The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

My plate is pretty full, literally and figuratively.

Figuratively, I just have a lot going on. I've been working a lot, which is good because it means I get money and experience, but not so good in that it cuts into my free time... Actually, the problem is that because my employers and I are both so flexible (they're happy to take whatever time I can offer, and I'm happy to offer whatever time they can take) it's been really hard to establish the routine necessary to use my time more efficiently. And apart from the law work I still have lots to do, like the swim teaching, some other projects I've got going, further job hunting, miscellaneous other crap that needs to get done, regular exercise, and, of course, blogging... As I've discussed before, it's not just about needing the time to do things, it's about needing the mental cycles to be able to pay sufficient attention to them. Particularly for writing (papers, blog posts, cover letters...) it's important to be able to give the efforts enough focus to ensure their quality.

Lately I've been struggling to do that, I think. My muse has been very cranky and inflexible again, and the love affair with words my blogging has inspired these past years I've done it seems to be in dire need of couples' counseling. I hope this isn't how things will always be as a lawyer. I hope this is just a temporary scattered-ness due to lots of things being up in the air right now. In a month I get my bar results, and soon thereafter, I hope, things will begin to land.

Anyway, back to the full plate thing, I also mean it literally (well, metaphorically, at least). You see, I've been cooking! Regularly! Or at least vastly more regularly than I can ever remember doing it before. Having now mastered London Broil, every week I look at the supermarket circulars and plan what I want to cook that weekend. Then I go shopping, where I challenge myself to show up at checkout with the Healthiest Cart of Groceries possible. Yes, Entenmann's chocolate donuts show up in it regularly (unfortunately these ones and not these, which I can't ever find on the West Coast)... but lately so have proper representations of the other USDA-approved food groups. Last week pork chops were on sale, so I made them with a recipe I clipped from a Florida's Orange Juice ad in Reader's Digest. (I'm very embarrassed to admit that I read Reader's Digest, and I swear that I only read them for the anecdotes - and occasional sponsored recipe - and not, I repeat, NOT, for the editorial policy...) Then this weekend I made a cucumber-dill salad and a salmon filet. The salad came out ok, except perhaps a little watery (probably should have drained the cucumbers more). I ended up going off-recipe with some improvisations for the salmon: we didn't have onion powder so I used garlic powder instead; I eyeballed the other spices' measurements; I used almost all the remaining fresh dill from the salad even though it had only called for a bit of dry dill; I added lemon slices, etc. Yet it all came out very nicely, and not at all like someone was cooking it for the very first time.

Yes, I'm practically a veritable Martha Stewart these days. Except without the prison record, of course.