Why we're in Alaska

I thought I’d just give a little rundown of the reason we’re here since many of you have asked, and most of you have asked why we still came after getting such a great offer from the firm in Austin.  So here’s the deal: Mario is a clerk for Justice Dan Winfree of the Alaska Supreme Court.  According to Wikipedia, “a law clerk or a judicial clerk is a person who provides assistance to a judge in researching issues before the court and in writing opinions. Law clerks are not court clerks or courtroom deputies, who are administrative staff for the court.  Most law clerks are recent law school graduates who performed at or near the top of their class. Various studies have shown clerks to be influential in the formation of case law through their influence on judges' decisions. Working as a law clerk generally opens up career opportunities.”  

So basically, Mario is a research assistant for the judge.  When a case is coming up, the judge needs to know what each side is arguing and the basis and precedent for those arguments so (s)he’s prepared when (s)he hears the issues.  The arguments submitted by each side can include hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pages of information, and that takes a lot of time to go through.  Most judges hire “kids” fresh out of law school to do all this stuff for them and write a sort of summary.  Mario is one of three clerks for his judge and, like most judicial clerks in the country, will only be doing this for one year.  Next year a new batch of clerks will come and take over.  

Law clerks are basically state employees, and as such don’t make very much.  We’re definitely not here for the money, but we are here for a few other really great reasons.  As it says in the Wiki explanation, clerks can be influential in forming case law, and they also become more employable as a general rule.  Alaska is a particularly exciting place to be a clerk because its state law is so new that Mario could have an active role in interpreting some laws for the very first time, thus being intimately involved in the setting of precedent for how they are implemented in the future.  Clerks are also generally more employable because they spend a year interacting with and learning from judges themselves, as well as having the opportunity to review the work of dozens of different attorneys from which they can also learn.  It’s a very prestigious position and a great opportunity for Mario to become a better legal writer and better attorney in a relatively short time.  This is why Mario’s firm in Austin is not only okay with us leaving for a year, they want Mario to be here because he’ll be a better lawyer when he gets back.    

Mario is really enjoying his work here so far.  Justice Winfree, or just Dan, and his wife are wonderful, and his co-clerks are great.  Mario is in the unique position of being the only clerk Justice Winfree has ever had who already has children, as well as the only one to welcome a new baby into the family during his clerkship.

Although we most likely would have taken a clerkship anywhere we were given the chance, we were especially excited that Mario got an offer to clerk in Alaska.  We’re thrilled to be able to spend a year in one of the most unique and beautiful states in the nation.  Really, who gets to live in Alaska for a year?!  We’re excited about having one last year of adventuring before real life sets in, and I’m sure this will be an adventure! 

On the road again . . .

Train in the park in Houston - Josh is saying "choo-choo!

Our last few weeks in Austin were quite eventful.  For Mario’s Father’s Day present, we got tickets to see Kings of Leon in Houston at the end of July.  We happen to have friends from law school in Houston and were planning to spend the weekend with them and catch the concert.  They ended up spending the weekend in the hospital welcoming their new twin daughters into the world a bit early (yay!), our concert got canceled (after we had already driven the 3 hours to Houston), and then Josh fell down a few stairs and refused to put any weight on his right foot.  So we drove back home. 

My poor little non-toddler!

Josh ended up having to get x-rays and blood tests, both of which were negative, and is completely back to normal now.  He spent more than a week as an immobile toddler, which I can tell you is a unique kind of hell for both the toddler and the toddler’s caretaker.  It’s rather difficult to entertain a 2-year-old who not only can’t walk but can’t even stand up.  It’s like having a newborn again (especially since Josh still doesn’t really talk), except the newborn weighs 27 pounds and has extremely specific preferences and a very short temper.  Suffice it to say we spent a whole lot of time in the pool (even more than usual, and that’s a lot!), and we watched an inordinate amount of Thomas the Train videos during those 10 days of immobility!  Thanks, Dad, for helping us get through!  Josh and I both would have had a much worse time without your support!

Milkshake at Hopdoddy for dinner!

Josh turned 2 in August!  His birthday, sadly, came right after he hurt his leg, but we still found some fun stuff to do.  We went swimming, rode the train at the park again, and stole Mario away for a lunch of Josh’s 3rd most favorite food (coming in behind whipped cream and strawberries at #1 and #2, respectively, which he had for breakfast) – chicken!  We took the little man out for dinner and he ended up having a sea salt caramel milkshake for his meal, which unfortunately meant that when we got home he was somewhat uninterested in the triple-chocolate (chocolate cake, chocolate ganache filling, and chocolate mousse frosting – yes, my kiddo’s got great taste!) birthday cake I had made for him, although he did thoroughly enjoy his new trains on top!  He did really get into the cake the next evening, though, and wanted to blow out his candle over and over (I think he blew it out 9 times).

