Another Week

This last week was brutal--I billed at least 13 hours per day and maxed out at 16 hours billed on my busiest day. It was the type of week where I don't sleep and, other than work, accomplish only basic survival. This means eating, mainly from the convenience store in the office building. (I almost never made use of Seamless back in the US, but it would really help to have it here.) And showering. That's it.

Happily, a major deliverable was sent off at about 4am Saturday and I spent the rest of my Saturday sleeping. Now I'm foraging for food and planning to find a movie on iTunes to watch... and I'm writing this post, which means I'm taking some time for reflection.

There is so much I want to say about work, but I just can't say it here other than I got to wear jeans on Friday because the partners were away at their retreat!  Jeans are standard on Fridays in our Southern California offices, but not out here.  (It's the little things.)

I've hit a few financial milestones recently:

• I maxed out my 401(k).  There is no excuse for not doing this on a big law salary, but I still feel the gratitude I expressed in this post back in 2011 because I remember that it used to take a second job for me just to be able to max out an IRA.

• I paid off my car.  The year before law school, I was in a car accident that claimed the Ford Focus I had been driving.  In my youthful exuberance, I splurged on a new car (a VW Beetle, my then-dream car!) and took out a loan to do it.  When I started law school, my parents offered to pay off my loan if I would, in turn, repay them once I finished law school.  That story had a happy ending: I finished paying my family back this week.  (Jury is still out on whether I should have just sold that car before coming to Tokyo.)

With those two items taken care of, I'll have a non-trivial amount of "extra" money available to me each month for the rest of the year to throw at my student loans and downpayment savings account.

Also this week, I logged on to Facebook feed to find an update from an ex's wife announcing the birth of their first child.  I'm Facebook friends with neither the wife nor the ex, but with a childhood's worth of mutual friends between us these updates make their way into my feed when our mutual friend's comment on their posts.  The moment reminded me of when a mutual friend forwarded me a link to my ex's wedding website.  In lighthearted news, I laughed out loud when I saw that the child was named after his favorite whiskey.  Wow.

ETA: Just finished grocery shopping. My heart broke a little when I discovered this package of raspberries costs USD12.25.