It's Over!!!

I am finally done taking tests and now I have almost three whole weeks to just relax. I am so excited! It will be nice to come home and see everyone. I can't believe how stressed out I have been lately so it is nice to be able to take a breath and calm myself down. Thanks to everyone for your encouraging words and prayers. See you on Thursday!!

Remember the good old days?

Remember the good old days when siblings posted on the blog so often? When witty back and forth was a daily occurence? I do. Those were the good old days. Now I can't think of anything witty to say. Finals have eaten my brain. Hopefully after Monday I will regain my brain. I am so excited to see everybody and go see the lights and eat pancakes and everything else Christmasy that I have been missing. I have not really had much time to think about anything other than civil procedure, contracts and torts. I only have one more final left to take and then I will be free for TWO WHOLE WEEKS!!!!!
I am super excited. So is Karen. We will have to make the most of the time while we are there.

Death to Finals: BYU-I style

basically i want to die

i can't wait to come home and see all you guys and have a christmas tree and drink egg nog and not do any school work or talk to teachers or worry about roommates stealing my food or cleaning or anything like that

Basically saturday can't come soon enough

Stinkin' Snow Plows

So this weekend was the first step in the move. We planned on moving some boxes and painting Ezra's room. Well, it snowed quite a bit last night so we knew it would be more fun than we planned. When we go in our car there was this snow plow in the parking lot over by the dumpster going back then forward. It was just sitting there when we pulled out of the parking space so we backed up. Then the stupid plow started backing up. Joe tried to pull back into the space, but the car was stuck in the snow, so he honked for like 5 seconds but the stinkin plow just kept backing up and then hit us. I hit my head, but no one really got hurt. The back of the car is pretty messed up, but at least the rear window didn't break (it came pretty close). We then got to spend about 45 minutes filling out police reports and junk.

Even though all of that junk we still moved about 8 boxes and painted Ezra's room. It's a nice light yellow that will look pretty cute with his digs. Hope you guys had a good weekend. Love you all.

Death to finals

I'm serious I want to kill them all. I'll do it too. You try and stop me.

(they are tests silly, you can't kill them, but they can certainly kill you)

Also in case you missed it before.

ELFED!!

New Glasses

I got new glasses because I lost my old ones. Here is a picture of Karen and I being glasses buddies!

Hi Ho, Hi Ho

Hello all,

So, yesterday was my first day back to work. My two appointments cancelled and Dr. Burr was out of town, so I only stayed for a whopping 4 hours. Joe played with Ezra in the morning and me and Ezra enjoyed the afternoon by listening to our drunken neighbor scream along with Pearl Jam and topping it off with maintenance saving us from a near kitchen flood (again). Ah, what a life. Love to all!

Dear Siblings

do you know anyone who wants to date me? if so kindly send them my way, thanks
love,
catherine

Done

Well I finished my legal research and writing take home test. I have to wait until ten o' clock to turn it in though. I can't wait to get rid of the dang thing. I just want to turn it in and not think about it again. I think I did a pretty good job, but grading here seems a bit on the arbitrary side so I am not sure how well I will do. This only counts as 30% of our total grade for this class so it is not as bad as finals are going to be where the three hour exam counts for 100% of your grade. Fun stuff. Anybody have any fun Thanksgiving plans? Karen and I are going up to Bert and Tiina's house to have dinner and then we are going to watch Rattatoullie (we got it about two weeks ago but have been saving it to watch it over thanksgiving). We are pretty excited. I also wish I could find someone with cable so I could watch the BYU Utah game at their house. I guess I will just have to settle for listening to it on KSL.

Mission: FAILED

he wasn't home so i couldn't give him cookies and i would have just left them but i want to see him.....that was the whole point of the cookies so i guess i will just call tomorrow? i don't know. Why do things have to be hard?

James, do you still....

Hello all,

Tonight for some reason I was thinking of James' always needed Friday dance. So do you still do the Friday dance, James? I would assume you have beefed it up for Law School- I'm sure it's even better now. We will all be excited for a presentation when you return!

Love to all.

Story Time

Brush With Death

Bet that title got your attention. Huh? Huh?

