Pittsburgh

We've now been in Pittsburgh for a week and our little apartment is coming together. We’ve been learning a lot with our first big move and have been experiencing a lot of growth. We got the internet up and running and I have time to sit down before classes start tomorrow to update our blog. Here are some pictures from the summer. Some of Sharon's sisters family, who we stayed with in Washington and some of the fun activities they took us along on, as well as some pictures of the famous Pike's place market.


Sharon got here last week with my family and we piled the boxes in our living room and slept on the floor. It was fun to have my mom, dad, and littlest (but by no means smallest) brother McKay here for a couple of days. We appreciate the help and support we got from them. Monday I gave them the grand tour of campus, which was fun, but probably not the most exciting. We then went down the road and saw some of the University of Pittsburgh and showed them the Cathedral of learning and checked out some of the museums and other buildings. While I was at a meeting they went and checked out the botanical gardens just behind campus, which they reported was pretty cool. You can see pictures that my mom posted here.

Tuesday my family took off for Amish country and Indianapolis and we started to unpack. Things are definitely coming together. We made a couple trips to IKEA and found some nice, relatively, cheap solutions for furniture that should get us through the next couple of years. I have some pictures of how the apartment is starting to look, but pictures never do much justice.
Before:

After:



We only have a few minor things to take care of now. A mattress, a possible couch cover, some curtains, and I'm going to try and build some shelves for food storage in a little closet by the kitchen.

School starts tomorrow. I’m excited. Orientation was fun. They did a good job at giving us time and information to get settled in before the load of classes falls on us, which I think will help. Orientation involved everything from a scavenger hunt all around Pittsburgh to some tests to see if we qualified to exempt any of the core classes. I partially exempted the database class, so I have some open credits for an extra class. I was hoping to exempt a few other classes, but I guess I wasn’t up to the Carnegie Mellon standard. It’s bitter sweet. It will be sweet to solidify my knowledge of the subjects I was hoping to exempt in classes that will be really good, but it’s bitter because I could have opened up some credit hours to take some classes in other areas.

Sharon has been busy since we’ve been here as well. Besides doing most of the house organizing she has been interviewing at a couple of places for a job. She recently had two second interviews with good results. One place, only a mile from our house, said they would love her help. It’s a non-for-profit daycare/pre-school called interplay. She would be helping in the classroom. The other interview was out in Columbus, Ohio. It is a political action and research group, non-partisan. Unfortunately they don’t have anything fulltime in Pittsburgh, only a couple part-time things with the elections coming up. She doesn’t know for sure what she’s going to do yet, but has to decide soon because they are waiting to hear back from her.

Career paths have been a subject we’ve been discussing a lot between ourselves lately. It’s hard to know where choices of employment will lead and how to choose employment that will take you where you want to go. We would love to hear people’s thoughts on this. Feel free to post something, or email us.

I’m hoping to keep up the blog; it might be back to once a month with classes starting. If you need our new mailing address you can email us. For security and privacy reasons I'm not going to post it.

We love you all and hope all well for you.