The Beechers Come To Town

My parents stopped by Pittsburgh for less than 24 hours on their way to DC, so we didn't get to show them around much. Also they brought boxes of my crap that's been stored in their basement for over 12 years.

When they got in Friday night we took them over to the Murray Avenue Grill (we had success with Paul and Hilary Feinberg there during their visit a couple of weekends before). This time they were not out of all the specials, so everyone got what they wanted.

That evening we went to Gullifty's for dessert. Dave and I got the flourless chocolate cake which he liked but I thought was very disappointing. The raspberry sauce had a lot of seeds in it, and the cake itself was chalky, not the decadence I was expecting. We stayed late enough to hear the first jazz act start. In spite of the poor execution of our Pina Coladas I think we'll be back for the entertainment.

The next day while waiting for everyone to come downstairs I went through my boxes. Among my long lost treasures I discovered my Irish sweater and my English coffee cup that I'd been missing since college, and my pewter mug from The Distillery (I drank over 100 beers from around the world to get that mug which used to hang over the bar).



I also found my old drill team practice uniforms and every letter, postcard, and note passed in class from my high school days.

My parents left before lunch, so we didn't get to show them any more of Pittsburgh, but I hope they'll be back soon so we can get out more.

Dust And Dad

Thursday, July 10
Turns out I've got to get the car inspected within 10 days of registering it. Just wanting to be done with all that, I take the car down to the same mechanic first thing in the morning, and by afternoon my ancient New Jersey registration sticker has been replaced by two PA stickers.

The Salvation Army people had finally picked up the old couch that had been left wasting away on the front porch, so I got this great idea to spend a couple minutes quickly running our new vacuum cleaner over the porch to finally clean it up. I'm feeling very pleased about halfway through when the vacuum starts smoking, so I decide to empty it. Turn it on again and it's still smoking. After just 30 seconds of use I notice it's full again. Now I empty it again, and this time I start reading the manual to get dust out of the various filters and hoses. There's dust spilling out everywhere, all over the porch again, covering the vacuum cleaner and my clothes, rising up as smoke, and I'm sure I'm breathing it in by the pound.

Another minute or so of vacuuming and it's still smoking. I dissect the vacuum again and it's completely full again, in all the filters and hoses. After a couple hours of this, the porch looks a little cleaner, but our trash can is half full of nothing but porch dust, and our poor brand new vacuum cleaner looks like it's just fought a war in the desert and aged 50 years. I use the dust buster to clean it off, and it's been sitting in the dining room ever since looking old and miserable. I've been scared to turn it on, sure it'll start spitting up plumes of porch dust all over our home.

In the evening, I met up for dinner at Lulu's with a student of mine who's in town for a summer program at CMU, during which time Virg bought the first flowers for her garden.

Friday, July 11
Virg planted her new flowers, while I hid inside feeling suddenly very sick, sneezing pretty much continuously all day. Virg thinks it's all that porch dust I inhaled, and I have this vision of my lungs looking like the insides of our vacuum cleaner. I managed to go out for lunch. We tried the nearby New Dumpling House, which turned out to be very good. I ate some udon soup between sneezes into my pile of tissues. In the evening I'm still sneezing too uncontrollably to get out for dinner, so Virg ordered in a couple sandwiches and more soup for me. I called my Dad to let him know that I may be too sick to see him the next day.

Saturday, July 12
I'm feeling the same in the morning, but Dad and Hilary decide they'll take their chances and come visit anyway. By late morning I'm feeling well enough to suggest that Virg and I go to a movie. We settle on a lunchtime showing of Pixar's Wall-E. We know it's got incredible reviews, but we haven't read any. I'm expecting something like Monsters, Inc., except with the wisecracks uttered by an unbearably adorable little robot.

stolen from http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/wall-e/

Being an early showing of a Disney movie, there are lots of little kids in the audience babbling through the previews. The movie starts, and holy crap there's no dialogue in it, and for a while there's just one character--a robot moving garbage around on a totally vacant post-apocalyptic world. But those mundane activities are given this sense of purpose somehow, and the robot is so expressive. 40 minutes into the movie and still no dialogue, but we find ourselves hanging on every movement on screen, with no idea how the story will unfold. And all those little kids are silently engrossed by the movie, too. The movie is like poetry, and we're finding ourselves choked up by it (or perhaps by Thomas Newman and Peter Gabriel's beautiful soundtrack). And although it eventually settles into something a little more formulaic, it's my clear pick so far for the best movie of 2008.

