Why I Do Not Drive in Pittsburgh

A photo essay:

heading into pgh via the tunnel

 

(that one's for you, Bre Theiss)

bridge leading into fort pitt tunnel (out of pgh)

we're headed out of the tunnel (out of pgh). the traffic stopped facing the other way is headed in. 

'nuff said. 

Sofa Triumphant

Finally, our living room is complete: a piece of upholstery that can house our entire menagerie and still have room for humans to stretch out. It's a beautiful thing. I came to the decision that the couch needed to happen immediately on Tuesday night as I tried to straighten out the u-shape of my neck from squashing lengthwise in the chair for an hour or so: what was I waiting for? an income? ha, ha. I looked online for a while dreaming about the idea of just ordering a couch off of the internet and having it arrive (surprise, Lucas!) happily at my door. But I could not decide. So, I retired, resolving that before the sun set again our living room would be sofa triumphant. Little did I know the quest that awaited us.
Wednesday morning dawned cool and grey. I had a fabulous hour with my new financial advisor over in Regent Square while Luke and Olive explored the neighborhood and narrowly, just barely escaped a(nother) parking ticket. I was exhilarated with the possibility of managing my finances and we talked excitedly about this and the visit from the second-and-fourth-wednesday-street-sweeping-parking-officer as we dropped off the dog and zoomed toward mecca. I mean, Ikea.

I thought, we'll just pick up this couch and then the rest of the day will be spent on spreadsheets and mint.com (have you tried it? it's fabulous) figuring out a brilliant way to live on zero income and mounting debt. While writing. On my couch.
Little did I know, Pittsburgh traffic and the laws of physics had something completely different in mind for my afternoon.
We picked out the couch in a relatively short amount of time. Note that is actually impossible to enter Ikea and go straight to the area in which you are interested. Nay, you must wind your way throughout modern, clever room displays, brilliant advertising with large print slogans written just for your frontal lobe. But once we compared a few couches and Lucas assured me that even my acute *awareness* would not get a 94" couch to fit in our 84" alcove we decided on a happy little fellow in oatmeal color called Karlstad. Can I please have the job where I come up with strange tongue-twisting ironic names for every single item that could possibly be found in a household? Komputre. Just spell with a K! Add some dots!
In mind-blowing Ikea fashion, this couch actually comes ready to assemble in flat-pack cardboard boxes.  This is the job Lucas wants. Take an article of furniture. Exactly measure how it might be disassembled into straight, slim components and from there determine a method of attaching everything with screws, widgets, and allen wrenches that will delight the consumer for hours after they've unwrapped it from its deceptively small cardboard box. And, he's pretty well qualified since the better part of our week and a half here he has spent putting together ikea furniture.

I am not good with proportions. Thoroughly convinced that this compressed couch package would fit into our jetta (well, after a mattress and a bed and a bookshelf - at the same time - one gets kind of self-confident) and so my very tolerant partner headed off to measure his trunk as I stood in line at the checkout. Having relieved myself of a load of cash I met him with my wheeled cart and large box at the door where he assured me that it would not fit in. Nevertheless, as we stood waiting to talk to a nonexistent peon about home delivery, we convinced one another that we would give it a try. At this point it's about 2pm and I'm still thinking we'll be home by 3:30 so I can make a 4:00 power yoga class. A soft breeze was blowing as we wheeled it out across the parking lot where I'm sure passers-by assumed we headed toward a (gas-guzzling, totally unnecessary) Sport Utility Vehicle of some capacity large enough to fit the couch-shaped box. Mais non. When we stopped in front of Der Jetta and Lucas opened the trunk and began putting seats down, one woman wheeling a cart past us looked at me as though she was going to say something and then thought better of it, and continued wheeling on to her SUV. Even when the trunk was opened, even when the seats were down and the box was wheeled in line with the opening: even then despite the obvious discrepancy between tab A and slot B, I refused to believe it would not fit. Awareness works for a lot. Just ask my old couch (RIP).

