the ocean

European Vacation

I just got back from my annual trip to Vienna with my law students. It's always a weird blend of sightseeing, helping people make oral arguments about bizarre made up factual scenarios, and waking up to a deluge of emails from a workplace that is seven hours behind me, but I enjoy it. It helps when, like this year, my students have basic life skills and therefore aren't emailing me to get directions from their hotels to the competition or asking me for wakeup calls. It's also nice that Austrian wine seems to be about twice the strength of your typical wine, at least if my level of buzz is any gauge, and I think we know that it is. It's just science, really.

This year got off to a not-so-great start thanks to Austrian Airlines, which cancelled my direct flight from Chicago to Vienna and did not bother to tell me, meaning that I only discovered that they had tried to re-book me on a flight getting in almost two days later when I went to check the flight status online before I left for the airport. After much telephonic shouting, I was booked on a flight arriving a mere eight hours later, but with a middle seat and a healthy layover in Frankfurt. It is truly not easy to sleep when you are wedged in between a giant fat man and a hyperactive German preteen for nine hours over the Atlantic. On the plus side, I finally saw The Shape of Water. Turns out United edits out the masturbation, btw and spoiler alert.

One I arrived, however, the highlights were plentiful. There was an amazing Keith Haring show playing at the Albertina, and the German tabloids were running ridiculous stories about Heidi Klum. We visited an old flak tower from WWII that has been turned into a surprisingly freewheeling aquarium, and discovered that Murder, She Wrote is called something that loosely translates to "Murder is Her Hobby." My students did not win, but that meant they got a couple of free days in Vienna, and I fit in a side trip to Bratislava, where the train station is kind of scary but the Old Town looks like something out of Beauty & the Beast (2017). 

More tales to come, I am certain.

I'm doing a March Madness bracket with some of my work friends this year. Which in essence means that I am just giving them money, because I have no chance of winning. As in I just logged in to fill out my bracket and was informed that the teams for the tournament haven't even been picked yet. Maybe I should have known that? I also didn't know that I apparently created an ESPN.com account in 2005. It's so nice to be reunited with it, though, I can't even tell you.

I'm also like legitimately going out this evening for the first time in a while. I mean, we've been to dinner and people's houses and such, but this is two actual parties in a row, neither of which is likely to involve board games. And my plan is to get a bit sloppy, though hopefully not to the point of drunk dialing my boss, which is something that one of my friends actually did by accident once. Thank God her boss was Linsday Lohan, so nobody thought anything of it. Not actually.

Springing forward should be the best! Truly, though, it's so nice to have two weekends a year where people talk about their clocks. The recognition is frankly long overdue.

What crazy weekend! And not in the sense of doing tequila shooters off of someone's backside. My sister had her baby, which meant that Ian and I were on call to watch my nephew. But since the labor went on over the course of several days, we were on call, then off call, then on call, then off call, then on call again. Originally we thought we'd be over there Friday night, but then were dismissed, so we ended up going to the grocery store and eating one of the Blue Aprons we forgot were coming instead. Then we were supposed to be there early Saturday morning, but we were literally in the car about to leave when the call came telling us we had another 12-hour reprieve. (Although we did get the very important task of taking my sister a phone charger, which we discharged with aplomb, or what passes for it at 6:15 in the morning.) Finally, though, we were thrown into action about ten minutes after finishing Dunkirk, which is obviously the perfect motion picture to pair with some obstetrics and gynecology. And we spent about sixteen hours babysitting, though to be fair about half of those were sleeping. And now we have a new niece, and everyone is happy, healthy, and very tired. Though my nephew did explain that HE is the baby. We've all been there, friend.