So Karen and I went to have dinner with a friend who lives in Maryland on Sunday. We got directions to his house from the internet and you know how sometimes they aren't exactly clear? Well we were on what we thought was the right road, but then it ended and our only option was to turn left or right. So I decided to turn left and then make a U turn and go back. I also decided to call my friend and see if he could clarify where the heck his apartment was. So I get out my trusty cell phone and try to find his number and then dial him up. While the phone is ringing the light turns and I have a green arrow. But I'm still kind of distracted because by now my friend's wife has answered the phone and I haven't met her yet so I'm trying to be polite and still ask her for directions and dive at the same time. Consiquently I am a little slow getting out into the intersection, when suddenly a car that must have been going at least fifty miles an hour totally blows through the intersection and misses us by inches. If I hadn't had been distracted by the cell phone conversation I would have probably been dead, or very seriously injured at the very least. Which would have put a damper on our dinner plans.

So here is a case where talking on a cell phone in the car actually prevented an accident from occuring. Kind of ironic huh?

Ezra's first "vacation"

Hi Siblings,

So, I kind of forgot my password to get on the blog and then James kindly reminded me it is just gmail name and password. Sorry for my absence.

This week has been an adventure! We got word that Joe's Grandma was pretty sick so we left on a spur of the moment trip on Saturday morning. Ezra didn't have the best time during our 12 hour trip to Los Alamos, but we made it okay and he slept through the night that night! Sunday we drove to Amarillo with Ann to see Grandma Parsons. I am glad that we went when we did because she passed away that night, so she got to hear Ezra before she passed away. We left Amarillo on Tuesday and will hang out here at Joe's parents house until Friday when we'll go back for the funeral.

All in all it hasn't been the most ideal baby's first vacation, but at least he will have a picture with his great-grandma and we are glad we came in time to see her. He is definitely getting used to long car rides, so I guess that is good.

Hope everyone is having a fun November- talk to you soon.

Happy Halloween

We carved our pumpkin yesterday. Here are some pictures.

Just kickin' it in the library, old school!

That's right friends, I am writing this blog entry because my brain has ceased to function. Hopefully it will get back to functionality in about five or ten minutes because I still have a lot of reading to do. We shall see. Everything is going pretty good here. I am still really busy, but I am understanding things a lot better now, so that is good. Karen and I are going to listen to the House Majority Leader speak tonight so that should be cool. We are also going out to dinner before we go, so that should be cool too. Don't forget to post!!

man i am hardcore

So i went bridge jumping today and it was pretty intense and a lot of fun.

me cass tyleen and janiece decided to form a rollerblading gang so here we are, matt remarked that if i want to look hardcore i need to stop smiling but frankly it is hard with these girls!

Adventures in the big city

So Karen and I went to the Nationals baseball game on Friday night. BYU was having an alumni night so we got tickets for just $8. We were going to go right after Karen got done with work, so I met Karen at her office and we took the metro over to the stadium. We had to go to parking lot number seven to get the tickets and they were going to have pizza there too. Well, parking lot seven is in the twilight zone of the stadium. We found parking lot eight and six and five but not seven. After walking around for a good half an hour we found it, ate some pizza and went to the game. It turns out that the nationals are not very good. They were playing the Philadelphia Phillies, and they got spanked. To make matters worse, there were all these really obnoxious Phillies fans sitting right behind us. They kept chanting really loudly. It was annoying. So we decided to leave early because I still had to go up to campus to get my books. We left at nine o'clock and didn't end up getting home until midnight. The trains run a lot slower after rush hour, so we had to wait about twenty minutes every time we wanted to take a train. It was not cool. While we were waiting for the train to go to metro center these two girls stumbled over to us. I was sitting towards the end of the bench and this girl just colapsed right next to me. It was very obvious that they had had a little too much to drink. So, of course, I used them for entertainment. One girl commented on my civil procedure book and said that she had one just like it at home. So I said "oh really, what do you think of personal jurisdiction?" She replied "I believe in it, I really do" It was kind of funny and sad at the same time. They rode on the same train as us, got off at metro center and took another train back in the same direction they came from.

Anyway that was our exciting adventure yesterday. Today I have been doing homework all day. All in all a very exciting weekend.

Wyoming, a state worth not exploring

I feel obligated to post because everyone else who has moved to another state has posted some sort of update. Well here is my update, everything is exactly the same every day. I am sure my experience here has been an episode on the twilight zone. If not, it should be. Sounds like the other out of staters have much more sweet stuff to talk about.

I-Daho

is pretty weird i will tell you what

a far cry from hanging out with jamie anyways
i always forget how many stupid couples there are
and how many attractive mormon boys there are.

things have been good thus far my roommates seem nice enough or maybe even too nice

i am excited for the rest of my friends to get here love you all!

