Busy busy busy...

Apologies for the lack of substantive posts around here lately... We've been super busy this week! Here's some of what's been keeping us busy over the last several days:

• Last weekend (MLK Jr. weekend): Manna Alumni Retreat, down in Langhorne, PA. This definitely deserves its own post -- that's on my list of things to do!
• Tuesday: I was hard at work all day on this brief I've been drafting for one of my cases, since we were planning on filing it on Wednesday. David was busy with staff meetings in preparation for the PEF/Manna winter retreat, coming up next week.
  
• Wednesday: Found out in the morning that we had lots of new stuff to incorporate into the brief, so we decided to work on the brief some more and wait to file it. Then at noon, we decided we could do it all for filing that day after all, which caused a fairly stressful afternoon for me; just barely got the brief to the courier in time.
• Friday: Got asked to go down to D.C. for a deposition next Tuesday, in a mass tort that I've only sort of been involved in... The midlevel associate who usually goes with the partner on these depositions can't go next week, so she asked me to fill in. I'm basically just going as the exhibit handler -- the partner will put various documents in front of the witness, so I need to be ready to hand them to him. A glorified Vanna White, if you will. But it's still terribly exciting! :)

And the non-career-related reason why I'm excited about going to D.C. next Tuesday -- David will be gone all week for the winter retreat. Every year, PEF and Manna do a joint retreat over intersession (the week off between fall semester exams, which take place in January, and spring semester classes, which start in February). Last year was the first year I didn't go on the retreat, since I had a job and work and stuff... :P I was gritting my teeth to prepare for this year, missing out on what had always been my favorite retreat of the year, and missing David -- it was rough for me last year. And then I got asked to participate in this dep -- nothing like scary/exciting new work experiences to take my mind off of things!

So now we're both gearing up for traveling on Monday. Though truth be told, I've been having more fun helping David get ready for his retreat... One of his retreat prep duties is to help with the baking responsibilities. Which generally translates into me doing the baking. :) It actually works out really well, because I love baking. And we've developed our own Keddie family system for handling the huge amounts of food prep required for this particular retreat. We got assigned 16 dozen cookies this year, and we always do our special peanut butter Hershey's kiss cookies -- so that's what we spent the bulk of today doing.

David helped -- he unwrapped all the Hershey's kisses!

And now that the cookies are cooling (it takes a while for the chocolate to solidify), we have just enough time to relax together before heading off to a dinner with students...

It's a crazy busy life, but we love it! :)