Stick to Your Guns

The other day at work, the senior partner asked me if I'd like to go on a field trip, to which I replied, Sure! He presumed to tell me that we needed to go to Richmond to do a title rundown on a piece of property and to register some guns with the U.S. Customs office. And also......that we needed desperately to go to Bass Pro Shop. He's going on a moose hunting trip to Newfoundland in October and needed supplies and permits for the journey. Also, one of the attorneys had a birthday. They have this tradition at the office where (if it's your birthday) you pick what cake you want and everyone gathers around the conference table, sings "Happy Birthday," and prepares to help you eat the delicious cake. You must cut everyone a piece of cake and pass each plate around, and every person at the table is required to touch the plate as it passes. So yesterday we ate coconut cake after lunch. And then the senior partner and I headed to Richmond. I'd say it's not a typical workday, but we had fun nonetheless. I bought some spinners for my brother in Bass Pro Shop and my boss was showing me all the shells that he uses for different hunting (turkeys, deer, etc), but I do have to say that I felt strange clicking around in there with high heels (both of us were in "career" attire). Alongside the raccoon and fox tracks inscribed onto the pollied concrete floor, I imagined what it would look like to have stiletto inscriptions on the floor...

Home

As promised, here are some pictures from my home improvement projects. Here is my kitchen, before the painting:

And here is after:

Here's the Diving Board walls:

Look at this awesome tablecloth I got from O'Suzannah's:

There's the Red Velvet Cake wall (that one took 4 coats of paint):

Let's Get Physical

Since I've joined the real world full-time, I have this huge fear that I'm going to become a humpback. And sometimes I find myself trying out homemade exercises to try to stray from the consequences of sitting in a cushy, plush office chair all day long. Someone else please fess up here...Sometimes I fear that while I'm stretching the so-and-so muscle in my neck and shoulder that one of the partners will walk by and think I'm a freak or something. Then again, I'm sure they did some sort of the same thing after their bodies were cemented to office chairs. Not that I don't like the chair. I love it. But here's the problem. Because I work with legal-sized folders, I need a big workspace on the desk. So as a result, my monitor is about 3.5 feet away from my eyes. At first I didn't think this would be a problem, but now I have increased the font size from "Medium" to "Larger," only one category away from "Largest," the font I will be using when I'm 80...great, I'm just a little over one-fourth of the way there. By the time I'm 60, I'll be using a magnifying glass on the largest text size. Because of the smallish font, I do that chin-jutting-out-toward-the-screen, shoulders-rolled-forward, lumbar-rainbowed-toward the desk maneuver to get closer because the arms of my chair will not fit under the keyboard holder on my desk. That's the most aggravating part about nine-to-fiving-it (Does this happen to anyone else?). I try to be quite conscious about this because I don't want to be hitting up a chiropractor to no end for the rest of my life, so I am obsessively keeping my posture in check all day by imagining the presence of a five pound etiquette book resting on top of my head. And then I resort to the crazy stretches. Kind of like office yoga. Speaking of working out, instead of selling my body to a gym (and since my office is on the 3rd floor), I've decided to briskly go up and down the flights of stairs right after my lunch break. Couldn't hurt, right? I'm all about the homemade remedies.