The hubs and I returned to our hometown last night and I haven't gotten out of my sweatpants since. While I'm sad that one of the most fun periods of my life is over, I'm also glad to not be on the road for a bit. I am trying to organize my thoughts about the trip in a coherent way, but sometimes words just fail.
The biggest thing I got out of the trip is just how VAST everything is. It's a big country I live in, and there are lots of big things to see in it. I could post a photo of the mountains we saw or the canyons we hiked here, but it wouldn't do it. You'd look at the photo, and think it was lovely, sure, but it can't capture how staggeringly BIG everything is. It's hard to look at the Yosemite Valley or the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon or any one of the other amazing natural wonders we saw and not think about how tiny we are in the grand scheme of creation.
The second thing I must do is say a big fat THANK YOU to the dozens of people who encouraged us to take this trip back when it was still just a twinkle in our eyes and helped us make it a reality. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to our lovely friends and family who hosted us along the way: Nick & Phil, Ross & Jessica, Rebecca & Kevin, Matthew, Erica & Dane, Elizabeth Ann, Tyler, and Coty. Thanks also to Brad & Wi who helped us get cheap hotel rooms, and of course to my lovely in laws who watched our ridiculous mutt for all this time.
Again, I have no words to say exactly how grateful I am to have had this opportunity, to have the friends and family I do, to have the husband I do. I am an insanely lucky lady and believe me, I know it.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
So, as you have probably noticed, I've quit blogging the day to day stuff since the hubs is largely taking care of all of that. Bless him. So I'm sure if you're interested in what we're doing all this time, you're following his blog too. If you just come for the hilarious tone of my writing, well bless your little heart you sad, sad person.
I turned 25 in Vancouver last week. Actually, by this time it's been over a week. Anyway, here I am in my 25th year and still feeling a bit like a lost puppy. Not having a home or permanent address or knowing how to answer people when they ask you "where are you visiting from?" will do that to a girl, I guess.
It was a good birthday, but a bit hard for me. I take birthdays very seriously. I love them. As I've told a lot of people, I love birthdays. I love the idea that there's one day of the year where YOU are the special person. People you love and that love you call YOU to share their hope that YOU especially have a great day. They give YOU gifts to ensure your day will be great. I love my own birthday and I love other people's. I love going out to dinner and I love cards and I love cake and I love candles and I love how people try to act like they don't care but really they do. I just love it. And it's not all about presents (though who doesn't love a perfect gift?).
This year was the first time I've ever been away from all my friends and family (except the hubs of course) on my birthday. And because I was in Canada, anyone who wanted to call me was calling internationally and my phone was roaming, so I didn't answer and just let it go to voicemail. While voicemails are great, it isn't quite the same.
Also, the hubs and I agreed, due to our current financial status, that we'd skip presents this year. Since we share finances and basically this whole road trip is one big present to ourselves it made sense at the time. And with our mailing address up in the air, it meant I didn't get presents from my parents or sister, either.
I don't mean to sound ungrateful or whiny. Though maybe I am? I had a great day with perfect weather eating delicious food in a beautiful city with the man I love. And I loved it. All I'm saying is next year, I'm staying home, having all my friends over and answering the phone when my grandma calls, you know?
The other big milestone that's happened recently is that I FOUND OUT I PASSED THE BAR. This means that I am one swearing in ceremony (November 5! Mark your calendar!) away from being what I think I've wanted to be for an abnormally long time: a real live lawyer.
The bar admissions people had told us that results would be out "the first two weeks of October." Sure enough, when I awoke on October 1 in San Francisco, people had already started posting their positive results. Of course, I went to check the bar website. Which had crashed.
The site had also crashed last year and the board's answer to this was to "release results gradually," which is to say they planned to send emails to test-takers throughout the day in alphabetical order.
This was the first moment since getting all the annoying paperwork done that I regretted changing my name. My marriage changed my last name from a very respectable beginning of the alphabet name to a sad, lonely end of the alphabet one. My husband claims it's the middle, but I swear, it's the end. And this meant I would have to wait until the end of the day (more or less) to find out my results, even in the best of cases.
Of course, the best case scenario did not come to pass. As you can imagine, with you know, telephones and that great system of tubes we call the internets, people with names not at the beginning of the alphabet heard that people had started to get results and went to check their own. Roughly 3,000 people checking in the course of a few hours crashed the site. They somehow had not anticipated that people would hear results were out or that, upon hearing it, they'd want their own results?
Hey, maybe next year, you guys could just set up the server to handle the traffic I guarantee you'll get? Just a thought.
So this meant that, when I woke up in San Francisco, I knew results were out, but couldn't access them. The hubs, our friend Liz (who had taken the same bar as I had and is similarly alphabetically disadvantaged), and I had planned to leave for Yosemite that morning, where internet access would be harder to come by, so we dawdled for a bit before deciding just to leave anyway.
This was going to be a long day. How, when you know results are out but don't know your own, are you supposed to think about ANYTHING else? We made half-assed attempts at conversation for a bit, but mostly just waited. We were getting texts from a friend of Liz's telling us that some people had just started to get emails with their results right in the email (novel concept, eh?).
We drove for a few hours before stopping to buy groceries...and check results. They weren't out.
