What a day.

So that whole law school thing? Yeah. That's over. Had my last final today--knocked it out of the park. And by "knocked it out of the park," I mean "wrote words, more or less in response to each question, which may or may not have formed sentences." Significantly, I turned it in, and I'm fairly certain I'll pass.

We're going to Europe in August, and have racked up huge credit card bills in the planning process. Using my impressive grasp of economics, I ascertained that the credit card company would be charging us significantly more in interest over the next few months than the bank would be paying us in interest on my savings account, so I paid the bill in full. Only, using my less-than-impressive grasp of computers and my own motor skills, I inadvertently paid the bill out of our checking account rather than our savings account.

Several days ago. And in the meantime, our bank has happily gone along accepting our checks and debit card charges, charging us overdraft fees, and not saying a thing. When my debit card was finally rejected during my pre-exam water, energy drink and donettes trip to 7-11 this morning, I logged in to find our balance at something like -$4209. A transfer from the savings account stopped the bleeding, and I then spent a good chunk of my afternoon on the phone with the bank's "customer" "service" staff. And let me tell you, nothing takes the edge off after a 3 1/2 hour exam like a solid hour on the phone with a pleasant but woefully incompetent phone-answerer. Anyway, I've got most of the charges refunded, still working on the rest.

I was lucky enough to win a kind of pointless little contest on Seth's popular Minnesota Twins-themed blog, and my prize was a boxed DVD set containing all seven full games from the 1987 World Series put together by A&E. So after I was done with all the bank silliness for the day, I got up on the treadmill in front of Game One. I was at Game One, as an awestruck eight-and-a-half year-old, and I remember Frankie V pitching well and a grand slam and a win, and a subsequent celebration where some loud lady spilled beer all over me (though that might actually have been Game Two), but not much else.

It's really an incredible experience to go back and see through adult eyes how it actually went, and to see players like The Wizard of Oz and the late, great Kirby in the context of a full-length ballgame again. I actually found myself yelling at the TV at times, usually at the umpire for a questionable call (which, as silly as it is in any situation, is at least doubly so when you're trying to yell not only across hundreds of miles of space but across twenty years of time). It was great fun, except for all the running in place and sweating. (Boy, if you've been skimming, that's gonna be a really hard one to decipher!)

Got a call cutting the nostalgia short--had to stop, actually, just after the grand slam--saying someone was coming to look at the house between 5:30 and 6:30. So I go downstairs, and I'm climbing out of the shower at about ten to 5 when I hear our cute little dog barking her cute little head off; there's a car parked in our driveway that isn't mine. I was sure I'd heard them wrong, that really they were coming at 5 instead of 5:30 (in which case they're still early), and I'm standing there in my towel. So I throw my clothes on, having to put on the jeans twice because the zipper stuck in the first pair, and pulling my t-shirt on over my not-nearly-dry upper half, and run outside to discover a very nice realtor and client who were not the people I was expecting, and who couldn't be bothered to make an appointment.

After that I met my wife for dinner and had generally a very pleasant evening. But I was out of breath for like an hour. Really far too stressful for a day when I'd planned to do nothing but enjoy all the done-with-law-school-ness.

***SUDDEN SUBJECT CHANGE!***

I tend to talk about baseball a lot, and yet to totally ignore the issues in baseball that most people talk about when they talk about baseball. For instance, I'm utterly bored by the steroid issue. If it were coherent to say that I was militantly, almost violently apathetic, that's what I would be about steroids (and HGH and what-have-you) in baseball. Similarly (though less violently), I have almost no interest in what Curt Schilling has to say or the job security of various non-player Yankee personnel.

But lately, the tragic yet (or rather, because) utterly avoidable death of Josh Hancock has a lot of people both inside baseball and out talking about the alcohol policy in most clubhouses (namely, that they provide it, and a lot of it). Now, I've read Ball Four, as everyone should. I know that baseball players, for the most part, are thoughtless, sociopathic losers. But I had no idea that teams encouraged this behavior on a nightly basis. This is ridiculous. Now, the firm I'll be going to has a Friday afternoon happy hour, and some people (present company included, once or twice, last summer) get a little silly. But then they (we) walk home or to the train station. Baseball players own big expensive cars, many of which are made to travel very, very fast. It really doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even a smarmy used car salesman, to realize that this is a problematic policy. I mean, come on. As Seth Myers and Amy Poehler might say, "Really, Bud Selig? Really?"