I Could Continue to Blog about Our Trip out West, But I'm Going to Bitch about My Week Instead

I promise the trip updates will continue, but today I just need to bitch.  Do you ever have days/weeks like that?  I would say that I was over this week before 10am on Tuesday morning.  That's a terrible sign!

First, I'll start with Hellish Week: Home Edition.

Over the weekend, the pipes under our sink were leaking and the maintenance guy came and took care of it right away.  Problem solved, right? Wrong.  But we'll get to that.  My Tuesday morning started with me getting TRAPPED in our garage.  Yes, folks.  I had a Christine moment.  As I was about to pull out of my garage, the garage door shut behind me and that turned off the lights.  For a brief moment, I was in the garage in the dark with my car running.  I definitely had an irrational fear that my car was trying to kill me.  I immediately turned off the car.  My clicker wouldn't work.  The button on the side of the garage wouldn't work.  So, I did what any person would do.  I called my husband at work.  And he didn't answer.  So somehow I ended up calling his gym (don't ask).  He did call me back and told me about this magical device called an emergency release lever.  So I pulled this lever and manually lifted my garage door.  I am now aware of how unsafe my garage is.  The only way of ingress/ egress is the garage door itself.

Anyway, on the way to work on Tuesday, I almost ran out of gas because the one gas station I knew had diesel fuel closed unexpectedly!  Thank goodness for google maps.  Anyway, Tuesday Morning was quickly followed by Wednesday morning.  Cue flooding of kitchen, broken coffeemaker and possessed garage door.  I woke up this morning to a flooded kitchen—water all over the counter, under the sink, on the floor.  And this water leakage was completely separate from the leaking from this weekend.  And Erik told me that the garage door was opening and closing in the middle of the night last night.  Why is my apartment cursed?!  Anyway, in the midst of all this, I am thankful that we live in an apartment complex that is so quickly responsive to our maintenance needs.  I'm also thankful that Erik stuck around this morning to deal with the maintenance guy and that we don't own a home because otherwise we would have had to call a plumber and it probably would have had to wait until the weekend and cost us $$$.

As if the home stuff wasn't stressful, enter Hellish Week: Work Edition.

Now, I will say that hellish weeks here do not compare to hellish weeks at Big LawNYC LLP.  This week is a new special kind of hellish.  I've been hesitant to mention it on the blog because, well, it all seemed so promising a little over a month ago.  I was hoping that the things that are making me hate my job and long for my days in NYC were just anomalies and things would get better.  Yeah, they haven't.  Today, I went to full on freak out mode.  I chatted on gchat with my go-to advice friend (CR, you are a wonderful friend and I know I don't reciprocate, but I love you and am so thankful we are friends), I emailed my best friend at BigLawNYC LLP and told her that we needed to talk asap (JSkim, I am also so thankful for you but I don't think you read the blog so... yeah...) and I called my former hallway buddy as well (BL, you are amazing and I miss you keeping me centered throughout the drama of daily law practice). 

So... I lost about 3 billable hours of time I was at work today to bitch and moan and mope about the state of affairs of my current law practice.  I'm just over the problems of having to prove myself yet again, doing things that at my prior firm I would have asked a paralegal to do and getting shit work that the junior associates don't feel like doing themselves because I'm the new kid.  I moved every freakin' year of elementary school.  I'm way over being the new kid.  Partners actually stop by my office to ask me if I'm "having fun".  Sure, if I enjoyed getting crap work and not getting much in the way of substantive work all while working 10+ hour days and feeling like I've gone backwards professionally instead of forwards. Yeah, I'm having a fucking blast.  And the whole, everyone is so nice?  Yes, it's true people are friendlier but I miss my crotchety new york coworkers.  And, in fact, it's exhausting to say hi to people in the halls and pretend to be happy when I'm not.  The highlight of my day (pre-coming home to E) is driving on a semi-empty highway in my awesome new car.  I spend my day counting down the hours until I can leave.  I hate it.  As much as the work was stressful at BigLawNYC LLP, I loved the type of work I did.  I can see how a lot of associates join big law firms and hate it.  I feel like my soul is being sucked away and have taken on more work than I would rather just to be able to do substantive stuff that reminds me why I like being an attorney in the first place.  UGH.  Hopefully, this is all part of a transition period until after I come back for my bar leave.  If not, I'm stuck here for at least a year due to clawback provisions in my offer letter.  We don't really have the funds to pay TechLaw PC back for all my moving and bar expenses and my signing bonus.  Le sigh.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that Tuesday I was staffed on a deal that will require work over Thanksgiving.  Awesome.  Is it Friday evening yet?!?

