The Beginning

Note: I'm going to divide up the past week into several entries to make my life easier to digest since this post is already becoming very long.

First off, if you are happening on this blog and don't know who I am, my name is Christian and I recently moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from the state of Washington to attend graduate school in chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University. This blog is basically just a place for my friends and family to keep tabs on me as I adjust to this new place and begin to experience it.

My journey starts with my trip back home to Snohomish, WA. Having just graduated from Whitworth University in Spokane, WA, I had stayed around Spokane working at the Spokane campus of Washington State University. For about 7 weeks out of the summer I worked as a research assistant in the WSU College of Pharmacy lab I had worked at during the previous summer at the main WSU campus in Pullman. For the couple weeks prior to my "move-out day," I had been scrambling to finalize a lot of details in regard to my move out east, including finding an apartment, booking flights, the rental car and hotel room and of course, packing up all my things in my room and trying to remember everything that I owned in the house in Spokane.

Of course all the while, I was desperately trying to meet up with as many of my Spokane-dwelling friends as possible in order to say goodbye. This was one of the hardest things for me to do. There were a lot of hugs, a few tears, and more emotion than I thought I could handle. To all of you whom I got to see, it was beyond meaningful to me to see you again and to say goodbye. To everyone else, I'm sorry we didn't get to see each other and I hope that we can see each other again at some juncture.

The day came and I loaded my things into my parents' truck and the car, said goodbye to my housemates and just like that I was on my way home. Caravaning across Eastern Washington is not the most exciting thing in the world, but it had become a regular thing having gone to school on the east side for four years, but this is the last time that I would do it for a while.

Arriving home, I dwelled on all that I had just experienced and all that I had to look forward to come nine days from then...as well as all the things that I had to get done in between! Those nine days were again full of packing and figuring out logistics. It was also full of saying goodbye to friends on the west side that I would be missing terribly. I also got to see my siblings and their families as well.

The day came. I got the last of my things into my suitcases, set off to say goodbye to Kristin and Jonathan and then raced back home to say goodbye to my mother and to drive over to the airport with my dad. At this point, we were quite a bit behind schedule. I was biting my nails the whole time we were driving around Sea-Tac (getting lost and turned around going to the parking garage thanks to the GPS) and while we were on the shuttle to the airport. We ran to the check-in counter, which thankfully had no line, checked our bags and bolted to security. Thankfully, I've been on a few airplanes in my life to I was familiar with all the TSA procedures so we got everything checked and we got through security faster than we expected and got to our gate (which happened to be at the very end of the concourse, lucky us) with ten minutes or so to spare before boarding.

The flight over was pretty uneventful, which is good, but unfortunately for me and my dad, neither of us slept much on the 3.5 hour flight from Seattle to Milwaukee, even though we had upgraded to business class and had comfy seats and a free cocktail. Since the flight left at 11:55pm, we were hoping to catch at least a few Zs. We landed in Milwaukee just as the sun was rising and it was a gorgeous sight. I wish I had had my camera. After an somewhat unappetizing breakfast, we boarded the plane to Pittsburgh and took off at around 7:50am. This time we were in a tiny airplane and we were both practically sitting on each other. It was most unpleasant. We landed at around 10:15am and claim our luggage and go to retrieve the rental car. We step outside and the humidity hits us like a ton of bricks. Yuck. We quickly locate the car and blast the air conditioning. I plug in the GPS, point it to the address of my property manager and we are on our way.

I'm going to stop this post here and you can continue reading in the next entry!