Note from Jimena: my mother, Julia, passed away this summer. I made up a small site with pictures of her as well as her eulogy, in case anybody would like to take a look: Julia Neale.
I’m a second year law student at the University of Ottawa, doing my degree half-time, which means I should be done in four more years. And please, don’t ask what kind of law I want to practice, because I really haven’t got a clue.
I also lots of non-law related interests, like
By far the biggest time-eater of my hobbies. Fan fiction is fiction based on somebody’s creative world, written by fans of that creative world. You know in the bookstore, in the Science Fiction section, how there’s a couple of rows filled with Star Trek and Star Wars novels? That’s fan fiction.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. The Web is home to millions and millions of stories based on books, movies and TV shows, written by fans. The X-Files alone has spawned enough fic, good, bad, and godawful, to fill a couple of stadiums.
A few years ago I started to contribute to the madness. So far I’ve written about a dozen short stories and roughly 5 novel-length ones. Scary, no?
Here’s a few links:
I took art classes for most of my childhood, and have fond dreams of someday having a little tiny home studio where I can experiment with oil paints, watercolour, and all sorts of other media that would be disastrous to use in a home with small children.
Here’s my Art Gallery, which hasn't been updated in a very long time.
I also have fond hopes of someday home schooling my kids, either part time while I’m still in law school, or full time once I’m done. I’ve been involved in some home schooling activities in Ottawa, but it’s a very difficult thing to do on your own if you don’t have a network of other families to do it with. Which I don’t, yet. I remain hopeful, and in the meantime, do as much home schooling as I can with our kids. I’d like to call myself a part-time law student, part time home schooling parent, but don’t really feel I have a right to.
Here are a few home schooling sites:
The Home Based Learner’s Network, a loose association of Ottawa-based home schooling families. They share information about curricula, activities, and occasionally pool resources to get memberships at museums and other educational places, or to hire specialty teachers (French, piano, etc).
Poppins Classical Academy, the blog of our friends, Sarah and Rainer. Sarah is actually home schooling her kids full-time in Brandon, Manitoba, and keeps a journal of their activities, triumphs and tragedies, and reflections on their days.
WHEREAS the aforementioned party of the first (hereinafter called the Web Home Owner) has determined that the legal profession is perhaps not undeservedly (yet still problematically) linked, fairly and/or unfairly, with excessive verbiage and convoluted turns of highly technical terms of art that perhaps, fairly and/or unfairly, serve mostly to create artificial barriers between those who - oh, I can't keep this up.
Most legal writing reads like pure gibberish. Much of it is. Occasionally, if you can wade through it, you learn neat things.
So. Here is where I post what I see as neat things :)
Every so often I inflict tales of my life on my unsuspecting friends and family. They get to hear all about what I’ve studied at school, silly things my kids have said, etc. And yet they still talk to me. They’re such nice people.
A sort of ongoing infliction of my life upon my unsuspecting e-friends. Follow the dancing link if you wish, but please remember, this is my journal. Anything that’s really private isn’t there, but I reserve the right to speak my mind on current events, throw in bits of T.M.I. (Too Much Information), and even to occasionally use a naughty word or two. If that sort of thing doesn’t bother you:
Here’s some of our hobbies:
Want to see what we're reading? Check out our bookshelves.
Want to see what we look like? Check out our photo album.
Our e-mail is ciroccoj2002qwerty@yahoo.com - but without the 'qwerty'.
Or you can sign our Guestbook.