First Day

So I have concluded that the first day of law school is a cross between a BYU premed class, and a conversation with dad. It is like a BYU premed class because everyone is raising their hand constantly to prove to the professor how brilliant they are, and it is highly competitive. Everyone wants you to know exactly how much smarter they are than you. (this is a bit of an exageration but not far from the truth) It is like a conversation with dad because you need to back up everything you say and be prepared to defend your comments. I think that being a member fo the Bates family has prepared me well to argue with anyone around on any subject imaginable. (that might be anexageration as well but hey, what the heck) also there is a large number of legal pads present in most areas, and everyone and their dog uses laptops to take notes. I am bucking the trend and using plain old pen and paper for now, but we will see how that goes after a while.

Our apartment

Hey everybody. Here are some before and after pictures of our apartment. The before ones were taken last Thursday right after we finished moving in, but before we had started unpacking. The after ones were taken today because today is the first day that we have had the internet. Not as exciting as a baby, but we do our best.

Before:





After:






We will take more pictures and post them later. Karen wants to start a new blog for both of our families so that her family can see the pictures too. I will send everybody the link.

hello fam

james/dia when do you start school?

james how is VA?

i feel very disconnected from you all i hope everything is well

Have a Pepsi and a smile

Today was my last day at Coke. Kind of weird to think that I will probably never go there again, and never see those people again. I am glad to be moving on though. It will be nice to actually have to think at my occupation instead of just being an order entry monkey. Everyone was really nice to me when I left though, so that was good. I talked to Karen just now and she is stuck on the tarmac in Washington DC. She doesn't know when she will be taking off. That is no good, I hope that she is ok.

Peoria

Congrats to Andrew on his mission call. I was poking around the internet and foud this website Check it out.

asian babies

no catherine and james, this is not "the catherine and james blog"

even though it sure seems like it. I just never have anything to blog about.

-dianabates

[sorry i didnt sign outta your name catherine, im on your compy and feeling lazy]

My Public Apology to James and Karen

Dear James and Karen,

I am sorry for freaking out at you guys tonight when we were talking about the whole "chris" thing. I just get really frustrated because i feel like i can't attract/ aren't attracted to guys that are mormon. My reaction was also due to a culmination of things that include matt not talking to me for a couple of weeks and Emily Omer telling me she has been on three times as many dates in the two months she has been single than me in the two years that i have been single. (that sentence is poorly constructed but i don't care).

I just keep thinking about all the guys that went after and go after my roommates/whitney and i can't help thinking what do they have that i don't... Sorry didn't mean to be bearing my soul here mostly i just wanted to say that i am really sorry for yelling and i know that you are just trying to help and i appreciate that. I love you both and i am excited for baklava and disturbia WOOHOO!

Love always, your little sister,
Catherine

ok so i misread your comment and now i feel stupid

you said what are we to do i thought it said what are we doing here.




i am going camping and i am going canoeing i feel like i haven't seen you in 3.7 years can we hang out?

are you coming to dinner on sunday?

maybe i will call you

have fun at work weirdy

I Will tell you what we are doing...

We are liberating the minds of Bates a crossed the state encouraging them to use those famous Bates English skills to enlighten the poor inhabitants of the blogging world who have not yet had the horrifyingly illuminating experience of Bates-esque prose lilting on their tongues, that my friend is what we are doing here.


also because frankly i like to blog and i think you do too.

Cold

Hope you get feeling better. I am sad you can't come to the baseball game, but it is more important for you to get feeling better.

Haircut

I got a haircut today. It made me ichy. In other news, it is uber hot and the swamp cooler is struggling to cool our house. Pretty much all it ends up doing is make our house a little cooler and a whole lot more moist. I guess I should get used to moistness if I am living in DC huh?

Dia and I are watching the cosby show

so i decided to post so that james isn't sad about our lack of blogging.

so i am going to rexburg on friday, going to talk to my counselor and go to a reception and hang out with one Matthew Johnson WOOHOO!!

and with the roomies and all sorts of fun stuff.



i love you all bye!

Test

This is a test of the emergency blogcast system. If this were a real emergency important details would follow this message.

Actually this is a test to see if anybody still looks at this thing. I would imagine people do what I do which is look at it, see that no one has posted anything interesting, and move on. I suppose it will get a lot more exciting once everyone moves to the four corners of the country.

Bates Book Club III

OK for the new selection, here are some things to consider. Here is a link to the Modern Library best books of the twentieth century. Here is a link to all of the Pulitzer Prize winners of past years. Here is a link to all the Booker prize winners of past years.