After the movie, Dad and Hilary arrived. We showed them our home, and in the evening, we all went to the fancy Capital Grille steakhouse in downtown (a place that would have to pay a hefty fine if Dave Barry had succeeded in passing his Extra 'e' Tax).

Sunday, July 13
The four of us drove into downtown and parked there, and in accordance with a Pittsburgh tradition, we walked across the Roberto Clemente bridge to PNC Park to see the Pirates lose. But, ah, what a stadium, with its fantastic view of the Pittsburgh skyline across the river. For dinner, we ate well at the Rock Bottom Brewery in the Waterfront.

walking across the bridge to PNC Park

the view from our seats

Monday, July 14
Virg stayed home and worked while Dad, Hilary, and I walked from our home to my future office at CMU, to Shadyside (where we had lunch at Pamela's Diner), and back through Forbes/Murray. It was a great walk in unusually great weather. Must have been over 6 miles. And it was good to learn that I really can walk to Shadyside from either CMU or home.

Dad and I outside my future building

In the evening, the four of us tried the nearby Murray Avenue Grill for dinner, which was fairly good.

We Have Sprouts!

How Does Your Garden Grow?

About 2 weeks after we moved in we still hadn't been in the backyard because there was just so much work to do INSIDE the house it was too overwhelming to add that square footage to our world. But the grass was beginning to get long and we knew we had to do something about it before the neighbors started leaving angry notes, so Dave got the push mower out of the garage, and I started tackling the weeds in the vegetable garden.

After about 2 hours I cleared about 3 feet (out of 20) and it was getting dark. For a couple of days I couldn't go back to it because my back was aching and it was such a chore that I couldn't deal. But then one morning we noticed some people walking around in our yard pulling out vines, and when I asked them what they were doing there, lo and behold they were hired by our landlord to clear all of the crud from the garden and landscaping! They cleared out everything from the veggie bed and turned it over so I could plant. I bought a bunch of flowering perennials from Lowes and put them in the ground.



I also had a couple of impatiens that Jen brought me when she visited:



Later I ordered some seeds from Burpee because I really couldn't afford to keep spending $10/plant to cover the last 10 feet of the garden. I decided that some zucchini would have time to grow, and a pumpkin vine would take up a lot of space and might get big enough by thanksgiving. So I cultivated the rest of the plot and made a couple of small mountains.



Hopefully a pumpkin will grow out of this little hill. I also seeded some lettuces and chard between the flowers. I sure hope those flowers get big enough to provide a little shade to my tender greens!

License And Registration (And Other Complaints)

Ack! I'm getting way behind in this blog, and Virg is now out-publishing me. No good. I'll attempt to speed through a whole bunch of boring stuff.

Saturday, June 28

Virg had already ditched me to see Sex And The City when it opened, but at long last she went to the theater to watch it with me. It was ok. The first hour was stupid, and then it got really stupid, but then if you were willing to buy all that stupidity, the final 90 minutes of this never-ending movie were actually fairly good. For dinner we tried a random Chinese place near us called Chopsticks. As the only customers that night, we were pretty unimpressed, but stayed for a long time anyway, to avoid another typically crazy Pittsburgh lightning storm outside.

Monday, June 30
We found a great random Chinese/Japanese place for lunch on Murray Ave. In the evening, we bought an air conditioning unit for our room, although it took us several days to bother installing it. With all these AC window units, we can't technically lower the temperature much, but it sure feels a lot cooler in here. (We're dreading our first electric bill.) Anyway, we celebrated by pigging out on the yummy Chocolate Raspberry Passion dessert at the Rock Bottom brewery.

Tuesday, July 1
I figured there was no immediate rush to deal with the DMV. Well, back when I was still living in California, I got a bill to re-register my car, and I thought, "Why would I pay money to register my car in California, when I'll already be in Pittsburgh by the time it kicks in?" And so we moved to Pittsburgh, and one day I realized I had let my CA registration run out, leaving us to drive an unregistered vehicle. Not good.

