My 500th Post!

[Climbing Grouse Mountain, Vancouver, Summer 2009]








Wow, time sure does fly here in "Tales" land. I started this blog in the fall of 2006 and here I am, nearly four years later! Still writing and still going. The great thing about having a longstanding blog is that I can go back to posts written a year or more ago & see how much I've changed & how my life has changed. Thinking back to the person I was when starting this blog & how I'm different now, a few key changes emerge:

When I started this blog...

1) I didn't cook. The problem was not that I was unaware of cooking techniques but rather than cooking didn't inspire me & I rarely attempted it. Now, I have a whole bunch of recipes on file in my laptop & I enjoy cooking complex dishes.

2) I didn't do homework. Despite my academic success, I went through my whole undergrad without really trying too hard at school. I went to work, went to school & when I came home it was time to relax. I would start studying for exams about two weeks before & would write papers about a week before they were due. I never did readings. Law school changed all of that: now, I read for each & every class, I start studying for end-of-April exams in February & I'm already researching for papers due not due until months from now. For me, it's the only way to survive.

3) I didn't volunteer. From my current vantage point of hyper-involvement, it's hard to remember a time when I had nothing extracurricular on my plate. But for years before law school, I wasn't involved in my community. I didn't know what I was missing. Getting involved over the past few years, it has been such a rush to see my initiatives come to fruition, to organize events & see record turn out, to stand as one of the student leaders at the law school & the university in general. It's addicting and, although I say goodbye to most of my volunteer opportunities when I leave law school in a few months, I know it won't be long before I amass many more.

4) I didn't reflect. Part of my desire to start this blog in the first place was to get a better sense of who I really was. It's hard to see who inhabits your skin when you're living in it, so this blog (along with time for reflection, the Myers-Brigg personality test I took for my Mediation class this term & my husband's perspective) have been very helpful in seeing myself more honestly. At the Trial Lawyers' retreat last year, my roommate told me, "A leader must know themself." I'm trying.