Happy Thanksgiving!

I spent this Thanksgiving at home in Portland and enjoyed every minute of rain. I’ve been living in Phoenix since May and, if you haven’t heard, rain is scarce in this part of the country. Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining. After two summers of Phoenix heat, I’m finally getting to enjoy the benefits of an Arizona winter (I haven’t put on a long sleeve shirt yet, let alone a pair of tights).

Unfortunately, there are many of you with whom I haven’t spoken recently, so here is a long overdue update. After three years of hard work and fun times, I graduated from BYU Law School in April—hooray!


I then moved to Phoenix and (after the previously documented, fantastic trip to Boston) spent nearly the whole summer studying full-time for the Arizona bar exam, which I took in July and passed—also, hooray!

Luckily, I was able to spend the two months after the bar traveling and having a lot of fun before starting back into “real life.” After taking the bar, I went home to Portland for my little sister’s wedding, did the tourist thing in New York City with my parents, and visited my cousin in Dallas. I don’t have any cute pictures or stories about young children like the rest of you, so instead here is a picture of one of my favorite adventures in New York City. My mom’s favorite movie is You’ve Got Mail with Meg Ryan. One day we decided to do a walking tour of the Upper West Side and, thanks to the DVD special features, found many of the landmarks shot in the movie. Here we are in the park where Meg and Tom Hanks meet up at the end of the movie—such a classic.


One of my other favorite post-bar adventures was a day trip to the Grand Canyon—the only one of the seven wonders of the world that I’ve visited to date—with my friends Christine (pictured with me below, also a recent BYU law grad) and Marissa. Our six-mile hike and the views from the rim were spectacular, and I highly recommend a visit to this particular wonder.


My extended vacation ended at the end of September, and I am now doing a one-year clerkship for a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals. My judge is great, so I am learning a lot and loving the work (legal research and writing on the appellate cases assigned to my judge). Outside of work, I’m busy having fun and living the single life. I’m loving Phoenix and don’t have any plans to leave any time soon, so when you want to escape cold winter weather come and visit (the weather really is amazing right now).

Hope all is well for all of you. Your friendship is one of the many blessings I celebrated this last weekend. Thanks!

Jill

Maggie Chan

Hi Ladies- This is Kristen, but I just received this email from Maggie Chan and thought I would post it: Hi, everyone, Bryce grows so fast and big. He has two teeth at the bottom. He can crawl like a pro. He can pull himself up. He likes holding my fingers to walk around everywhere. He is currently 8 months old, slimming down a little since he started crawling but still a chunk. Skyler just turned three today. Sorry for not having the party pictures here. You have to wait for the next edition. He had a Lightning McQueen party, getting a lot of “Cars” toys. The most he wanted was to become bigger and bigger, he said, because he was afraid that Bryce would be bigger than him. He got the idea from too many people to talk about it. Sad… I ran the Twin Cities Marathon on Oct. 1st with a stress fracture on my tibia… Ha… Funny, huh?! I finished 10th overall female with a time of 2:42:19. Considering that I had a cold and a stress fracture, 7 minutes off from what I wanted?! It’s a great race. I still had a hard time to imagine how I finished it with the stress fracture. So now, I am enjoying my time off, focusing on my scrapbooking business. I biked everyday to burn off some of my huge intake of calories and I would start running next week, 6 weeks from the 1st. I had a lot of fun and got to know many people in the process of this scrapbooking business, which kept my mind off from not being able to run in these 6 weeks. Brent was going to be deployed in January but he was told not to when he was training in MS about a month ago. I hated the military life this way; we couldn’t plan on anything two weeks in advanced. Something could be up anytime. So, I guess I wouldn’t be in Utah for 4 months now. Hope everything going well in your sides. Happy Thanksgiving.