|
ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
A Live Journal mirror of this site can be found here, so now you can leave me your comments — even if you aren't a Live Journal member!
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
1:00 p.m.
|
Well, we have done it again. With some minor updates to our 2007 route, and a major change from the original 2006 on-road route, the Walking to West Virginia Committee reports its second success with a 39.5-mile hike from CMU to just near the town of Colliers, W.Va. It was a pretty interesting weekend. We had a crew of seven walkers (Rebecca, Eight, William, Chris, me, Evan, and freshman Alex) set to go for Saturday morning, and Kempy and Greta made us a huge pasta dinner Friday night that concluded with a four-layer chocolate cake of such massive proportions that the 10 people at the table combined ate less than half of it. More heavy rain was predicted for the next day, though, so we were wondering if it would have been better to postpone the hike for a day. In the end, I decided to wake up at 4 a.m., check the radar, then call around to get everyone else up if we decided to still go for it. We decided to still go for it, and so around 5:00 a.m. a party of four (Rebecca, Eight, Evan, and me) left the house and headed to the UC to meet up with the others coming in from Squirrel Hill. This is where we discovered that the universe sometimes has a sense of humor: about 15 seconds out of the house, we got a few light sprinkles. "It is now raining," I said, starting to fish in my backpack for my little umbrella. Another few seconds after that and we were in the middle of a regular monsoon, which of course cut power to the whole block. We eventually arrived at the UC quite soaked, even after dodging through Resnik and West Wing on the way. Rebecca and Eight pulled the plug on their trips right then, and at 5:30 a reduced set of five left campus and headed towards downtown. The plan had been to cross the Birmingham Bridge during sunrise, but we were a half-hour late in leaving and the sky was cloudy anyway, so we missed it. There was some more rain heading down Fifth Avenue, and then a bit more around Mile 13, but that was it. The rest of the day turned partly sunny and quite warm — too warm, I thought: we easily hit the predicted high of 28 C for the day. I didn't take any timing information down on the way, mostly (I suppose) because in making the trip for the third time I wasn't pulling out my map very frequently. Chris and I had also planned to take voice notes, but I discovered almost right away that my MP3 player's battery was dead. We made decent time to Oakdale, where we stopped again at the Oakdale Diner for lunch. (I avoided the fish and pink lemonate this time; we all had hamburgers and water except for Chris, who had soup and an egg salad sandwich.) Resumed walking again after a nice break. After Midway, in what I keep thinking of as the "Sound of Music" hills, William had increasinly painful foot problems, which led to him and Chris dropping out at Bulger, around Mile 28. Kempy and Greta rescued them in the car, and then Evan, Alex, and I kept going. I was the slow one. After a very fast-paced zip into Burgettstown, I was really really glad to sit down in front of the grocery store (like last year) and drink a liter of Gatorade. We also went over to the old ice cream stand, the scene of our abortive rescue in 2006, but we found it had been replaced by a sort of sign company. Instead we settled for a box of four drumsticks from the grocery store, which we ate on our way out of town. The new part of this year's route was the Panhandle Trail past Burgettstown — in 2007, the "official" trail still stopped two miles short of the town, and we had continued on a rough dirt-bike trail. Now the dirt-bike part's been brought up to the better standard for the Panhandle Trail, which now looks like it goes about six miles into West Virginia. We crossed the border at 10:12 p.m. on the trail after a total trip time of 16 hours and 45 minutes; there's a little obelisk marker about four feet high marking the spot, with a picnic table on the West Virginia side that we thought would be more fun if it were straddling the line. (Imagine a picnic: —"Could you pass the cheese?" —"I don't know... that's interstate commerce now. We'll have to see about putting a tax on it.") We had arranged to meet Ross in a parking area that, on the trail's billboard maps, should have been at the intersection of the trail with Harmon Creek Road. We were just getting there (and realizing that there was no parking lot!) when Ross called: due to malfunctioning high-beams, he'd hit a big pothole on his way down from Route 22, blown a tire, and was stuck on the side of the road a few miles north of us. We worked out our relative positions and decided to start walking towards him, since he expected a fairly long repair. Thus we set out westward for the town — well, "unincorporated place" — of Colliers, which Ross was a bit north of. I didn't mind walking on the road so much; there were fewer mosquitos and more things to distract me from looking up at the stars and missing someone, although I bet Even regretted the lack of synchonized fireflies. We were just coming into Colliers when Ross called again to say that someone had stopped and helped him fix the tire, so he was underway again and would meet us shortly. He did, but by then I was too tired to think about checking the time. I kind of collapsed into the front seat of the car and started directing Ross back to Pittsburgh. He wanted to avoid freeways with the spare tire, so we crawled in reverse along our 2006 walking route. It was interesting to see again all the places we've missed by taking the trail these last two times, but I was having lots of trouble staying awake and alert, despite the fact that I never fall asleep in cars. I think it took us about two hours to get home; at 1 a.m. I went to bed and slept kind of fitfully for the next eight and a half hours. |
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
3:14 p.m.
