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It is NICE to be home. I slept in this morning, ate breakfast, wandered around Memphis for a little while, went to Germantown for the mock trial meeting, ate lunch, did a little more wandering, got Chick-Fil-A, and sat around doing nothing for the rest of the night. Doing nothing was all I remembered it to be, and more.

The kids at mock trial are in a tough spot this year. Most of their experienced people graduated last year, and almost no one is returning in their roles from previous years. Since I'm not in Memphis through the week much anymore, this is the first meeting I've made it to since last year's state competition, where we beat two top-ten teams and yet somehow we finished out of the top ten. I'm still angry about that. The meeting today was just to go over what they'd written and what questions they had developed during the writing. It's good to brainstorm and discuss issues, but I have a feeling most of what I say goes in one ear and out the other. This is one of those things where you don't get better until you get embarrassed a few times. I hate to see that happen because a lot of these people are clearly very intelligent, but it's the competition that forges the best lawyers, and no one has really been through that yet. My role has always been to scare the newbies, to make willing to learn, then to challenge them and make them better through a competition that didn't mean anything. It was a great role because I got to play Devil's Advocate all the time, then teach how to avoid or respond to the problems. Now, I'm the visiting expert and the reason we took second in the district last year (that was my introduction today), and almost no one knows me or has any reason to listen to me. And I got called "sir" today.

There is general agreement that UTSI professors, while knowledgeable and nice people overall, do not make good bosses. I was misinformed about the timeline of my project more than a year ago. I don't think that was all my advisor's fault (contracts had to go through about 12 government agencies, including the military, before they reached the company that was contracting with us), but it also made for a year of absolutely no work toward my thesis, and will probably cost me at least one semester on my graduation plans. Lee's advisor kept telling him that things weren't pressing, so Lee came home. Now, it seems, work needs to get done yesterday and Lee might have to go back to school to get things done. Amy's advisor didn't give her much work at all during the semester, but has now loaded her down with things to do over the holidays (and her sister's wedding). Amy, a math major, also gets to take a Reading class with the always fun Dr. Kupershmidt. I think they should start with The Little Engine That Could and see if they can make it all the way through the Dr. Seuss collection. Although if Kupershmidt picks, it'll probably be all the fun books he told us to read "if we had time." (To be fair, he acknowledged that would probably be after the completion of classes.) I have an interesting book on Cryptography that I did a math report on, if that helps. I'm sure it doesn't.

I really should have read the mock trial questions that I told that girl I'd look over. I'm a bad visiting expert.

Drew Carey: Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.

More tomorrow.