I've been sitting in front of my keyboard for a while, trying to find the words to sum up how wonderful and needed this past weekend was, and those are exactly the words: wonderful and needed. On Friday morning my two favorite Massachusetts ladies, Bea and Emily, rolled in to town for a weekend of catching up and exploring Pittsburgh. We had some beautiful weather for it, too! After five long, dark, months, it was great to get outside in the sun and visit places that none of us have seen before- like the Monongahela Incline, Mt. Washington, and The Mattress Factory- and a few of my personal favorites- Frick Park, Construction Junction (they have autopsy tables right now!), Phipps. Construction Junction may seem like a weird place to bring visitors that drove 12 hours to see us, but it turned out to be a highlight for all of us. It is sort of magical.
Honestly, up until this weekend, I really hadn't done much exploring of our new city. Our move was a whirlwind- we arrived with 48 hours to spare before I went off to my new job- and Chris now finds himself working most weekends. While I have no problem doing things by myself, touristy things are more fun with two or more people. One of the strangest aspects of living somewhere we'd never even visited is the feeling of being both a tourist and *kind of* a local at the same time (I know I'm not a local, but I do live here on a permanent basis). But I loved showing them the places I knew, and experiencing new things with them as well, and I feel like this weekend was the first that I really appreciated Pittsburgh. Maybe it was seeing it through the eyes of our friends, and not through my own. I think when you move to a place for a job, rather than out of a personal desire to live somewhere, it takes some time to get to know it. To start to like it. It's all too easy to draw comparisons to where we're from, states that we know back to front after nearly three decades of living in them. We still haven't found mature spinach and Teddy brand peanut butter at the grocery store, traffic patterns confuse and annoy, and the whole liquer store/beer store thing is still found to be bizarre, but we're starting to settle in. I know those things may seem incredibly trivial to many of you, but I also know I'm not the only one who finds comfort in the everyday.
It's a weird feeling, being so far away from the people we're closest with, a feeling I've never really had before and one I'm not entirely comfortable with. I shock myself when I realize that I haven't actually seen my mother or brother and most of our friends- who are also like family- since the Holidays. Having Bea and Emily with us for a couple of days was comforting, knowing that we can catch right back up and fall in to step again.
On a completely separate note:
In this outfit: Everything vintage from head to toe, all bought at thrift stores in ME, NH, MA, & PA, all under $5
On Sunday morning, I was scheduled to be a background extra in a photo-shoot for work. There was a certain theme that I was instructed to dress for, along with being instructed to wear dark colors. These pieces are all from different eras, but came together in a unified outfit. Mostly though, for being over-tired, I'm just really proud of how my hair came out.
Thank you for reading,
xo -Julie.
