Weekend Updates

5:00pm church services are pretty much the best thing ever invented, because they let me go to church, which is important to me, but still be able to sleep in as late as I want to on Sunday and spend sunny Sunday mornings basically in my pajamas, reading, doing some emails, watching TV, cleaning, or whatever else I want to do. So anyway, since I found a wonderful church here with services at 5, I've been feeling like I have the best of both worlds--still going to a great church but also having Sunday mornings free.

Yesterday was incredibly busy. I had to get my car fixed because the brakes have been squeaking, so I went to the north end of town to the Ford dealership to do that. Then I went to Goodwill for awhile and came back to my apartment for about 20 minutes, then went to go pick up Ashley to go see the Great Gatsby with two other law school friends. We hit really bad traffic on the way to the theater and would have been super-late, so we just had lunch and went shopping instead. Ashley stayed out with our other friends because they were going to try to catch a later movie, but I had to leave because Catherine was coming into town to have dinner with me around 5:30. But I soon realized that I had a little problem--I had never been in that part of the city before, and I only figured out how to get there in the first place because Ashley told me where to go. When I tried to leave by myself and meet Catherine, I got SUPER lost and for the life of me couldn't find an entry point to the interstate. Finally I called Catherine and told her I was too lost to find my way back to where I live, and asked her if we could just have dinner at a restaurant in the area where I was and I could figure it out later. Like me, she also was GPS-less, and then, to top it off, my phone battery was almost dead and I kept shutting it off to try to squeeze a little more battery life out of it. Catherine got totally lost too, and it ended up being like, "I am in the Saks Fifth Avenue parking lot. There is a Target next door. Across the street there is a very tall building whose roof looks like a white hand touching the sky. You'll know it when you see it." Anyway, somehow we found each other, and we laughed for the rest of the night about the ridiculousness of it and the odds of two incredibly lost people actually finding each other in a random parking lot.

So we went out for dinner at this fantastic restaurant--in fact, it was pretty much one of the best meals I've ever eaten (even though I had just finished my late lunch with my other friends like 2 hours before--pretty much all I did yesterday was drive around and eat, I feel like!) We just shared appetizers and this taco platter--we're talking about tacos with braised pork and pineapple slaw, and tilapia tacos, and tacos with buttermilk fried chicken and spicy roasted corn. Then we both ordered dessert--she got this chocolate mousse with caramel popcorn in it, and I got this rootbeer ice cream with peanuts and marshmallows in it. Both sound incredibly weird but they were delicious! In fact, I'm still full this morning. Here's a picture:

 

I finally made it back home (in case you were wondering), called Lauren (my friend from college), and then went to bed. So all in all, it's been a pretty busy weekend.

Can anyone believe it's already the last day of June? (Happy 29th anniversary to my parents, by the way, today!) This summer has FLOWN by, and I've gained more legal experience and more life experience in the last month and a half than I thought was possible to gain in a year. This past week, everything at work just clicked, and I feel like I finally get it, and I now feel stupid like once a day, in comparison to every 5 minutes when I first started! I finally know what I'm doing. I know how to explain legal issues to clients, and when I give them the caveat I'm required to give them--I'm not a licensed attorney yet, so don't rely on the information I gave you as any kind of legal advice--they've been acting very surprised that I'm not, which is a great feeling. It just feels so great to know what I'm doing and to automatically know what motions need to be filed in what situations, and how to begin settlement negotiations, and how and why stuff like jurisdiction matters. I've been pulling together massive amounts of information from classes like torts, civil lawsuits, domestic relations, evidence, contracts, civil procedure, and legal ethics and professionalism, and realizing that everything I've learned in the classroom can be used in ways that affect real people's lives, and I'm just so excited about how the pieces of the puzzle are coming together. This job's been very hard for a lot of reasons, but for the most part there's no denying that I absolutely love what I actually do, and I also think it's a really great fit for my skills and personality and that I'm honestly really good at my job, which is a relief since I more or less committed to this career path before I knew if it was right for me! I'm not 100% sure that I want to go into litigation necessarily, which is what I'm doing now, but I do know that law is my niche in the wide world of careers, and I have found what I absolutely love doing and am good at, and have also found a place that I want to live after graduation. And I think that's enough to tackle in one summer.