Tosca

Aubree and I went on a date last night. It was really nice. I'm sure that Aubree would agree that we don't do it often enough. Aunt Michelle was nice enough to come over after work to watch Thomas. Aubree and I went to dinner at Christopher's. It was nice, but Aubree's chicken was apparently pretty bland. My dinner was okay. I had a cajun seafood pasta. There was too much sauce for the amount of pasta and seafood. Overall, though, it was nice to go to dinner, just the two of us. After dinner, we walked to Capitol Theater for a performance of Tosca, an opera by Puccini. He wrote it between La Boeheme and Madame Butterfly. I really enjoyed it, and I think Aubree did, too. It's a pretty tragic love story. Every major character ends up dying. Four people in all. The music and the performance was great. What's even better is that we're going to go to the opera or symphony once a month for the rest of this season.

I also have another piece of news. I was notified by email yesterday that I was accepted to Chicago-Kent Law School. It's part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. It's a decent school. One thing that drew me to it was its intellectual property program. The law school is actually just two blocks from the sears tower. It would be kind of cool to go to school in downtown Chicago. I guess I'm 4/4 now. That's pretty exciting. What it really means is that my decision is going to be that much harder in a few months.

As Aubree and I were talking at dinner last night, law school came up. I asked her if I were to get in to every school (which isn't going to happen), where would she want to go. She was somewhat ambivalent about this, mostly because she has a hard time remembering everywhere I've applied. She asked me a while ago to post a list of all the schools I've applied to. I meant to do it one day I was watching Thomas, but as anyone who's watched him knows, the best intentioned plans often get put by the wayside while watching Thomas. That's just fine, but I forgot to post the list at a later time. So, here it finally is. They are listed in order of rank according to U.S. News and World Report. I've listed that rank to the right of each school. Take that with a grain of salt. The schools in bold are ones I've been accepted to.

1. Columbia (NY, NY) - 5
2. University of Chicago (Chicago, IL) - 6
3. Virginia (Charlottesville, VA) - 10
4. Duke (Durham, NC) - 10
5. Georgetown (Washington, DC) - 14
6. Washington University (St. Louis, MO) - 19
7. Boston University (Boston, MA) - 20
8. George Washington University (Washington, DC) - 22
9. University of Washington (Seattle, WA) - 28
10. George Mason University (Arlington, VA) - 34
11. BYU (Provo, UT) - 44
12. Utah (Salt Lake City, UT) - 57
13. IIT Chicago-Kent (Chicago, IL) - 60


The list may seem a little long, and it is. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. I took the LSAT twice. Data and statistics drove what range of schools I was looking at. I was going to try for maybe one or two schools in the top 15, but my focus was on schools in the middle of my list. Once I got my higher score, I added some schools near the top of the ranking because my chances increased considerably at those schools. I did eliminate many schools from the middle range at that point, but I still liked the schools that remained on the list, so they stayed. In addition to that, I received fee waivers from about 40% of the schools, so while applying was still expensive, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. (I don't know if Aubree would necessarily agree with that, though.)

Finally, I would like to thank Thomas in this post. If he weren't taking a nap right now, this wouldn't be happening.