 

We went to Sea World while Josh’s leg was recovering since he doesn’t walk much there anyway.  He was having a bit of a rough day and didn’t really want to do or see anything until we went to the shark aquarium.  He sat right there for almost 2 hours just watching the fish swim.  Since then, he has become a fish fanatic, but more on that later!

We also had the chance to go visit my brother and sister-in-law in Albuquerque for a weekend.  It was a quick but wonderful trip.  We enjoyed Albuquerque, the great food, the great company, and the much cooler weather!  Thanks, S&A, for a great weekend!

My mom came to visit.  Of course we had to make one last trip out to Sea World while she was there.  We also ate ourselves sick.  One of our last indulgences: Franklin’sBBQ.  This place is unreal.  It used to be housed in one of Austin’s ubiquitous food trailers until the lines just got too crazy.  Its hours are listed as “11am – Sold Out.”  That’s right; they sell out every single day.  A lady comes through the line before they open (that’s right, there are dozens and dozens of people in line before they even open) and asks everyone how much they intend to buy so she can give one lucky customer a sign that says “Last Person to Eat” so everyone else knows not to stand in line for 4 hours if they aren’t even going to get any meat.  They’re famous for their brisket (which was out of this world), pork ribs (which were my favorite in my current not-crazy-about-red-meat pregnancy phase), and espresso bbq sauce.  Their smoked turkey was also fabulous.  It was totally worth getting in line at 9:30am (and I wasn’t even the first person there!).  We also enjoyed some lovely Columbian food (fried plantains stuffed with mozzarella cheese – yum!), and a few other bbq places.

Mario really enjoyed his work at McKool Smith in Austin, and was fortunate enough to be extended an offer to return to work for them after our year in Fairbanks.  He accepted on the spot and we are absolutely thrilled to be returning to Austin next fall for the foreseeable future.  We feel incredibly blessed that, after the trials of the past three years, we have landed somewhere we love and that we feel is perfect and right for us.  Mario loves the work and the firm and we couldn’t be happier with how things have turned out.

We had an awesome summer in Austin and it was bittersweet to leave it behind; bitter to exchange a good paycheck for a not-so-good paycheck, pack up yet again, and say goodbye to our friends; sweet to exchange a nuclear summer (I believe we were on our 30-something consecutive day of 100+ heat) for our beloved Pacific Northwest summer days of 70-80 (Josh is really happy he can actually go outside and play again without sweating his brains out!), move closer to family for a while, and begin a most excellent new adventure here in Alaska!

One of the few immobile pleasures left.

Sea World with YaYa

He was thrilled about the birds until they started landing on him, then not so much.

He much preferred this interaction with the birds!

Home Sweet Austin!

Hanging out at home with the cars.

The day after graduation, we packed up, said goodbye to Mario's family, and my mom joined us in our drive from Cambridge to Austin, TX. It was (thankfully) a pretty uneventful trip, apart from some really wonderful food (with many thanks to the food gods for smart phones, which helped us find some excellent places to eat that we never would have known about!) and a random flat tire somewhere in eastern Texas.

Playing at the Children's Museum

We lived a spartan life for a week before our belongings, sent a week before we left via a moving/storage service, arrived in Austin.  We're settled in now and really enjoying our new home. We live in a rather large, higher-end apartment complex with a big pool and a couple of common-use grills.  We're less than a mile from Mario's work downtown and about a quarter mile from Austin's trendy SoCo (that's South Congress, of course) neighborhood, complete with antique shops, a few drive-in burger joints, and a whole abandoned parking lot full of permanent food trucks, one of which sells only cupcakes.  It's DANG hot, but Josh and I are getting by pretty well with lots of help from our swimming pool and multiple splash parks.


Here come the pregnancy details.  Feel free to skip if you're not interested.  We found out we're having a girl, I'm 20 weeks, and I've had a much, much rougher time than with Josh.  With Josh, as long as I ate every 90 minutes or so, I was fine, end of story.  I didn't throw up because of morning sickness even once.  With this one, eating is not the magic bullet I was hoping it would be.  Even when I eat regularly, I've felt pretty continuously crappy for about 60%, maybe 70%, of the past three months.  I've thrown up multiple times, the last of which was our second week here in Austin while Josh and I were on an outing with some new friends to go pick peaches.  I'm pretty sure me heaving my breakfast up on the side of an old country road really made a great impression.  In the immortal words from Tommy Boy, "That [family] might not call us."  Anyway, I've been getting a lot better in the past few weeks.  I've also been able to control my weight a whole lot better this time.  With Josh, I had probably gained 25 pounds by 15 weeks.  I'm only up 10lbs so far this time.  One big difference is probably that with J, I wanted red meat and LOTS of carbs, like toast with lots of butter and french fries.  This time, veggies and fruit are really what sound good and are most of what I eat.

