I'm back from Montana's Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness. The twenty-six mile, three-day long hike was, at different times, excruciating, exhilarating, frustrating, tiring, and incredibly beautiful. We ascended to the tundra at 10,000 feet, where snow was still melting into pools and lakes, and then climbed back down through heavily forested trail. It's hard to describe, so I'll let my 400 pictures tell the story once I get them up on Flickr.

In any case, I've come back to find myself in a deep pile of work. It's crunch time for clerkship applications, and I really have to do more work on them. I hope I get everything in on time..

I also came back to find that my messy roommate's brother has randomly dropped in on us from Shanghai. While I usually don't mind guests, this guy kept wanting to talk to me and waste my little remaining mental capital for the day. He's also as messy as his brother, which is just wonderful. My bathroom is really disgusting now. I don't want to clean it.

In fact, I won't. Because in just three weeks, I am moving out to my own, cleaner place. Can't hardly wait.

It's the middle of my third week now at Quinn Emanuel (almost half done, if you can believe that!!) Things are settling in, and I'm feeling less stressed and tired.

I have, however, been working on one project this entire time. On my first day here, Dobbs*, the head of the appellate practice at my firm, asked me to research a very open ended common law issue for an appeal of a case he's working on. (The facts are pretty cool, but I won't talk about them here. Let's just say they involve alcohol and intellectual property, two of my favorite subjects.) Unfortunately, no matter how much time I poured into it, he wasn't satisfied with the cases I found. I should have known something was wrong when he brought me in to talk about my memo and he told me it was "um, a good start."

Turns out, the issue was so open-ended that Dobbs didn't really know what kind of cases he wanted until he read through the secondary legal sources which I had pulled up (and I did identify the right ones.) So now I'm doing follow up research for him, on a more well-defined issue. That's better, but gee, I'm almost half done with my six weeks here. I want to do something else, too.

To his credit, Dobbs has been pretty understanding about the whole thing. He realizes that the assignment he gave me was unusually fuzzy: "it's like poking a marshmellow," he said. The analogy is that the issue is so obvious, yet so hard to put your finger on.

* "Dobbs" is not the guy's name. It's actually the name of a treatise on restitution that I pulled up for him as part of my research.

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