Well, it turns out you can't register a vehicle in Pennsylvania without (1) a Pennsylvania driver's license and (2) Pennsylvania auto insurance. And it also turns out you really need the driver's license in order to get the insurance. So what do you need to get a PA driver's license? Many things, but most importantly, you either need a birth certificate (don't have this) or a passport. No problem. I've got a passport--good for ten years. But a quick glance showed that the ten years were due to run out in two days. Holy crap! Time to run over to the DMV!

Ok. The DMV turns out to be called PennDOT here, probably because it fails to live up to the competent and friendly customer service you'd generally associate with a real DMV. The nearest PennDOT turned out to be all the way out in Monroeville, and it turns out they only do driver's licenses there--no registrations. So, Virg and I show up having no idea if we've got the right paperwork with us, just hoping to talk to someone and ask what we need. The take-a-number machine assigns us number 450. No problem. We're lucky enough to grab a couple of empty seats, and we look at the numbers lit up above the two desks in front of us, and we see that they're on number 390! About 10 minutes later, we look up and see that they're still on 390. Ugh.

And so we waited in those uncomfortable seats for over 2 hours.

Finally they reached 450. The employee who helped us was very friendly and professional, and it turns out that *phew* we actually have everything we need to get our licenses! The waiting was not in vain! Still, we must have been at that desk for over 10 minutes. The employee is very impressed that we've actually filled out the form to get a license. I guess most Pennsylvanians aren't as bright. At one point he starts scribbling a bunch of stuff on a piece of paper, and we wait silently for him to finish. A couple minutes later he gives us the paper, and on it he's written the names and locations of several restaurants he likes in the area (completely illegible, of course). No wonder it took forever for them to call our number! Considering half the people waiting there are new to the area, you'd think this guy might want to have pre-xeroxed a whole stack of illegible restaurant suggestions.

Anyway, now that that's done, it's time to take a number to wait to have our photos taken, thus immortalizing the haircut I'd gotten that morning. Thankfully, this goes pretty quickly, and they print off our new temporary Pennsylvania driver's licenses--good for 14 days. Our "official" driver's licenses would be arriving in the mail. But here's what doesn't make any sense. The temporary IDs aren't crudely-typed folded pieces of paper. They're full-fledged (I love fledging!) plasticky bar-coded cards, sporting two exhausted-looking photos of me (now in both medium and large sizes!), and covered in all sorts of intricate holograms. When our "official" driver's licenses finally arrived in the mail a week later, they were pretty much identical to the temporary ones--except these didn't have the word TEMPORARY stamped across them in red. So why bother with the temporaries if they have the facilities to issue the real things?

Wednesday, July 2

The painter arrived to paint our bedroom this cool light chocolate color that Virg picked out. (It took her all of 2 seconds to decide among the thousands of shades of brown at Lowe's, and it turned out to be a fantastic choice.) All the white paint in our bedroom and on all the moldings and doorways had dark smudges and fingerprints, etc., so thankfully our landlord agreed to have someone paint over it all. So, for a week we had a painter hanging out in our house during the day. He proved to be a nice guy and a pretty good painter who got through a lot of painting very quickly. Still, we were just a little uncomfortable having a stranger in our house, so I picked up a lot of takeout sandwiches for lunch. And we got to try out our guest room bed on the first night when our room was only half-painted.

our newly painted room, featuring new air conditioner unit

Also, we watched Futurama's next movie installment: "The Beast With A Billion Backs"--not nearly as clever as "Bender's Big Score".

Friday, July 4
Virg had the day off, so we spent lunchtime at the movies seeing The Incredible Hulk. It only proved to be incredible for the first half of the movie, in which the script took time to focus on Bruce Banner's struggle to lead a normal life (and Ed Norton was awesome). The second half was just stupid, with the characters making a series of implausible decisions just to pave the way for a contrived final big battle between the Hulk and another giant mutant.

In the evening, we went to the Monroeville Mall to watch fireworks. The fireworks were ok, but the audience was pretty trashy, and going home, it took us 30 minutes to get out of the mall traffic.

