Update

Well, my firm Christmas party went extremely well. We were late and ended up driving instead of cabbing, but that worked to our benefit. I introduced Dave to all the trademark people that were there. Unfortunately, most of the firm are people who work on the Patent side of IP Law. I'm one of +/- 23 people. To give you an idea of how big my firm is there were about 800 people there that night. Meaning half that were employees. We walked down the stairs in the Fairmont Hotel here in DC (very nice place) to the ballroom and Dave was like, "Do you know any of these people?" I looked at the crowd and said, "No." Haha! There were only some of us there from Trademark. I introduced Dave around, we got some drinks, snagged a table and got some food. We sat with my co-worker Sandra and her husband. She's such a sweetie!
Here's some pics:This is a bad one of me. Funny thing: it was a Christmas party, right? The invitation said "Black tie/Cocktail" for the dress code. As you can kind of see, I'm wearing a yellow, halter top, cocktail party dress. I like this dress. Dave was in his three-piece suit wearing a nice red shirt and matching tie to compliment me and the season (I asked that he wear red for this purpose). So we're a festive couple. We walked in and everyone was wearing black. I mean EVERYONE. Then men were mostly in tuxes or black suits. And the women were all in BLACK dresses! Out of all 800 people, I was the only one in yellow! Haha! Well there were a couple of women in red. But the rest of them were either in black, navy blue or dark green! Sorry, but seriously, how boring is that??

Ok so I wasn't very photogenic all night. Meh. This is me and one of my favorite attorneys, Jody. She's a lovely lady. Next to her, not really paying attention, is another one of the attorneys I work for, Mack. He's a good guy, kind of a big teddy-bear.

We stayed pretty late just talking with people and enjoying the free food and free drinks. Afterwards we hit up this greasy, awesome place in Georgetown- The Philadelphia Cheesesteak Factory. Not cheeseCAKE, cheeseSTEAK. It's a sandwich. Sliced steak in a hoagie bun with mayo, lettuce, tomatoes and sometimes hots (but I've determined that's a Baltimore thing since no one in DC know what "hots" are). This place is great. They're open until 2 most nights and 4am on Friday and Saturday. YUMMY!

Then it was back to my place to sleep until noon!

I worked tons more overtime since then. Total for the last pay period was about 25 hours of overtime.

This past weekend we went snowboarding. Now, I've skied my entire life. I mean, I can't even remember when I first learned how, it's just something I've always done. Every weekend growing up, I was either enjoying the sun in my face and wind in my hair as my family and I zipped down one mountain or another. It's something I've missed so much since moving out here. You never realize how much the mountains mean until they're gone. It's might be kind of weird, but to me, the mountains symbolize home. So many good memories were made involving the mountains. I even have problems with directions because there are no mountains to be my base point (if you face them from SLC, that's East, so you can find whereever you're going from there)!! People tell me the Chesapeake is East, but you can't see the water walking on the streets in the city...

Last year, Dave wanted to learn how to snowboard. I'm up for anything snow related, so we went for it. I was just incredibly curious as to how and where the mountains were.... because you kind of need those...

Well, we took our first and second lessons on a hill in Pennsylvania. Seriously, for those of you familiar with the Rockies, this place was a hill. We drove by and he's like "There it is!" I looked everywhere and was like "Where?! I don't see it!" He pointed to this slightly white hill and said "Right there!" I was like, "Are you serious? That's a hill! That's not a mountain! We're gonna snowboard on that?" But it was a great place to learn. When you can see the grass under the lift... well, that's not really something I'm used to!

This past weekend we tried a different place. Lessons three and four were at Wisp. Check out their website. It was a cute place. I would compare it to Powder Mountain or maybe even Nordic. It's smaller of course, but, I was informed that it's some of the best skiing this side of the Continental Divide (not sure if that's true, but it's what I was told). Not too far away from DC, of course, because I'm sure New Hampshire and Vermont have better "mountains" than here. Anyways, we had a blast. I'm all banged up and sore from my chin to my toes, but I had fun!

Oh, both these places are about a 3 to 3.5 HOUR DRIVE from Dave's house, which is almost an hour from DC. And they're a couple of the closer ones!

5 days and a long flight to home.

love,
Carmen