|
Very busy week last week. Sunday was the post-hike recovery day. I sat at home except for a quick 20-minute walk to Wean and back, and we had some people over for dinner and cards. Nertz is on a huge resurgence in our house: I think we are averaging about four times a week, and Greta and I are both self-declared Nertz addicts. It's been keeping me from doing as much work as I should in the evenings, but it's great fun to actually be doing something besides staring at my monitor and staying either on campus or holed up in my room. During the days, one of my main tasks was to get everything in order for my French visa application, which I made in Washington, D.C. last Friday morning. Actually getting to the point where I could get there was... somewhat annoying. I hauled my car in to the mechanic's a week in advance, since I needed an oil change and state inspection anyway and had also sprouted a pretty bad coolant leak when I drove home to see my parents for Easter. The mechanic had it in all day, and then around 4:30 called to say that I have a list of problems with this car about as long as my arm, using 10-point font for the list. The short-term effect is that I had to pay $72 for a rental car (plus gas and tolls) to go to my visa appointment, and the long-term effect is that I'll probably just ditch the car instead of spending what looks like a four-digit sum to repair it. Even though I've been (even in this journal) a somewhat long-standing anti-car advocate, the thought of being without one has yet to completely sit well with me. I think the main problem is that I'm not convinced that always having to rent a car (and buy insurance for it from the rental company) is going to come out any cheaper on a yearly basis. Sure it will if I only need a car five days a year to see my parents or go camping, but I think in the general case it's more complicated than that. Well, anyway, I picked up an economy-class Hyundai Accent from that new little Hertz place at Baum and Negley Thursday afternoon and duly arrived that evening at the town in Virginia named after Messrs. Dunn and Loring, where I was staying with Car. Friday morning into the city in 30-degree heat (or much more, if you believe one of those bank thermometers I saw at Dupont Circle, which said 98 Fahrenheit). I had a one-mile walk from Car's to the metro stop, and then a two-mile walk from where I left the metro to the French embassy, which would normally be all imposing with gates and guards and such if the stuff inside didn't look like it was built in the '70s. You have to give up your driver's license at the gate, at which point they issue you with a sort of pass for the area you're going to inside. The visa area looks a lot like a DMV, except the administration people are behind those horrible glass walls with fist-sized screens in them, through which of course you hear almost nothing. I was called up to the windows three different times during the processing, and I approached two of them in French — perhaps, in retrospect, a bad idea because of the aforementioned sound-blocking glass walls. It was kind of hard to make out exactly what was happening, and then I was a bit flustered and out of practice too and so didn't respond in quite the nice fluid way I'd planned. At least I got my visa in about 95 minutes, even though it's not for a long enough duration and I'll have to get a carte de séjour from the Grenoble préfecture once I get there. From about noon until 10:30 p.m. I roamed wild in the city. First I walked through Georgetown and some other places to meet Sharon at Dupont Circle. We had lunch and then browsed through a couple of bookstores and a cupcake shop, then walked around down by the White House and the Farragut station until a further refreshment stop at a Potbelly's, and then we got caught in a crazy half-hour downpour complete with hail, which we watched (and experienced!) from an awning over a revolving door to a closed restaurant at the corner of 19th and L Streets. After the flood, we met up with Sarah (from high school — I think it's been maybe four years since I saw her last?). She and I had dinner at a Thai place back up past Dupont Circle, then walked around a bit until I took the train back to Car's. So kind of a late night and a long day overall. I didn't bring a travel alarm with me, thinking that I'd just use my cell phone, but I didn't expect that my cell phone was going to hit low battery on Friday and then start beeping periodically overnight. I knew it was absolutely imperative to be on the road by 7 a.m. since the rental car was due in Pittsburgh before noon, but every time the phone beeped I was so afraid that it was going to shut itself off that I woke up and checked it to make sure it was still on. So I think I got about an hour of sleep that night; a pit stop on the PA Turnpike was strongly indicated so I could get some tea and not drive off the road. Total time driving back was still only four hours and 23 minutes, though, so I did pretty all right. Now I am spending the next two weeks in San Francisco, but the details of that trip will have to be in a separate post. |
Thursday, July 2, 2009
1:01 p.m.
