First Day of Exploration

It's nice to naturally wake up at 6 a.m. because of the time change.  I'm hoping I can just stay on this sleep schedule for the rest of the summer, but we'll see if that happens.  Waking up so early allowed me to get quite a bit done today, including running some errands and doing a little bit of exploring.

Thanks to the Trader Joe's up the road, the apartment is fully stocked with all sorts of breakfast foods.  After a good breakfast, I went and worked out in the complex's gym, which was surprisingly bustling this morning.  It's weird living somewhere where there are people outside the age range of 18-25.  I forget how much of a bubble Athens is sometimes.

Cartel Coffee Lab's location in Scottsdale

My first goal of the day was to find somewhere to sit and get some work done. Thanks to Foursquare I found Cartel Coffee Lab, which is a few miles north of the apartment near Old Town Scottsdale.  It's a nice little coffee bar, and it also serves some food, beer and wine.  It reminds me a bit of Walkers back in Athens, just with long tables instead of booths.  Also, I think Cartel has a few other locations around Phoenix.

I spent a couple hours there just going through the Goldwater case docket.  The stuff Goldwater is working on sounds right up my alley, particularly cases like this and this.  I'm probably going to have to whip out my Con Law I outline to refresh my memory on some of this Commerce Clause stuff.  I've actually taken Con Law I, Con Law II, and State and Local Government -- the three courses I likely will be drawing on the most this summer -- with Prof. Lori Ringhand.  Good thing she's an excellent professor.

After heading home to make lunch and running a few errands, I scoped out my morning route to the Goldwater Institute.  The drive takes about 20 minutes without traffic, so I'm planning to give myself an  hour to get there in traffic on the first day.  Normal office hours are 8:30-5, but they asked me to come in at 9 a.m. on my first day, which is this Tuesday.

At the moment I'm at the Starbucks across the street from my apartment complex looking at the last few cases on the Goldwater docket.  The plan after this is just to go back to the apartment and chill out for the rest of the night watching Mad Men and cooking dinner.  The girl who I'm subletting from has all kinds of cool kitchen stuff in her apartment, but frankly I'm too scared to touch a lot of it for fear of breaking something at the moment, so I'm keeping it simple for now -- most likely chicken and veggies or something of the like.

T-minus two days to the start of my clerkship.