Saturday, July 5
Our first visitor arrived--Virg's friend Jen from Ohio! We spent the afternoon exploring Pittsburgh's exciting Strip District. And what's so exciting about it? Don't know. We were bored of this large seedy run-down area in just 10 minutes. Apparently they have cool farmer's-market-type things in the mornings, and then I guess it reverts back to being a dump.

Sunday, July 6
Virg tried out some fancy market called the Food Co-op, which I'm sure she'll want to write all about. Then she and Jen spent the day doing girly shopping. In the evening, we went out for a fancy dinner at an Italian place called Girasole in Shadyside. So yummy good...

Mr. M shows off for Jen by doing battle with his classic arch-nemesis: the DVD player.

Note the new WRISTSTRONG bracelet Virg is sporting to show her solidarity with her husband and Stephen Colbert and other heroic athletes suffering from wrist injuries.

Mr. Guy studies geography.

Ohio State alums know how to party!

The next morning, Jen left and the painter returned.

Wednesday, July 9
Finally, our driver's licenses had arrived in the mail, thereby letting me get the car insured. At last, enough pieces had fallen into place to solve the unregistered car problem. We were grateful to learn you can avoid the PennDOT beast by registering through AAA. On the PennDOT web site, we learned that you need "to bring the following items with you" to register your car:

• title
• proof of pennsylvania insurance
• completed form MV-1 [not availabe online. must be completed by authorized agent]
• tracing of the VIN [or verification by an inspection mechanic]

Tracing of the VIN? It took us a while to figure out this meant literally rubbing a pencil on tracing paper over the vehicle ID number just under the windshield. Problem is, there's just the tiniest space to get in there, and no way to get any leverage to rub a pencil over it. Crayons didn't help either. Clearly I had to get it verified by an inspection mechanic. Problem is, there's no way to find these mysterious people.

After a great deal of searching, I found a list online of all inspection mechanics in the state of Pennsylvania. Downloaded it. Put it into Excel. Sorted by zip code. For everything in our zip, I searched on google maps to find the closest one. Called them, and I got this very helpful guy on the phone, who said he could verify the VIN any time, but I'd need to get the MV-1 form for him. Ugh.

I call AAA to get one of these forms, and I get this horribly rude woman, who says they don't allow the form out of the building. Well, can they verify my VIN at AAA? Only the inspection mechanic can do that. Ok, how do I do this if I can't get the form to the mechanic? They tell me to get a different form, MV-41.

I find the form online, and the first two blanks call for my Pennsylvania title number and registration plate number. (If I had these, I wouldn't need to go through this stupid process in the first place!) To make matters worse, the back of the form states "This application can only be used to correct typographical error of one digit, transposition of two digits, or if the vehicle's engine number has been erroneously recorded as the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN)." This doesn't sound like the right form at all. I call AAA back. Same nasty woman, insisting again that I take this form to the mechanic.

So I do. The mechanic is kind and helpful, and takes care of me immediately. He doesn't balk at the form, so maybe it's the right one after all. He tells me, "I don't know why they tell you to get a tracing. I've never seen a car where it was possible to trace the VIN." Thanks, PennDOT.

Armed with everything but MV-1, I drive my unregistered vehicle over to AAA. I take a number. 26. Wait for a minute. Someone calls "25? 26?" And I'm being helped immediately by a refreshingly pleasant woman. Turns out I've got everything I need, since she fills out MV-1 for me without my ever seeing it. A couple minutes later and they hand me my new registration and license plate. I drive home, take off the CA plates, put on the PA plate (no front plate in PA), and my car is legal at last. Woo hoo!

Virg and I celebrated in the evening by going to a restaurant called Bravo's at the Waterfront. It was a lot like a Macaroni Grill, and we both really enjoyed what we ordered.

Higher Learning

Having had no idea what we were looking at when we tried exploring Carnegie Mellon University on our own, Virg and I decided to go on the official admissions campus tour together. So, on Tuesday, June 24th, the two of us, along with a dozen high school kids and their parents, were given a tour of the various oddities on the CMU campus.

I'll be working in Wean Hall, the big concrete box on the right. The tower in the background is the Cathedral of Learning at the nearby University of Pittsburgh.

Virg can't wait to go to college.

Virg eats some pretty decent Indian food at the University Center.