|
Linguistic digression! I haven't had one in a while, and although writing about listening to air traffic control between Denver and San Francisco is fun, it's less exciting from a discovery point of view because it doesn't take very long before you figure out how the whole system works just by listening in. I came across a Thai word two night ago, on the other hand, that is pretty much impenetrable without expert help. As Bill Nye says, "consider the following." The word "สกปรก" is made up of five consonants. (If you want, that's "sgprg" when strictly romanized.) The Thai alphabet is something of an abugida, which means that it has implicit vowels. There are two: a syllable can be made up of one written consonant, in which case there's an implicit [a] (or more like [aʔ]) at the end, or you can have two written consonants and an implicit [o] between them. Together, this means that as soon as you have a run of two or more consonants, the reading gets massively ambiguous if you don't have any real knowledge of what things are words and what aren't. If your skill be mathematical, you might start wondering about just how many readings there are — I came up with a little recurrence. Say r(n) gives the number of readings for a string of n consonants, so r(0) = 1 and r(1) = 1, (assuming there's exactly one way to read a null word, which is to vocalize nothing). Now, given r(n), I think you can define r(n+1) without too much trouble. For each reading of length n, you could add a new syllable with consonant n+1 and an implicit [aʔ], so if there are r(n) readings at length n there are also r(n) readings at length n+1. Or the new consonant at n+1 can combine with the consonant at n to make a new syllable with an implicit [o], and this new syllable attaches to all the completed readings of length n–1, of which there are r(n–1). Thus we discover that r(n+1) = r(n) + r(n–1): oh hey, the Fibonacci numbers. So given the word "สกปรก" with five consonants, the non-native Thai speaker (or computer) has eight equally plausable alternatives to pick from. But wait, there's more! I ignored consonant clusters — things in English like "tr" or "sh" that have two letters but only one sound. That happens (a little bit) in Thai too, so we have to further consider the case in r(n+1) that the last two consonants form a syllable that uses them both as an initial cluster followed by an implicit [aʔ]. That adds a term of r(n–1) to the recurrence and now leaves us with r(n+1) = r(n) + 2r(n–1), so now our five-consonant string has 18 possible pronunciations. But wait, there's even more! It turns out that "สกปรก" is pronounced [sok.ɡaʔ.prok] ("ก," which I'd romanized to "g," is devoiced at the end of a syllable), which wasn't one of the original eight readings and still isn't one of the 18. That's because, if you match things up carefully between the Thai and the IPA, you can see that we reused the first "ก" — it's once at the end of the first syllable in order to get [sok], and then again on its own in the second to make [ɡaʔ]. This is another trick of Thai to trip up the unsuspecting foreigner: you can turn what looks like (well, "could be") a two-syllable word into a three-syllable word by reading one of the consonants twice. I had a book some time back that mentioned this, but I don't remember if it's specific to two-syllable words or if it can happen anywhere, so I won't try to work out a new recurrence term for it. I think things are already complicated enough! Ah yes, and "สกปรก" means "dirty," by the way. |
Monday, July 6, 2009
3:05 p.m.
|
This three-day Fourth of July weekend had three very active days in it. I suppose it doesn't hurt that almost everyone in the world is either living in the Bay Area permanently, for the summer, or for some visiting purpose just now. We started Friday with KGB Urban Hike #6, which Dan named "Maurice" when we told him that all of our previous walks have had names. Maurice was a nice little 14-miler (route here) down 3rd Street, across the peninsula through a bit of Daly City, and back up the other side to Ocean Beach in the city again. We ran into some amazing street names. Dan got really excited when we passed Yosemite Avenue followed immediately by Armstrong Avenue — "We wrapped around!" he said. I thought this was just a little joke of the moment at first, but then I started recalling previous cross-streets: Wallace, Underwood, Thomas, Shafter, Quesada... we actually had wrapped around, and Dan had been tracking the names for around 15 blocks! It turns out that particular area off 3rd Street goes through the alphabet about one and a half times; we got as far as M again before turning off onto Bayshore. Later we ended up in the land of European city streets — that was just before our lunch stop at a small Mexican restaurant near Geneva and Mission with good food and low prices. Later still we played the alphabet game again in the Sunset District. At Ocean Beach I found a whole sand dollar, and then we took the Muni home. Alan and I skipped the group dinner in order to go grocery shopping, but then a bunch of people came over afterwards and we played Twister Chess and Nertz. Saturday started a sort of high-class old-style weekend out of the city: the kind of thing I always think of well-off couples doing in the '50s by going out to some friend's country house. We even took the train, although it was only Caltrain to Mountain View and I complained about the $6 one-way fare. Dan hosted the big Fourth of July barbecue and pool party at his apartment in