Hello everyone,

I hope that you had a good weekend. For those of you who celebrate the Easter holiday, I hope it went well! My weekend was filled with lots of yardwork - my body is so sore today! My husband and I are going to start a vegetable garden this spring. In order to make this work, I had to till the ground and put down fresh soil because planting vegetables in Georgia clay will not work. We're going to plant rosemary (I use it in everything), strawberries, tomatoes, and yellow squash. I am really excited, but glad to be here at coop not doing anything physically draining.

So, in remaining consistent with my blog topics (enough about gardening already), I wanted to let you all know about how hard last Friday was for me. I am totally the type of person who needs first-hand context to feel passion about my work. What I mean by this is that doing appellate work is fascinating legally, but somewhat removed from the client because at the appellate stage, you are reviewing the record for legal error and making an appeal to the appellate court to provide legal relief based on such error. I hope this is not too confusing. Anyway, last Friday, I asked one of the investigators here to share some stories with me about our clients.

While I cannot go into incredible detail about what was revealed to me, what I will say is that at least for the two clients I am working on now, their childhood lives were more horrific than I truly thought possible!!!!! Of course, I knew that there were some very difficult experiences out there, but it's different when it slaps you in the face like it did me. On a more positive note, that kind of revelation was just what I needed to incite the passion that I was looking for.

Have a good week everyone!