We kept driving. Kept trying to talk or think about ANYTHING other than whether or not Liz and I would be lawyers by the end of the day.
We stoppped again. No email. Liz's friend (god bless her) suggested we try the cached version of the bar website. Success! We were able to log in! Success! We both passed!
Both Liz and I were too excited/relieved to do anything but read the "We are pleased to inform you..." line and basically freaked out in a Starbucks in the middle of nowhere. We had to go back a few days later to check again (on the un-cached site) so we could make sure it was for real and actually read the letter (which included, among other things, the caveat that if we didn't get around to being sworn in in the next 4 years, our passage would be revoked. Who ARE these people for whom they have to make such crazy rules?).
Anyway...this post goes firmly under the label My Life Doesn't Suck. It will be an interesting winter trying to adjust from this absurd vacation lifestyle to having to, you know, work. A lot. BECAUSE I'M A LAWYER.
I turned 25 in Vancouver last week. Actually, by this time it's been over a week. Anyway, here I am in my 25th year and still feeling a bit like a lost puppy. Not having a home or permanent address or knowing how to answer people when they ask you "where are you visiting from?" will do that to a girl, I guess.
It was a good birthday, but a bit hard for me. I take birthdays very seriously. I love them. As I've told a lot of people, I love birthdays. I love the idea that there's one day of the year where YOU are the special person. People you love and that love you call YOU to share their hope that YOU especially have a great day. They give YOU gifts to ensure your day will be great. I love my own birthday and I love other people's. I love going out to dinner and I love cards and I love cake and I love candles and I love how people try to act like they don't care but really they do. I just love it. And it's not all about presents (though who doesn't love a perfect gift?).
This year was the first time I've ever been away from all my friends and family (except the hubs of course) on my birthday. And because I was in Canada, anyone who wanted to call me was calling internationally and my phone was roaming, so I didn't answer and just let it go to voicemail. While voicemails are great, it isn't quite the same.
Also, the hubs and I agreed, due to our current financial status, that we'd skip presents this year. Since we share finances and basically this whole road trip is one big present to ourselves it made sense at the time. And with our mailing address up in the air, it meant I didn't get presents from my parents or sister, either.
I don't mean to sound ungrateful or whiny. Though maybe I am? I had a great day with perfect weather eating delicious food in a beautiful city with the man I love. And I loved it. All I'm saying is next year, I'm staying home, having all my friends over and answering the phone when my grandma calls, you know?
The other big milestone that's happened recently is that I FOUND OUT I PASSED THE BAR. This means that I am one swearing in ceremony (November 5! Mark your calendar!) away from being what I think I've wanted to be for an abnormally long time: a real live lawyer.
The bar admissions people had told us that results would be out "the first two weeks of October." Sure enough, when I awoke on October 1 in San Francisco, people had already started posting their positive results. Of course, I went to check the bar website. Which had crashed.
The site had also crashed last year and the board's answer to this was to "release results gradually," which is to say they planned to send emails to test-takers throughout the day in alphabetical order.
This was the first moment since getting all the annoying paperwork done that I regretted changing my name. My marriage changed my last name from a very respectable beginning of the alphabet name to a sad, lonely end of the alphabet one. My husband claims it's the middle, but I swear, it's the end. And this meant I would have to wait until the end of the day (more or less) to find out my results, even in the best of cases.
Of course, the best case scenario did not come to pass. As you can imagine, with you know, telephones and that great system of tubes we call the internets, people with names not at the beginning of the alphabet heard that people had started to get results and went to check their own. Roughly 3,000 people checking in the course of a few hours crashed the site. They somehow had not anticipated that people would hear results were out or that, upon hearing it, they'd want their own results?
Hey, maybe next year, you guys could just set up the server to handle the traffic I guarantee you'll get? Just a thought.
So this meant that, when I woke up in San Francisco, I knew results were out, but couldn't access them. The hubs, our friend Liz (who had taken the same bar as I had and is similarly alphabetically disadvantaged), and I had planned to leave for Yosemite that morning, where internet access would be harder to come by, so we dawdled for a bit before deciding just to leave anyway.
This was going to be a long day. How, when you know results are out but don't know your own, are you supposed to think about ANYTHING else? We made half-assed attempts at conversation for a bit, but mostly just waited. We were getting texts from a friend of Liz's telling us that some people had just started to get emails with their results right in the email (novel concept, eh?).
We drove for a few hours before stopping to buy groceries...and check results. They weren't out.
We kept driving. Kept trying to talk or think about ANYTHING other than whether or not Liz and I would be lawyers by the end of the day.
We stoppped again. No email. Liz's friend (god bless her) suggested we try the cached version of the bar website. Success! We were able to log in! Success! We both passed!
Both Liz and I were too excited/relieved to do anything but read the "We are pleased to inform you..." line and basically freaked out in a Starbucks in the middle of nowhere. We had to go back a few days later to check again (on the un-cached site) so we could make sure it was for real and actually read the letter (which included, among other things, the caveat that if we didn't get around to being sworn in in the next 4 years, our passage would be revoked. Who ARE these people for whom they have to make such crazy rules?).
Anyway...this post goes firmly under the label My Life Doesn't Suck. It will be an interesting winter trying to adjust from this absurd vacation lifestyle to having to, you know, work. A lot. BECAUSE I'M A LAWYER.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)