).

But yes. I got a 10 on my closing on the Sunday trial, and that’s what I’m going to stick with. As a team, we didn’t do as well as we could have, but as an individual (especially considering I had to fight the twisted unfair extrapolation thing) I kinda rocked the weekend. I won’t play modest (lol, like you saw any humility in this entire post); I’m good at this shit, so it really feels sucky that this was most likely the last time I’m going to be able to do it.