legally blogging {me!}

Hope you all have been following along on the Legally Blogging series that I've been doing with Allison from Lawfully Lost and Catherine from Bailey Dailies. I loved meeting these ladies in the blogging world. Since we have being in lawyers in common, we decided to start the Legally Blogging series, complete with this fun button.

Two weeks ago, Catherine started us off (see here) and then Allison introduced herself to us last week (see it here). I'm the last to go! We want to continue this series in the future by possibly having some sort of link up. Please contact me if you'd like to be involved!

So here we go - I'm Jackie and welcome to my blog if you're new here!

I needed a random reason to show me with this penguin.

I was born and raised outside of Pittsburgh, PA and then I went to undergrad at Ohio State in Columbus, OH. During college, I did study abroad in London my junior year. I loved it so much that I returned back to London after I graduated and worked/lived there for 9 months. It was awesome for me to get to travel around a lot when I was 20 and 22 years old. So fun. See?

Photos: Globe Theatre/London, La Sagrada Familia/Barcelona, Buckingham Palace, Ireland, Palace at Versaille, Coloseum/Rome, Interlaken, White Cliffs of Dover, Hampton Court Palace.

Yes, in the third to the last picture I'm jumping of a cliff, attached to a rope. It was pretty crazy because I'm afraid of everything, especially heights. We were in the Swiss Alps and I was 20 and thought why not. (Never again.) Anyways, after London, I worked for a few years and then decided to go back to law school - I graduated from University of Pittsburgh Law in 2010 and have been working as an attorney in Pittsburgh since then.

My blog is a mix of inspiration photos to get me to decorate more, actually decorating our house, some recipes, some fashion-y posts, some updates on my life, lots of pug photos and really any posts on what I'm interested in at the moment.

Why did you start blogging?
I had been reading a lot of blogs about home design and people updating their houses on their own. I wanted to start to do my own projects and thought the blog would be a good way to keep me motivated and to document the updates. I knew the blog wouldn't be all house-y, so I like the mix of other areas of my life.

What do you like to do when you're not blogging?
Like I said, I'm really trying to fix up the house and decorate. Otherwise, I hang out with my fiancee and our dogs a lot (see here for a million pug photos). Since we both work full time, we're pretty lazy on the weekends, but do the usual of hanging out with friends, go out to dinner, etc. My main hobby/exercise is adult ballet classes which I've talked about before here. I take classes twice at week and they are usually about 2 to 2.5 hours per class (an hour and a half ballet class, then a class in pointe shoes). We're also doing a little performance in April, so we have an extra 2.5 hour weekly rehearsal too. It's a great workout, keeps me in shape and is a fun way to get my workouts in. I highly recommend dance classes!

What do you find is the biggest misconception about lawyers?

1.) That we're all rich. Just because someone is a lawyer doesn't mean that make craploads of money. It's really expensive to go through law school and only a small percentage of jobs pay the big bucks. I think it's especially important for people thinking about law school to consider that. (Please email me if you want any more of my thoughts on this.)

2.) That all lawyers are old, white men. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone to court or to a deposition and people assume that I'm an assistant or an intern or a court reporter. I guess it could be a compliment that I just look SO young, right? Ha. But really I think it's because they expect to see a dude, preferably an old dude. So yeah - us ladies can do it too!

What's your favorite vacation you've been on?

Ahh so hard to choose! Can I say my two extended stays in London were my fave even though they weren't vacations? As for our weekend trips - I really loved going to Barcelona and Mykonos.

One of my other favorite places to vaca is Disneyworld. My friend Jaime is a huge Disney fan so we've gone numerous times and it's always so so fun.

  

Oh the last isn't a Disneyworld pic - it's actually with my dude when we went to Disneyland once. I've been to both parks a lot and love them!

What's your best and worst home reno project?

We haven't done any crazy projects yet, but I'd say our best project so far in this house would be replacing the carpeting because it made a HUGE difference. See where I posted about it here. As for the worst, nothing too crazy so far. However, we tried to replace the toilet in the world's tiniest bathroom and got it in there and found out the new toilet was too big. Womp womp. Not too exciting, but I'll end it here, since this post has gotten LONG.

Congrats if you stuck with me this long! Thanks for learning more about me !! Thanks to Catherine and Bailey for co-hosting - they are super awesome!!

  

Linking up: Northern Belle Diaries, Helene in Between