3 Weeks: A Check-In from the Road

We are two hours into our drive to Colorado to visit my family and ski for Spring Break and I figured if I can't manage a blog post on this 12 hours drive then I really have no hope of ever posting again. So here we are, in the northeastern quadrant of Texas, speeding along the flat open roads, hoping the wifi will last. The Harry Potter book 4 audio book is playing over the car speakers, the kids are on their mandatory hour without electronics (we alternate one hour on/one hour off), and I'm hoping very much that all our necessary ski stuff is in the back. We started packing last night at 8 pm, so I honestly can't vouch for anything back there. The preparation timeline was not ideal, but up until last night my bedroom looked like this:

And most of our clothes were trapped in the dressers under the tarps - trapped without warning I might add, for me to find when I got home from work on Wednesday night. Luckily we had a small load of clothes in the dryer that provided some necessary items, like a pair of fresh socks and underwear for me to wear on Thursday (and then wash again to wear on Friday).

As always with home renovaton projects, I just keep trying to ignore the dust and tell myself it'll be worth it. (And it will- we're re-floating the non-straight/non-smooth walls of our TV room-turned-office and bedroom, replacing mismatched baseboards, adding a feature wall in our bedroom, repainting everything, and do a few other small fixes to two rooms we've mostly ignored in our other renos.) It helps to look at this absolutely gorgeous art piece I ordered from a lovely female artist in Spain and just got back from the framers. It's going to go behind my desk and I love it so much.

The TV room was completely blocked off for a few days, so to enter our bedroom we had to leave the house and reenter through one of our exterior bedroom doors. Then our room was blocked off so I got to sleep in Landon's cozy full size bed with my 6'3" husband and all of Landon's animal pictures staring at me.

My first three weeks at the firm have been an exciting and wonderful whirlwind. Week 1 was in the office, learning all the systems and meeting all the people. Week 2 was spent in San Francisco at the ABA White Collar conference. I got to meet several of our white collar partners who traveled in from our other offices, visit with our San Francisco associates, listen to some great panels (and I got two shout outs from former government side colleagues!), reconnect with some defense counsel and outside experts I met through my past investigations, attend an absurd number of happy hours in four days, and eat breakfast in the beautiful Palace hotel.

And enjoy these beautiful views out of my 47th floor hotel window on the bay.

(Some times of day were nicer than others.)

I also got to wear the stunning new trench coat James got me for Valentine's Day. He remembered the time 8 years ago when I tried on the most beautiful Burberry trench coat in their Michigan Avenue store in Chicago. We couldn't possibly afford it at the time, so I put it back and talked about it for months instead. And now, many years, he surprised me with it in a big box on my placemat Valentine's morning. I absolutely adore it.

Meanwhile James and the kids carried on at home and sent me pictures and updates.

I got back in DFW on Friday, enjoyed the weekend from which I have almost no memories but I'm sure was great. Then this past week was spent back in the office for my usual 3 days a week. And it was BUSY in the best and most exciting ways. Like getting my new beautiful chair for this little window nook behind my desk. I love it, and the side table I got at Homegoods, and hope to use it as a secondary reading spot when I have something particularly tricky or particularly dull to review and need a fresh spot to sit.

I'm still working on the rest of my decor - my new art is being framed (bought from the same artist as the piece above!) and I can't wait to show you the final product. In them meantime, my shelves are also coming along.

I'm honestly really enjoying wearing work clothes again and being around my fellow attorneys. Our office is pretty casual (for a BigLaw office anyway) and it's pretty much jeans + top + fun blazer each day. I've expanded my Rothy's collection and wonder if and when I'll ever wear heels again.

I got to open TWO new matters this week that are mine! It is so nerdily thrilling to staff and run my own case and take calls from my own client. I've now staffed out six cases I'm running and I love getting to tap associates who have reached out and told me they're interested in SEC work. In my first week every female junior associate stopped by my office to say how excited they were that I was there. Corporate partners have reached out with client SEC questions. There's so much referring and recommending and "we're so glad you're here'ing" that I barely mind how many emails I get an hour. I'm also doing several CLE's and other business development events, in additio, to a few more interviews that resulted in a few more articles over the last week (like this fun one, and two publications from the conference.

The biggest downside so far to my new life is that I have been to yoga twice in the last 3 weeks. I've gone from someone who exercises everyday to someone who sits in the car 90 minutes a day instead. Eventually I hope to weave in yoga a bit more often- or at least start doing a short flow after I wake up when my floor isn't covered in drywall dust, but for now, the occasional walk with Maggie after I get home is all I can manage.

She is less enthusiastic about this than I am trying to be.

We'll being in Colorado for the week ahead, visiting my sister and her sweet family to celebrate my nieces' first and third birthdays and then seeing my parents in the mountains to ski Winter Park with them. I have some video calls Monday morning and a few check-in calls scheduled for Thursday, but hope and plan to fully block out our ski days on Tuesday and Wednesday. We'll drive back on Friday and then I leave on Sunday for a securities conference in Orlando. I fly back to DFW Tuesday night and then fly back out Wednesday for the firm partner retreat in Miami. James gets to go to that one (and we need to somehow buy him some fancy event appropriate clothing before then! I don't think the Lulu pants and workout shirt will work), so my parents are stopping at our house on their way home from the mountains to watch the kids. We get back on Friday and then I will finally be back in the office on March 29th.

We're about to hit the part of Texas where cell signals go to die, so this is the perfect time to sign off. I look forward to sharing more about how we're making this new substantially busier life work (spoiler alert: it involves a new fulltime W-2 family employee, a payroll account, and a lot of thinking about what the infrastructure on which our life is built, what is important to me (FAMILY DINNERS), what isn't, and what I can delegate (almost everything that isn't wife'ing and mothering and yoga), but it IS working and I feel so lucky and happy and excited about it all. Happy Spring Break to everyone and I hope to share ski pictures soon!