Mountain View, where some very well-timed games of Boggle kept me from frying myself in the sun too badly. Dan and dfontain revealed themselves to be quite good at the game, although things weren't as unbalanced as when Jessica used to beat the tar (and the rat, and the art...) out of Mark and me in our suite senior year. At a certain point we collected ourselves together and walked to the Shoreline Amphitheatre, or at least a park near it, for the fireworks, which were completely underwhelming and lasted about 12 minutes. Afterwards there was another general call for food, so we stopped at the Safeway near Dan's and had a sort-of pasta party when we got back. I have to add the modifier because I fell asleep partway through, and a number of other people got all tangled up together and collapsed into a lazy blob on the floor. Em and Carolyn stayed there; Alan and I spent the night at Jeff's apartment not far away. The plan for Sunday was what people call the "bouncy castle," which is really Sky High Sports, which is really a huge room where the floors and walls are made out of trampolines! Among the things to spend $9 on in this area (where your choices these days include about three fourths of a round trip on the Caltrain, four and a half Muni rides, or just barely an aller simple between downtown and the SFO airport on BART), I think an hour in this place is the best. I bounced impossibly high distances into the air, ricocheted off walls, hopped between trampoline-squares, and fell purposefully more times than I could keep track of, and when they told us that our allotted time was up I didn't want to get out and wouldn't have minded going for another hour. (Hint: Monday though Thursday you can, for an additional $6.) The mechanics of flight take a few minutes to get used to, and I never did quite master throwing myself backwards into a wall, but at the end my only damage was a scraped elbow from once rotating too far on a fall and catching myself back there instead of with my hands. I have to also mention our lunch beforehand, which was at a place called Sizzler's in Santa Clara — or at least I'll call it that, because I spent eight years in southeastern Michigan and therefore earned the linguistic right to stick possessives on the end of place names that don't officially have them. The procedure at this place seems to be that you ask for the $9.99 unlimited salad bar, and then they tell you that you can essentially order a full extra meal at no additional charge, so you do that and have enough food to last a couple of days. I had a big plate of salad with a bowl of clam chowder to start, and then my half-pound hamburger and fries came out. I dispatched what I could from that (Alan ate the rest) and then got a plate of fruit and light chocolate mousse for dessert. Which meant I didn't even come close to sampling the ice cream, pasta, or taco bars, not to mention all the Midwest-style picnic items like pasta salad and Jell-O. Note to self (or others): When visiting this place again, make sure you can either get to a refrigerator shortly afterwards, or be sure to bring along a portable cooler. Today is recovery day, which means that so far I've read through a bunch of CMU Bash and checked up with Live Journal, Facebook, my e-mail, and the news. At some point I should get out and walk around a bit, but that might not be until later. The sun looks pretty strong just now and my nose is already peeling from the weekend. |
Thursday, July 9, 2009
3:08 p.m.
|
I had an excellent urban hike, I guess I'd call it, yesterday afternoon. The goal was to visit Twin Peaks, which Jeff and Alan had said was a really great view, and based on where the place is I decided the secondary goal would be to walk the entire length of Market Street. It's only about 4.5 miles, but it feels rather longer than that, and you go through quite a cross-section of the city. The last mile or so (after Castro), when you're starting to wind up the hill to Twin Peaks, gives a pretty good indication of what Pittsburgh would look like if land values there were higher — a lot of stacked-up-looking apartment buildings with huge windows facing off the side of the hill. The view, I have to say, is well worth it. Completely without premeditation, I happened to fulfill one of my life's goals (I guess this would be a tertiary goal of the walk now?) somewhere in the vicinity of Market and Grand View when a British person thought I was British too! It happened like this: I was walking along thinking to myself, as sometimes happens, in a British accent just for fun, trying to work out the sounds and get the vocal pitch down into my own register instead of in this fake high-up thing I somehow come up with when I'm trying to do the accent. A guy appeared walking along the sidewalk in the opposite direction from me, decked out with frame pack and everything as if he'd just come off the AT and was heading into the town post office to check General Delivery. He asked me "Could I use your telephone to call my friend?" — and the combination of his accent (which I don't think I consciously processed until later) with the thoughts that had been running through my head for the previous half-hour produced "Oh, I haven't got one with me" with all the right vowel changes just subtly enough to make it sound natural. The response: "Are you English?" and the further information that the guy I was talking to was himself from Leeds, although just back from India and looking for a friend's house "near Twin Peaks" whose address he