Moving to Cali: Fort Collins --> Park City

So.... 2 months later I'm finally blogging about the rest of our road trip.  I count the first 2 days as done with this post (a little scant but why be redundant?).  I'll do it the cheating way and just post photos with descriptions.  Hey, I was at work until 9pm—cut me some slack! :)

Note: We really wish we could have taken some side trips while driving through Wyoming and Utah.  Unfortunately, the cats made our road trip less fun (and not just because of the constant crying).  It wouldn't be right to leave them in the car or do anything that would keep them in the car longer than the 8 hours of driving we had to do to make it to California in time to take possession of our apartment.

Colorado countryside

On the road again...
We were so grateful that the weather was fabulous and the sights were beautiful.

Wyoming - these ranch signs were everywhere.  Love!

They have drive-thru liquor stores here too!

We got bored and brought Pericles out to play.

The rock formations in Wyoming.

Cool countryside.  We seriously could see sci-fi films being shot here.

Wyoming.  Beef country.  Enough said.

Utah rock formations.

Park City!

Ski runs with fall colors.

Olympic Village.  All I could think about was Cool Runnings even though that was in Canada...

We decided to go here for dinner while in town.  We started with the roasted artichoke (Erik even tried it!) and I had the Elk Sirloin.  I really like elk because it's a very mild beefy taste but without the gaminess of venison.  We were really happy that we went here to eat even though it was on the outskirts of town.

 It's fun to look at these photos again.  I truly feel like Erik and I are very fortunate to have been able to take the time to drive across the country to our new home.  We've seen a lot of things that lots of folks will never see and have not taken it for granted!  These photos are only a small sampling of the photos we took (went a little photo crazy from the car), but I thought I would spare you the complete set of 134 photos from this leg of the trip.

Ridge Vineyards

So, I told a friend of mine that I would blog yesterday.  And... I didn't... Sorry!  It's funny how the weekend gets away from you when you are settling in, catching up from being out of town/ working during the previous weekend and cooking 3 meals for the week.  What can I say?  I got in a groove and couldn't break myself away from housework.  Yes, I know.  Feminist pioneers just died a little inside.  I'm sorry to the women of the 1970's and 1980's, but I do love to fold some laundry, cook some meals, and see the clean open expanse of a tidied house (okay, apartment).

Anyway, about a month ago during Erik's and my 3rd weekend in California, we went to Ridge Vineyards (as foreold here).  It's shockingly close to where we live, and it's just amazing wine.  Erik's been a fan and now I am too.  Besides, they have release parties for shipments (we haven't gone yet) and they are so close that we can get free wine tastings whenever we want (we're members now).  Anyway, before going to Ridge, we went to the Steve Jobs memorial at 1 Infinite Loop.  I had the honor of being at Buckingham Palace and witnessing (and contributing) to the Princess Diana memorial in August 1997 so I made Erik go to the Steve Jobs one in Cupertino.  Yes, it's morbid, but we can say that we were there and paid our respects to a great innovator and businessman of our time.  Side note:  I do hope that it comes out that Steve Jobs contributed to charity in some way because there are no public gifts of note and that bothers me.

Anyway, some photos from the Steve Jobs memorial.

Flags at half mast

Erik looking appropriately somber

The memorial.
I didn't get much closer because people left a ton of
apples with a bite out of them (get it!?) and those apples attracted bees . . .

Even though there isn't a large crowd here, you can see that a bunch of
people have come to the site because of the wear on the grass.

Even the gas station near the Apple Campus had signs.

So after that rather morbid excursion, we went up into the Santa Cruz Mountains to drown our sorrows in some tasty vino (after having lunch in a tasty brewpub nearby).

Panoramic view towards where we live (Santa Clara)

This winery is unique in that they don't trellis all their vines.

In theory, you are looking at San Francisco.  If you click on the large version,
you may be able to make out the skyscrapers on the lefthand side of the photo.

Family shot

After Ridge, we went for a hike in the Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve but that will have to wait for another blog post. :)

Housekeeping items:
I bought two new books for my Scavenger Hunt posts: one for nearby cities and one for nearby hikes.  Expect to see some posts from those (already able to check off 2 hikes and 3 cities!).  AND, my biggest accomplishment.  I finished all the scavenger hunts from my Inside the Apple book before I left NYC!! Yes, I know! I'm very proud.  But I'm also VERY behind in posting.  Don't worry, I have a goal to post more often now that we are more settled and work is starting to get in a flow.