Apparently I'm on a "dogs" kick...

Beautiful

Dear Internet,

Not sure exactly why, but I loved this little image as soon as I stumbled across it. That's all. Happy Monday. You're welcome.

xoxo Liz

Smupdates

Dear Internet,

So it's Sunday evening and I wanted to get a post in since I haven't written in a while. I wanted to tell you that San Francisco was great last weekend! I stayed with Judy, a friend of another VISTA here in Helena, and I ended up helping her dogsit a tiny, ferocious little thing named Otis. Judy was super nice and invited me out with her friends and even bought me dinner!

Otis

Plus I got to sit in on two classes at Berkeley (which has a gorgeous campus, by the way!) - a 1L Criminal Law class and an International Humanitarian Law class. I loved it, and both classes - especially the latter - reaffirmed that I would love to study law, both intellectually and in terms of what I can do with it.

Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley

The next day I walked all over San Francisco - a free tour on Telegraph Hill, and I walked down the Embarcadero and Lombard Street, and visited Boudin Bakery (where they make famous San Fran sourdough!), and saw the Golden Gate. It was a great trip and I got to miss the 15 inches of snow that fell in Helena... although not really. It's still around a week later, making my walk to work pretty treacherous.

View from Telegraph Hill

Boudin Bakery

Golden Gate Bridge

Outside the apartment where I stayed. The hills in this town
are serious business!

Aaaand I came home to this sad buried car at the airport.

There's not a whole lot else going on, just enough to keep me busy. I did finish painting my room - whoever did it before did an atrocious job:

Paint ALL OVER the baseboards...

... so I sanded and stained those. With a beer.

Then I got ready to paint the weird crappy brownish color on
the walls, and the ugly cabinet thing that was left up here.

More before...

And the after! Yay indigo!! I chose this purply/indigo color
because it reminded me of the color the mountains around
Helena turn at dusk.

So that's all the important updates, really. My job is going well - actually, some of the pieces on disaster planning and disaster response that I wrote recently might (MIGHT) get published in a journal. So we'll see how that goes, but regardless, things are pretty good. I have been hanging out with my roommates Nora and Stefan a lot, but they're pretty great so it's been fun.

Altogether, I'd say life is not super exciting to talk about but it's just busy enough and it's good. Ben comes to visit for Thanksgiving this week, so I'm looking forward to that and to other small things: going to the YMCA with Nora in the morning. Interviewing a legal services guy in Louisiana this week about the work his agency did post-Katrina. Seeing my family for Christmas in less than a month and seeing Will again in just over a month. Not exciting things to read about, but happy things :)

In the meantime you can find me getting ready for just another week, snowed in, in Helena.

xoxo Liz

San Francisco!

Dear Internet,

Today, I love this picture:

Guess why.... I'm going to San Francisco this weekend! I don't think I told you that. I'm telling you now. Get over it. Smile.

Aaaand, I was kind of upset because I probably picked the worst weekend possible to visit Berkeley (I'm applying for next fall, by the way) because the whole Public Policy school (I'm applying for a dual degree... because why not) is out of town, in DC ironically, for a recruiting event. Also there are no school tours to be had. Also my boss Brian's friend who goes to Berkeley Law will be out of town and can't talk to me.

BUT

everything seems to be coming together nicely because people are super nice. One guy at the Public Policy school said he would be out of town but would send me a list of "Top 10" things to do around the school/surrounding neighborhood/etc. And one of the other Helena VISTAs is from the Bay area and emailed her friends asking if someone could host me (I had no luck with finding a CouchSurfing place), and her friends seem super nice and willing to host me. Plus one of them went to Berkeley undergrad so I can get some kind of idea about things. Plus they invited me to hang out with them.

People are great sometimes.

The only thing left to work out is getting to the airport Thursday morning... a winter storm's supposed to be blowing in and I'm flying out of Bozeman (almost two hours away from Helena). Luckily I'll miss most of the storm while I'm in SUNNY CALIFORNIA, but I do have to get there. Fingers crossed that I can make my 7am (ugh!) flight.

 (But I won't have to because San Fran will be SUNNY :)

Also, you should watch this because it's hilarious. Happy election day, and don't vote for the crazy one. We all know who I mean.

xoxo Liz

Wise words from Vonnegut

- Kurt Vonnegut.