A Nutty First Week In Squirrel Hill

Our home is about a 35 minute walk from CMU. We're in an area of Pittsburgh called Squirrel Hill. Like the rest of the city, everything here is a bit old and run-down. Squirrel Hill is actually a heavily orthodox Jewish neighborhood, but there are plenty of non-Jews here, too. We're just a block away from Squirrel Hill's main street of Murray Ave, which is packed with pizza places, coffee shops, Asian restaurants--and a Giant Eagle grocery store. The area reminds me a bit of the Porter/Davis areas outside Boston.

Virg took off from work for our first week in Pittsburgh, and we figured we'd use the time to explore our new city together. Instead, the first week proved to be a never-ending flurry of work. This included:

• waiting for the Comcast guy to hook up our Internet
• waiting on the phone with Comcast support after the guy left us with a non-functioning Internet connection
• immediately spending $400 on cleaning supplies, etc., at Target (in a great mega-store shopping area a short drive away called The Waterfront)
• waiting for my car not to arrive Saturday evening
• picking up my car Sunday morning, and returning the rental to the airport (30 mins away)
• looking through stores for desk chairs before buying 2 at Staples (and spending forever trying to remove the glued-on armrests)
• waiting for a delivery guy to drop off Virg's computer, and then waiting the next day for a delivery guy to drop off the piece that Oracle forgot to ship with the computer
• exchanging emails with the landlord (who has been wonderful!) regarding much-needed repairs, painting, and cleaning
• calling the repairman, painters, and cleaners
• waiting around for painters to come by to provide estimates
• waiting for cleaners to come and clean the house
• measuring the den and master bedroom, buying massive rolls of foam padding and massive custom-cut rectangles of carpeting from Lowe's, driving a rental truck full of carpeting back to our place, unloading it, and racing to get the truck back before the store closed
• sweeping/mopping the den and bedroom floors and arranging/cutting foam padding for the carpeting
• looking through several stores for desks and desktop computers for me. Ultimately I bought both at Office Depot (desktop pc - $250, LCD monitor - $200, desk - $50). I'm loving the pc and monitor, but assembling the $50 desk required hours of expletives.

We probably spent $500 a day that week.

Finally, on the Thursday morning marking our one week anniversary of camping out on an air mattress, the moving truck arrived with all our stuff. For this we had to lock the poor frazzled cats in the bathroom for a couple hours. When we finally released them, they practically wept with joy upon seeing all their cat trees, scratching posts, and familiar-smelling furniture. Just a few minutes later, a truck arrived with the guest bed we ordered, and we had to lock up the cats all over again. But at last, the cats got to take over their favorite piece of cat furniture--our bed. They've been lying there blissed out and unconscious for much of the week since then.

And as for us, we were also able to relax when all our stuff arrived. We were particularly thrilled to finally have:

• Our tool box. The first week in a new place is a terrible time not to have tools!
• Telephones. We could finally plug in a phone to try out our new phone line. Turns out, we had a whole bunch of messages about deliveries. Oops.
• Our table and chairs. It's been nice not to have to sit/eat on the floor.
• Music. We used Virg's laptop to play songs off my ipod for a while, but it was wonderful finally having access to our full music collection and real speakers.
• The printer. We could finally print out directions, bus routes, etc.
• Our bed! So big and soft and comfy! It was wonderful to finally get a good night of sleep on our bed, even if we did have to fight the cats for it.