Scheduling

Yesterday, I did some master planning for all days between today and memorial day.

Primarily, I allocated time to the following 3 groups of activities:

1. Law school -- mainly study day allocation as necessary given my current state of unpreparedness, how many units the course is, and how much I think I need to study between now and the exam.

2. Working out -- if there's one thing law school has taught me, it's that in a time of stress, many things can go out the window, but I MUST maintain some minor commitment to working out or I'll head into a downward spiral of headaches, dizziness, heartburn, and sleeping problems. So, I've got tentative plans to do a few easy races between now and memorial day. If life won't let me run 'em, no worries, at least I'll have done the training to stay sane.

3. Social/Family/E -- yup. I'm that big of a geek. When facing a big grind-time, I actually schedule when I'm going to see my extended family, when I'm allocating time to hang out with E, and when, if at all, I'm going to allow myself to do something social with people outside of my family.

The scheduling brought an odd intersection of bay area running, my family life, and law school to my attention that may have otherwise slipped my notice: My school, in its infinite wisdom, scheduled graduation for the same day as a little footrace known as Bay to Breakers. Awesome. An extra 65,000 participants and 110,000 spectators all less than 2 miles from graduation... sounds fun.

The race suggests finding an alternate route (you know, avoid the freeways that the out of towners will be using to get to the race...that's right, all of 'em) and, also to avoid/postpone travel in the affected areas.

This presents a particularly interesting problem. I have relatives from out of town who are uncomfortable with "the city." If they must come, they deal with much of their discomfort by getting up at the asscrack of dawn. This means they arrive very early (to avoid traffic and have enough time to deal with unforseen complications). Clearly this plan is going to backfire this time. So now, I've got to figure out if it's better to get 'em all to San Francisco and into a hotel the night before graduation (a night in the city???) or to try to make the point that they should drive later in the day and just sit in traffic because it'll actually be better than the early AM traffic on the day of the race.