Updates from Oklahoma

This week has just been AMAZING all around! Catherine and I, plus Jessy our student coach/ 3L classmate and friend, are outside of Oklahoma City right now after having spent the weekend competing in the national client counseling competition. We're happy to have made it to semifinals and finished 5th in the nation out of 118 total teams who participated in this year's competition! We've also had wonderful news of success for our law school in several of the other moot court competitions that our classmates were competing in around the country this weekend, and to be honest with you, I could not be more proud of my school right now. This has been an amazing place to get a legal education, and I will be so proud to call myself an alumna of this school in just a few short weeks. 

So the competition went great, and we've had a lot of fun hanging out here in Oklahoma. Yesterday we had the afternoon free, so we went to an art museum, explored downtown, and went to this little hole-in-the-wall burger place called The Garage for dinner (delicious!) Then we went to one of the casinos on the Chickasaw reservation with strict rules that we were all only going to play a maximum of $10 and when it was gone, it was gone (we law students can't afford to get lured in and spend more than that . . . ) So I bet $1 on the slot machines, and I started winning, and kept playing my winnings, and winning more, and after an hour I had $21 and my friends made me cash it in and leave because they said (correctly, I'm sure) that if I kept trying to win more I was just going to lose it. The trick is to stop while you're ahead! So I was pretty pleased to be able to get $20 out of an evening of fun (made back the money I spent on dinner, that's for sure). Then we went back to the hotel, which has a really nice gym with volleyball courts and such, and played volleyball and basketball and Frisbee and then sat on the gym floor talking for a couple hours. We are now plotting to have a late-night capture the flag game on the football field with our classmates when we get back to school, because we were talking about how fun it was to just forget about law school and play games for a little while. We are also going to host a reunion get-together of our 1L section group, because we were all in section 1 and we had every class our first year with fellow section 1 folks, but we've not all been together since. The time runs short, and thinking about leaving the law school, all my friends, and the place I've lived for 2 1/2 years is very bittersweet. But I do anticipate staying there for the summer to study for the bar exam, and not moving until the beginning of August, so I have time. I have the best friends in the world, and I'll be sad to leave, but I know I'm moving to go on to bigger and better things, and I could not be more excited about what lies ahead. You know that quote that says something like, "There are better things that lie ahead than any we leave behind"? I feel like that's pretty true for life in general. The best is yet to come. I'm going to finally be an attorney in the big city, after being interested in practicing law since high school, and I am SO excited about it. 

Yes, the best really is yet to come.