Mario is really loving his work.  The firm is great and he loves what he's doing.  After only two weeks, they invited him to help with a deposition in California.  He loves that he's been thrown right into the pool and is really enjoying the stimulating work and the great people.

In all, Austin is wonderful.  It's everything we hoped it would be.  And if we're having this much fun with triple-digit heat every day (the weather forecast usually looks like binary code - it's all ones and zeroes!), I can only imagine how awesome it will be in the winter months when the weather is a little more kind!

There's a fun train at nearby Zilker Park that Josh had a kick riding on a few Saturdays ago.








This past Saturday, we drove to San Antonio to take the little man to Sea World.  It was awesome!  He had a great time watching the Elmo show, he was blown away by the killer whale show, he loved the water park, and he really loved the huge aquariums. 

Watching the Elmo show.  Josh kind of likes Elmo.  Can you tell?

Watching Shamu

Commencement and Farewell to Cambridge!

Clever boy got out a bowl so he could reach the chocolate whipped cream :)

Here's our last playgroup with some of the wonderful moms and kids Josh and I have spent so much time with here.  We miss you!

Mario finished classes and we got to spend a few weeks with him before graduation, part of which we spent in Oregon visiting mostly his parents as he hadn't seen them in a year.

Love visiting YaYa's store!

You can just barely see Mario waving to the right of the big tree.

Justice Ginsberg and her retinue

Harvard's Commencement was at the end of May and was really wonderful.  Mario's dad, my mom, and Mario's step-brother Rich, his wife Paula, and their daughter Chelle came out to celebrate Mario's amazing accomplishment with us.  It was really an experience.  The all-Harvard ceremony was enormous.  It's a miracle we found Mario at all in the tens of thousands of people there.  Here are the Law School graduates standing for the conferral of their degrees.  After the all-Harvard ceremony was the Law School ceremony.  Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a former Harvard attendee, dropped in during the awarding of the degrees to say hi. I think there's kind of an unspoken rule that if someone shows up with their own Secret Service detail and mentions they'd like to interrupt what you're doing to say a few words, you let them. Mario is the first person in his family to go to college (step-family excluded for this particular stat, although they do get quite a lot of credit for helping Mario get where he is now). And now he has three degrees, including one from Harvard Law School.  That's pretty incredible. He worked his tail off to get there and worked a whole lot more for the three years he spent there.  He's amazing and so is what he's done!

Now you can see what a miracle it was that we actually saw Mario at all!  You can vaguely see all the law students standing for the conferral of their degrees.

 

New Apreotesi on the Way!

At the sugar shack

At the Boston Museum of Science

Hello, all!  Very sorry for the lapse.  Life has certainly gotten away with me.  We had a great last few months in lovely Cambridge. We went out to our favorite maple sugar shack one last time in the spring.

Mario's prime rib

We had a great Easter with some great friends.  Mario made prime rib again, and it was delightful.  Josh got to enjoy not one but three different Easter egg hunts.  Once we opened an egg and showed him there was chocolate inside, he was much more willing to wander around and pick up eggs!

Easter egg hunt with friends after dinner

 I spent almost two weeks in Moab and Las Vegas with my family in March, during which time I found out I'm pregnant!  Since Mario wasn't with me on the trip and I didn't want to tell him over the phone, I couldn't tell anyone in the family while I was with them.  I'm pretty proud I was actually able to keep a secret like that for almost a week, actually, but I sincerely apologize for my moodiness and my inability to explain exactly why I was crying at the drop of a hat!
 

We started in Moab with Dad and all the siblings except Scott and Anita.  It was a little on the chilly side.  It actually snowed one day.  Josh took it like a champ, though, and played outside a lot even in the freezing weather.  He got his first taste of an old Foutz favorite, camp donuts, and had a BLAST on the little electric four-wheeler Grandpa Riggs brought for the grandkids to play with.  Josh was willing to sit in it for 20-30 minutes waiting for an older cousin to come along who was willing to give him a ride since he was too short to reach the pedals.  I also got to ride a quad for the first time in forever when we took an expedition out to the Gemini Bridges. 






 































After Moab, we went to Las Vegas to meet Grandma YaYa, Wendy and her family, and Scott and Anita.  We spent a few wonderful days with everyone playing on the Strip and at Wendy's house.  Josh really enjoyed spending time with his wonderful cousins, although he and Collin didn't quite agree on how to share YaYa. 

Battling for YaYa's lap

Tuckered out!

Josh and I had a wonderful trip, and the little man came home from our trip wearing this to tell Daddy the great news!