School related changes

For those of you reading who might be interested in going to school part time or for anyone interested in what impacts going to school has had on my life, here are some of the changes I've made to my daily schedule to accommodate the current demands of evening classes.

M-TH
6:15am - get out of bed. This is when the wife's alarm goes off (which I used to sleep through), but I'm finding that I don't have time to gather all my books and stuff, eat breakfast, walk the dogs, and make it out the door by 7:10. Since I don't want to deprive the dogs of their morning walk, I can live without the extra 15 minute snooze I used to have between 6:15 and 6:30.

7:30-4 or 4:30 (depending on how long I take at lunch). Work, as normal. No change.

4 or 4:30 - go to school (which, for me, is on the way home). I am going straight to the library where I complete any reading or briefing I need to do for that evening's classes.

6-8:45 - go to 2 classes (except on Thursdays, which are screwy on our schedule).

9pm - go home.

9:15 - 10 - converse with wife, have a snack, watch something mindless on TV, like Southpark (and thanks to Tivo, I can watch a 30 minute show in 20 minutes).

10-11 or 11:30 - read for the next days classes, as necessary. If not, there's probably something around the house I ought to do.

FRI
On Friday evenings, I don't do anything related to law school. This is personal time, wife time, friends and family time, pet time, or whatever it is I need to do to maintain my sanity. Whether it's a home cooked meal with a bottle of wine or burgers and beers with friends, I need a night to not do school and to detox/destress from everything that happened that week.

Weekends
Read and brief for the next weeks classes. Review notes from the previous week. Complete any LWRA assignments. This took about 4 hours on Saturday (2 at the library) and a couple hours on Sunday this past weekend, but I don't know whether that's indicative or anything or not. I'd like to think I'd get faster at some of this, but something tells me the workload will increase enough to compensate for any speed I attain. Fortunately, this does leave time for random house chores, yard work, and more time with my wife and pets.

In summary, you can see that going to law school had essentially taken care of the network TV habit I developed last year. Instead of hanging around the house, playing computer games and watching TV every evening, I'm now going to school and studying. Obviously, my weekends are impacted too, but there's still time to have a little of a life, and that's good.