After all that walking, Virg was tired enough to try out getting home on Pittsburgh's bus system. I still haven't been on a bus here, but it looks like the bus lines will be incredibly convenient for getting between home and CMU (although very confusingly numbered). Anyway, I had arranged to meet with a co-worker to work out my teaching schedule and set up my accounts. It's looking pretty final that I'll be teaching 3 sections of CMU's CS2 course, which is almost exactly what I was teaching in AP Comp Sci AB. Regarding accounts, it turned out there was nothing I could set up until I'm officially on payroll in September.

Some other highlights of the week:

• Wednesday: finding a great desk for Virg at IKEA
• Thursday: getting caught in a giant lightning storm as we attempted to leave the hardware store
• Friday: meeting a former student of mine at CMU and getting lunch at nearby Lulu's (Asian noodles)

Home Life

Saturday, June 21st, on the day after the Ducky Tour, Virg and I drove to an area of Pittsburgh called Shadyside. The main street there is called Walnut Street, and it's about as close as we've found to something like Palo Alto's University Ave.

Shadyside's Walnut St., as stolen from Wikipedia

There we grabbed sandwiches at the Pittsburgh Deli Company (one of our guidebook's first let-downs), walked around a lot, looked through stores, and stopped for coffee. The highlight for Virg was a cute store called Kawaii Gifts, with the largest collection we'd ever seen of Hello Kitty and other weird Japanese collectibles. Virg will be redecorating our home to look like the insides of that store at an approx. rate of two silly items per store visit.

Capping off an enjoyable, work-free day, we enjoyed a good dinner at the Point Brugges Cafe and went back out for some phenomenal chocolate cake at the Gullifty's Restaurant near our home.

The next day it was time to get serious about settling in, and Virg was in heaven on her first trip to Pittsburgh's Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. We had an excellent brunch at Harris Grill, unpacked a lot, and then Virg treated me to our first home-cooked meal in Pittsburgh--some yummy stir-fry. And the next day she cooked an even yummier steak-and-mushrooms meal.

That was Monday, and therefore Virg's first official day of working from home. We're slowly making the blue room in the back of the upstairs into Virg's office, and I've since moved my desk/computer set-up down to the dining room.

Virg gets to know her new co-workers.

Backyard Tourists

We spent our first week in Pittsburgh cooped up in our little area of Squirrel Hill, waiting for deliveries, spending a fortune at the hardware store, and hiding from the constant barrage of severe lightning storms (seriously, God hates Pittsburgh). But on the day after our belongings arrived, we were finally ready to get out and see Pittsburgh as it was meant to be seen--in duck form.

Yes, we took a Just Ducky Tour--20 little kids and us packed in a brightly painted combination bus/boat amphibious vehicle. The tour was led by two very entertaining comedic tourist guides, whose job it is to point out everything stupid about Pittsburgh, and to prompt you to call out "quack quack quack" at irritated people on the sidewalks.

The Ducky Tour begins across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, so I was pretty psyched that we'd have to cross it in boat form. Alas, we crossed rivers four times over the course of the tour, and always by driving across a bridge. But we did get to cruise on the water at 5 mph on the Ohio River, not far from the football stadium.

Virg quacks enthusiastically as she cruises around Pittsburgh in boat form.

It was actually an excellent, entertaining, and comprehensive tour, in spite of the little kids and quacking. Virg snapped about a thousand pictures, so we'll soon post images of Pittsburgh from every possible angle. A highlight: early in the tour, Virg raised her hand that we were from out-of-town, and I had to remind her that she's actually "from Pittsburgh."

outpacing the green Ducky Tour boat around The Point

Afterward, we ate a good lunch at the Houlihan's in Station Square, next to wear the Ducky Tours leave. Then we decided to check out the nearby Monongahela Incline--a pair of very steep railway tracks that each take a single carload of people up and down Mount Washington--the big hill across the Monongahela River from downtown.

The Monongahela Incline

The Incline itself was kind of lame, but the view from the top was spectacular.

Virg loves her Pittsburgh.


Dave looks wistfully toward CMU.

We walked the mile from there to the top of Pittsburgh's other Incline, found nothing there, and retraced our steps to get back home.

Near the Duquesne Incline, a billboard blocks my favorite view of the city.

The true measure of the success of this outing is that we have since been completely unmotivated to do anything else touristy.