didn't remember. I suppose, in some roundabout, twisted way, that I have to thank Greenpeace for the encounter. They were all over the streets, you see. I first stopped at a farmers' market near Civic Center and got snagged by a guy called Alex from Environment California. He sounded like he'd never got more than two words into his pitch before, and I'm not a very assertive cutter-offer of speech except when I fail, so he got quite a bit into it with me until I was able to slowly get at the non-monetary option of filling out a card in support of their initiatives. (But I didn't want them to start sending me the world's supply of junk mail, so I only wrote in "Greg H., Pittsburgh, PA.") Anyway, I got away eventually and walked on several more blocks until I was corralled by a guy from Greenpeace standing on another corner. This guy followed me for half a block trying to get me to make "even" a 50¢-a-day commitment before I finally was able to derail the nagging by saying I'll look at their website and see what I can do later. (Argh, why can't these people just collect petition signatures or something instead of always wanting addresses and money?) Well, after the second encounter I kept a sharp eye out for further people in blue shirts and clipboards and narrowly escaped one more at the next block. After that I decided that the next solicitor was going to get about 30 seconds of a fake British accent and plausible story to match ("Erm, actually, I've already signed on back home... the Warwickshire chapter."), and that was what got me set off again thinking in a British accent before I met the guy from Leeds. Twin Peaks, to get back to the actual point here, is maybe only 1000 feet above sea level, but from a certain angle it's the first thing to block the wind in a quarter of the planet, so the moving air up there is, uh, rather strong. Not gusty, but just a very constant hard-blowing wind. I had to set my camera's shutter speed to 1/1250 in order to feel confident that the lens wouldn't be shaking too much during exposure time. I also managed to lean pretty far backwards, into the wind, before feeling like I was actually going to have a chance at falling. There are in fact two peaks, looking roughly the same, above a little figure-8 roadway that goes around from the viewing area just below the actual tops. I went up to both peaks: from the road it's only about a 100-foot climb or so, so some other people were doing it too and one of them took a picture of me standing in front of the city with my hair all crazy. It may appear on the Internet soon after I've had a chance to go through the shots on my camera. |
Friday, July 10, 2009
10:20 p.m.
|
Activities for today: I joined Hostelling International with a one-year membership for $28. It seems like it should actually pay off — HI hostels in France and Switzerland require you to be a member in order to stay there, and Canadian HI hostels give you a discount. This is obviously relevant to my interests for spending the fall in France (and traveling as much as a small budget will allow on the weekends), plus the MT Summit conference in Ottawa next month is taking place about two blocks from an HI hostel, and this gives me more ammunition to argue that I should go (if I need to argue) since I have a new way to keep costs down. I think I leave for France in about seven or eight weeks: I booked my tickets a few days ago, and the Jour J is Thursday, Sept. 3. Outside of my computer, I have understood about 25 percent of what's happened in my world for the last 50 hours. I've nominally learned 12 new Thai words, not from picking them out in conversation but by studying them in a little book when I have nothing else to do, but compared to the number of words I've heard go by it's an astronomically small percentage. I should be seizing this opportunity to test out what I can say, but I always feel too nervous and have thus just spend two days feeling very isolated instead. I am beginning to revolt by switching to French when talking to Alan, which at least makes me feel a little more competent in some linguistic arena. |
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
3:38 p.m.
|
Well, home again after a very nice — what was that? — 16 days in San Francisco. I think the only reason that it doesn't feel completely weird to be back in Pittsburgh yet is because I came back on an overnight flight via Washington, D.C., and getting only two hours of sleep is enough to throw me off even without traveling. I cannot, for example, make up my mind so far as to whether today is Tuesday or Wednesday: when I first got home, checked my e-mail, and saw the usual reminder for the Wednesday 12:15 GALE conference call, I thought "Oops, I guess I'm missing it right about now, eh?" Then, an hour later in the cluster, I decided I was silly for getting ahead by a day when the call was actually tomorrow, and since then I've seen the day of the week on computer terminals enough to re-convince me that I had it right the first time! I'm hoping this wears off tomorrow with a full night's sleep on an actual bed again. Only one reasonably interesting incident on the trip home. We were taking off from San Francisco at 11:22 p.m. and arriving in Washington at 7:30 a.m. Eastern time (i.e. effective 4:30), so most of the passengers on the plane decided to go to sleep even before the usual drinks were served. I had a cranberry juice and read a bit of a book of F. Scott Fitzgerald stories I had, and then at a certain point I shut off my light, pulled