Look those over and post suggestions of what you want to read. I have not read most of the ones on any of those lists, and am pretty open to read any of those.

Bates Book Club II

OK kids, the time for hesitation has passed. The official first selection of the Bates Book Club is Rabbit Run by John Updike. Get it from your local library (or buy it if you are rich like Catherine) and we will read and discuss. Do you want to meet together to discuss, do you want to discuss via e-mail or blog (that would involve people actually posting on this blog I guess I should talk huh?) anyhow give me your input and start reading!!!!

Bates Book Club

OK kids here is the deal, the rabbit books is a series of five novels by John Updike. He won the Pulitzer prize for numbers three and four in the series Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. I am wondering if we start reading Rabbit is Rich are we going to be able to understand it since it is the third book in the series? Here are our options as I see them.

1. We read Rabbit is Rich and just deal with jumping in in the middle of the story.

2. We start at the beginning with Rabbit Run

3. We read something else entirely

My only comment on option three is I would like to read something I have not read before and we need to pick a book everyone can agree on.

Let me know what you think.

BLog Revival please

Dear Siblings,

can we revive the blog? i think it is necessary, especially since we will be busting apart here in a little bit. So in short the blog is integral to our familial health.

ok maybe not but regardless START POSTING!

manly stuff

I am pretty sure i went bowling AND ate steak last week.

how about them apples?

dearest family of mine

where have you been? guess what? I only have 7 days of class left bwhahahhahahahha! how about them apples.

i can't wait to come and play with you guys it will be great fun!

i love you all!

this is what dia and i were talking about at dinner hope you enjoy it and i love you all

Funeral Home

We have our own funeral home just FYI

RICK POPE 2007!

I don't know if any of you remember our attempt to elect Rick for pope last year, but it did not work. So this year we are giving it another shot. His party headquarters feel there is a good shot and I have to agree. First the U of U, THEN THE VATICAN!

stupid blogger won't let me see it help me AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH

Communist mask o' fun

Cornell

I got an e-mail today and I have been admitted to Cornell law school. We are still waiting to hear back from six other schools, but we have some really good options right now.

I am excited.

For the record

For the record all that new google garbage I had to go through to get onto this thing was lame. In other news for those not updated on my life. I have been accepted to the University of Utah, Utah State, and I have a letter from the Y but I am to scared to open it. I fear rejection. I recieved a scholarship from Utah State which was cool. It was not for a lot but still it was nice. But none of this can compare to the fact that I am Bengal of the month. Yes my life has finally reached its climax in the form of a small plaque and parking space.

Skiing

Karen and I went skiing last weekend. It was a hoot, but I fell down a lot and I think I screwed up my knee in the process. I am going to go see the doctor about it, so we shall see if skiing was a good idea or not. Anyhow here are some pictures.

sibling BLOG

well siblings i must say that i miss you quite a bit right now, i have these occasional overwhelming bouts of home sickness where everyone in idaho makes me want to ralph and the thought of a month and a half more of this place is just too much so i am very glad that mom and dad and diana will be here in five hopefully short days it will be good to see them all and i will miss the rest of you. hope everyone is having a good day and i love you all

Mom the activist

Wow, next thing you know she is going to be running for Mayor. Watch out Tom Dolan, there is a new force to be reckoned with.

So i was listening to Weird Al today

and all i could think about was orange carpets and couches accented by blue wallpaper
and andrew bouncing up and down

curse new blogger
this is catherine i have another blog i think you all already knew about it? anyway mreh there it is

George Washington

1. The Father of our country.

2. Born on president's day

3. The dollar bill guy

Wait remember Disney Land? The hall of presidents?

Great what did he say?

"Welcome to the hall of presidents"

Had wooden teeth chased Moby Dick

That's Captain Ahab dude.

The blog is not dead!!

Long live the blog I say!!!

Karen and I had a fun President's day. We went and saw Breach in the afternoon and had dinner with Karen's family tonight. Now we are gearing up to watch an episode of lost on the internet.

Weird dream

So I had this crazy dream two nights ago that Liz had a baby and she didn't name it for like eight months. So finally I asked her what she was going to name the baby and she said they were going to name it Philosophilous and call him Filo for short.

Weird.

Diana where have you been? you don't answer my phone calls. How are things?

hey kidlets

so i was browsing some of my favorite blogs and i found this gem of literary genius i thought i would share. I love you guys and i am a bit sad to be heading back to the wonderful land of potatoes but it must be so, sniff