the window cover down, and put my seat back some amount so I could try to sleep. From behind me suddenly came a querulous voice: "You really can't go all the way back. You're squooshing us back here." Upon inspection, the complaint belonged to an older-middle-aged lady, ridiculously done up (you will remember this is at night) in large plastic-rimmed sunglasses and what looked like a sunhat. Further, she wasn't even sitting directly behind me — I had seat 22A, and this apparition was sitting in 23B. So even if I was squooshing anyone, it couldn't have been her. I assumed she was speaking for the guy actually sitting behind me, who looked like he could be her husband but who was apparently asleep. I decided to compromise: since I'd pushed my seat back maybe two thirds or three fourths of the distance it would go, I pulled it back to about a third. Sunglasses lady just made a pushing-away motion with her hand and shook her head, so I pulled the seat back up to full upright and spent the next two hours or so trying to sleep that way. Scant success. A person more brave and more ready-tongued than me would have come up with a snappy riposte that, while certainly not rude, would have firmly expressed that her 14 inches of legroom were safe from any supposed marauding 20-somethings in the row ahead, and that all this particular 20-something wanted to do was not sleep bolt upright in a chair. I wish that person had been sitting in 22A, or at least 22B and had taken an interest in the proceedings of his or her neighbor. In Washington I narrowly missed (by my own doing) a chance to get what turned out to be a free round-trip flight on United that could even be transferred to another person. The screen at the gate to Pittsburgh said they were looking for volunteers to change to a later flight, but that later flight was at something like 12:55 p.m. instead of my programmed 8:55 a.m. Now free flights are always good, especially for someone who makes little money and has need to fly a lot, but I didn't particularly want to be stuck in Dulles airport for six hours with only half an F. Scott Fitzgerald and no free Internet. There were also plans to meet Ben on campus at 1:30 for a return to our usual weightlifting. I decided to get some cheap breakfast at a suitable spot while I thought it over a bit. Coming back, I found two volunteers already in the process of changing their tickets, which was when I found out what the prize was, and apparently they didn't need any more after that because there was no further announcement. Oh well... maybe next time. From tomorrow we are back to something like routine for about six and a half weeks, and then it's time for MT Summit and (very quickly after that) France. This weekend I'm going backpacking with Eric and Paul in West Virginia, though, so I only have a few days of boring old work before running off for something else again. |
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
11:47 a.m.
|
Went backpacking this weekend with Eric and Paul, down in the Roaring Plains area of the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. We covered at least twice five miles, so I get to check off another state on my hiking list. I suppose the name "Roaring Plains" is related to the Roaring Creek that's marked on maps, but the actual waterways that we happened to cross (or, in one instance, walk in for some distance) had a rather different character. At one point I asked Eric, when he had the map, if he was sure it didn't say we were supposed to cross Boring Creek instead. On the plus side, that meant that our elevation changes were pretty minimal. Otherwise, it didn't take long to remember how annoying it is hiking with a pack. The weight isn't a problem — especially on a short weekend trip with three people — but it increases my size in all three dimensions such that I have a harder time fitting through branches, under fallen trees, etc. without getting constantly caught or snagged on things. That turned out to be an especially notable concern down at this place, since most of the trails are unofficial, and those trails — we use this term quite loosely — are often more like bushwhacks that someone had once done before and jotted down on a little map. Even with a map, a lot of the junctions or turns are almost impossible to pick out. We opted for a particularly unofficial route after running into a guy from Pittsburgh at the trailhead, who gave us a map he had and told us about this point where two valleys come together with a "330-degree" scenic view and the largest elevation change in the state. Well, he wasn't lying about the view: it was quite amazing when I crawled out on the very tip of some rocks and looked down more than 2000 feet. If you want to follow along at home, have a look at this map. We started Friday night approximately at the "B" marker, then walked Saturday south and a little west to get to that big point at the bottom of the map that would be Texas if the flat area were the U.S. We camped a bit past it that night, then wound our way through the valley to the north and back to where we had parked again Sunday. Sunday's part also included a long lunch stop with tea and some time to pick a bunch of wild blueberries, which were growing all over the place. Eventually back to the cars around 3:30, which was a little later than we were planning, but which got me, even after a stop at the Petersburg, W.Va. Wal-Mart for ice cream, back to Pittsburgh again in Eric's car around 8:30 p.m. |
Monday, July 27, 2009
6:01 p.m.
|
Very busy and very fun birthday weekend. The day itself started (Friday morning) with my discovery that I have the same birthday as a single-appearance cartoon woodpecker, which I suppose is of some interest. The day at work was all right — kind of busy: I had to give a research update at the AVENUE meeting at 3:00, and of course the slides weren't ready (or at least ready enough) until about 15 minutes beforehand. Then Jon and I got some parsing running on the cluster, and I went home a little before 6 with the mission to convince my housemates to come out to dinner with me. Before I could complete the mission, the doorbell rang, and I went out to the porch to find a large box with my name on it. It proved to contain 32 (very good!) English muffins sent as a present by a certain person, of which we have managed to eat something like eight so far. It's going to be very nice not having to worry about breakfast for a while. Then Kempy and Greta came home with Rebecca, and they had a nice bouquet of flowers for me from that same certain person. I did manage to get the three of them and Philip interested in dinner at the Rose Tea Cafe, since I'd been wanting bubble tea for about two weeks continuously. They also insisted on paying for my dinner, even though I was the one asking them to go. (Thank you!) Ice cream at Rita's, and then home for games of cards that lasted until 2:30 a.m. The evening definitely made up for the rather indifferent week I had at work, culminating in something of a talking-to during my advisor meeting on Thursday. Saturday morning my parents plus Chris and John were expected; they got in around 1:00, and then we went to the Waterfront to have lunch at Uno's. It's not quite the Uno's we remember from the very early '90s in Ann Arbor, but they still have deep-dish pizza and the sauce still has big chunks of tomatoes in it. (I think Alan and I confirmed as much when we went there a few years ago.) After lunch we walked along that bit of trail along the river behind all the restaurants, until it started to get really dark and windy and we had to make a dash for the cars. At home I used all of our clean mugs to make tea, and then we had the required Heinen's chocolate cake with whipped white frosting. (I also don't have to worry about teatime for the next few weeks — Chris and John got me a box of tea and a bunch of biscuits to have with it.) Chris and John were staying the night out in Green Tree, so around 8:00 the three of us decided to go out there and swim in the hotel pool. I looked up buses back and found the last 36D passed near the hotel between 9:30 and 9:45. We managed to be done swimming, changed again, and at the bus stop by 9:30, but I somehow muddled my directions, waited on the wrong side of the street, and didn't realize my error — of course — until the actual bus went by in the opposite direction. Faced with the task of carting me back to the city, Chris proposed a stop at Taco Bell first, which turned out to be on the walking route to West Virginia near Poplar Street and Noblestown Road. Then home for me; we managed to get just behind a 61A on Forbes, so I jumped out of the car in Oakland and got the rest of the way on the bus. Sunday we wandered Schenley Park a bit, ending up in Squirrel Hill for lunch at Aladdin's. All three of us feel the same way about what I call the "throw-up sticks" at the near playground, meaning that we're too old to be able to enjoy them anymore. Chris and John weren't used to much walking, so after lunch we took a pretty direct way home and stayed there until they had to leave. I had dinner at the Chinese buffet — our usual Sunday affair, it seems — with Ian, Dan, and Keith. |
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
9:18 p.m.
|
For having missed the first bridge night while I was in California, I now seem to be exiled from the activity. This means that, since I don't feel like working, I've spent the evening having dinner and watching "Voyager" episodes instead of getting the heck away from my computer for any fraction of the day. To prevent this from occurring, I seek (but not in that "SWF" way) the following: either three other people who are interested in playing bridge — though not necessarily with any skill, since I only got to play once before people moved on — or something else to do on Tuesday nights. My mistake this time around for not giving anyone a call or IM in advance. |
Thursday, July 30, 2009
12:20 a.m.
|
I know this is more than three months late, but I finally finished editing photos from Carnival. They're now posted on my photos site. Enjoy! In case you wanted to ignore all the rain and junk this week and think back to that nice early-spring time... |
Friday, July 31, 2009
1:19 p.m.
|
Oh my goodness who gave it permission to rain so much? I mean, I guess it's making the grass and other plants very green, much longer than you'd expect for mid- to late summer, but I'm getting kind of blue. This is the wrong time of year to be sloshing through the puddles during a half-day rain. According to the way of the world — at least as we learned it in elementary school — it's April shower that bring May flowers, and Mayflowers, as we've all been told, bring Pilgrims. Pilgrims, in turn, bring Pennsylvania horrible outdated laws, like that no vehicle shall operate at reasonable freeway speeds within 400 miles of a construction zone, or that alcohol may only be purchased from special stores where you have to buy enough to make sure you can get really drunk. That brings us to the fourth week in July, 2009, when the cycle apparently begins all over again. You people should be on the lookout for crocuses and tulips and such things, then, just about the time the new freshmen are arriving. Maybe we can put one over on the rest of the nation's farmers by getting in a second growing season before it starts to snow. Otherwise, I will be hiding out in my room because ugly grey skies and pouring rain pretty much kill off any remaining shred of motivation I have to go running — and I desperately need to go running. So far I've finished the entire first season of "Voyager." |
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
11:41 a.m.
|
The weather has improved. Since Friday afternoon, when I guess my complaint was addressed by the Pittsburgh Celestial Weather Department, I have gone running and rollerblading, and I'm hoping to run again shortly today (i.e. just after writing this) and with Philip tomorrow evening. Also played some ITG with Owen yesterday afternoon, but I didn't do so well at that. More of my activities have involved in-the-field strength training, though, in the form of putting heavy books into boxes and moving the heavy boxes out into the hallway. I sure picked the wrong year to be LTI librarian (if I was trying to shirk responsibility) because this year it's the librarian's responsibility to pack up the place for the move to the Gates Center. The "catalog" I have to work with, such as it is, is an Excel spreadsheet last updated in August 2006, but there's very little in the library published any time this decade. (The place has served as a sort of dumping ground for stuff other people don't want, it seems, but the stuff they don't want is all tech reports from the late '80s.) So it's been an interesting historical jaunt, I suppose. By myself, I managed to catalog and pack only four boxes of books in about two hours on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but then Sunday I got the very helpful help of Lea and Ian, and by the end of the day — five hours? — we had 16 new boxes in the hallway. Today the total stands at 23, I think, since I only did a few more yesterday. Mary Jo, our moving coordinator, thinks that workers may be coming to dismantle the shelves tomorrow, so I think the rest will just get roughly sorted by type and dumped into boxes without noting everything on the catalog. I estimate maybe as many as 15 boxes to go, so, uh, if anyone's got nothing better to do later today, Newell-Simon 4501 is a good bet on where to find a time filler. |
Sunday, August 9, 2009
1:42 p.m.
|
It's been quite a full week — of almost everything but work, it seems, although I got through my advisor meeting all right on Thursday. Physical activity has been happening almost daily, which makes me really happy because it always makes me feel better, both physically and mentally. I mentioned the ITG on Monday already; I ran Tuesday, weightlifted with Ben Wednesday, ran Thursday (not as far as I would have liked, but I put in some running up the Gesling bleacher stairs to make up for it), weightlifted with Ben and ran with Eight Friday, then biked yesterday. (For what I think was a two-hour bike ride, the distance covered wasn't all that great. Future riders should note to stay off Route 65 if at all possible, maybe unless there's no traffic and you're going downhill: this is a divided highway with a 45-m.p.h. speed limit. Also, if anyone wants to put in some pavement markings to keep bicyclists from losing the North Shore trail among the stadiums and that horrid new casino, I'd support that.) The running Friday was also interesting because it was the first time in a while I had access to a clock of some kind during the activity. I was hoping that I would have gotten a little faster — or at least not much worse — since the spring, and I also thought that having someone else running wtih me would help, but we ended up doing three miles in about 26:30. That works out to a pretty dismal 8:50 mile pace, or 7.06 m.p.h. In the spring, I had worked myself back up to 7.3 again on the treadmill. Other tidbits... I had a dentist appointment on Monday. On the list of questions your hygenist — who, I point out, you've know for about 15 minutes — should not ask are such things as "So, did you fall in love at CMU?" Thank you, but no: we are not getting into that sort of territory when you've got sharp pointy things at your control in my mouth, even aside from the usual norms of polite conversation. Tuesday was LTI library day: I stopped noting everything down in the catalog and just roughly sorted things by category and decanted them into boxes. It turns out my estimate was not far off: I needed 14 more boxes to finish, which brought the grand total up to 37. Wednesday night I went to Bloomfield and spent a nice evening with Lea and Ross at Lea and Chris's new house. We talked for a bit, had dinner at one of the two Thai places on Liberty Avenue (whose names I forget; we ate at the closer one in), and then watched the original "Ocean's 11" from 1960. On Thursday evening I was off again to watch Keith's East Winds Symphonic Band play at a concert in Crafton. We had some "fun" getting there and back, caused as usual by the Pittsburgh street system being crazy and also under construction. And last night Kempy invited me and some other people over for a dinner party at her new house on Wightman. And finally, an e-mail from our department business manager that I didn't like so much. After some rambling preliminaries about cutting costs and so on: The low level of activity on our telephone lines did not justify the high costs we are paying in terms of service and equipment. Hence, we are eliminating the telephone lines in the student offices, effective August 17th. The telephone line is GHC 5420 which is limited to on campus calls is available for the LTI community at all hours. Somehow this just rubbed me the wrong way, even though most of the other people I've talked to have had reactions more along the lines of "Yeah, OK, I never use my office phone anyway." The sticking point for me is that I do: I'm on three conference calls per two weeks, and I also had long phone interviews (one international) last year when I was looking for an internship. The fact that my department just unilaterally decided that no grad student will ever have to place or receive an external business call, without providing any means for an opt-in system or for student input, seems very dumb. If they want to cut costs so fervently, why don't they quit serving the fancy food at faculty meetings and give them the same cheap stuff we get for the MT Lunch? |
|