We lifted it up and it would not even go into the first trunk opening (let alone the enclave between trunk and collapsed back seat). As in, absolutely not at all. I had to give in. We loaded it back on the cart and wheeled back across the Norwegian parking lot to our friend, the Home Delivery desk. Standing among a litter of carts and flat-pack boxes marked "Thursday" (this is Wednesday, mind you, and hours counting down to sunset) we decided we did not want to do home delivery, spending $70 to have two strangers bring this to our zone 1 address not today but tomorrow. Forget that. We agreed to spend 19.95 (for the first hour) renting an Ikea van to drive our baby back ourselves, having it today and saving a wise $50.00. Lucas made the deal, we did the walkaround, we threw it in the back of the van, strapped in, and headed off on 376E, back toward the Burgh. It was 2:40. We had an hour to get back to Start, plus a 15-minute buffer. Unflappably optimistic, I pointed out that Ikea is only like 12 or 14 miles from our home in the East Side, and for sure we could make this happen. We zoomed onto the interstate, over a hill, and found ourselves in dead. stopped. traffic. Now, as you will see soon when I write an entry on Pittsburgh traffic, it is quite common to slow to a crawl near the tunnel, a phenomenon worth exploring in itself. We were at least 6 miles from the tunnel. A car in front of us peeled off and desperately drove up a gravel slope to a nearby exit. We idled. A man next to us rolled up and yelled what was going on. Lucas swore. I pulled out my ikea catalogue and began sketching on its cover as we had left my notebook along with our map and, wisely, our gps in the jetta. After he had given in to reality and found a good radio station to groove on and I had covered three pages in ideas for mfa poetry readings and environmentalism, we began to move again. We zipped along for about a mile and became gridlocked again. This should give you a good enough idea, coupled with the information that it took us 50 minutes to get home, of what that drive back was like. 4:00 yoga, not to mention spreadsheets and neat budgets, began to fade from my future. Irene, our kindly neighbor, watched us struggle the couch sized package up the stairs where we dumped it in the house and decided to risk 2 minutes for a bathroom break, and sprint back out to good ol' panelvan. By this point it is 3:45. Rush hour had begun. The notable thing about afternoon rush hour is that all of those people who work in the burgh are trying to get out of the burgh back to the burbs for their evening. Mass exodus. And we were in the same line. The bridge toward Fort Pitt Tunnel looked like a cross between bumper cars and Independence Day where the bombs have started to hit, sparking mayhem, and everyone is exiting the city at once. The tunnel is two lane traffic. The bridge is four. I have photos. It occurs to me now that my whole day could be considered a lesson in trying to make things fit.
At about 4:30, stopped in traffic one impossible lane over from our exit, Lucas observed that he would be happy if we simply made it back within two hours and were not charged for a third. We beat this goal by about 6 minutes, I mailed some letters at the post office, we picked up the cover for our couch at the ikea warehouse (oddly, they did not have room to fit the 2"x3' box in the store), made a pit stop at a nearby target for a toaster and a watch (since one has to cross a bridge also to get to a target and we had had our fill of leaving the city) where Lucas got stuck in an unmoving checkout lane that really, must have been the icing on the cake, and then we hopped in our car and headed home. We finally walked in the door about 6:15.
Time to assemble our couch. I started ripping packages open like a crazy person and hissing at Lucas to just begin putting covers on the cushions while we waded through a sea of corrugated cardboard and plastic wrap. He insisted on reading the directions at which point I threw down my cushion and headed into the other room to get ready for the late yoga class. I spent the next 90 minutes sweating in a yoga studio/sauna trying to balance on one foot whose toes were too sweaty to grip the mat, while Lucas aligned velcro and sofa cover, lugnut and couchfoot, and walked Olive down in the drizzle to meet me.
When we got back home at 8:30pm we still had to rearrange the rest of the furniture, shower, make dinner, and for fun rearrange the bedroom to where some former living room furniture was exiled.
All in all it was about 11:30 by the time we were done. I stretched out on the couch for about 15 minutes, on principle, struggling to stay awake, before I went to bed and fell asleep before I could make my goal list about what to accomplish before the next sunset.

This morning, in all its glory. 

Instructions

So the thing about a blog is that it puts the most recently written "post" at the top. That means that the first posts I wrote are at the bottom. Had I thought about this before I would have  written it all backward...but what I'd suggest is start at the bottom post (1 Week in Pittsburgh) and read posts up from there. End with skateboard baby and you're off to have a fabulous day.

Coming soon (maybe) (here's hoping): photos of around town

SkateBoard Baby!

And these I just had to share. Here is how we tried to break Olive of her gripping phobia of skateboards while we were still in Yellow Springs:

This did help a bit since the baby was not afraid of the skateboard. As you can see, Buda was protective/ made crazy by this experiment. Olive did make the journey a little bit from panicked to curious, but I am not sure that it stuck. However, here in the Bergh we have discovered a new fear to trump skateboards: people pushing shopping carts down the street. 

Anyway since we're on the subject of my best niece ever, here are a few more pics of Kai Soleil: 

On the blanket her gramma made her, daily crawling practice. 

And grooving on her toes. We all miss the skateboarding funny noisemaking little squishy!

The Three Amigos

That closet door holds Olive's treats. If you are near the door, Olive is near you. Sometimes, it pays off. 

She really comes alive when we take her on her daily walks. It's hard I'm sure since she had the fenced in yard for the last several weeks in YS to just run and jump around - and take her victory laps - and now she has to be on a leash all the time outside. Since just getting the internet yesterday (and hallelujah for that in a strange city!) we have looked up local dog parks and plan to start trying them out. Each time someone heads toward the outside door she gets very hopeful. She is loving all of the smells. We've also decided since the areas of grass are much more concentrated (like, little strips along the sidewalk), the smells are probably a lot more concentrated as well. At any rate she is heading for the status of bloodhound. We've also noticed that people tend to turn the corner or cross the street when they are walking a dog and we are walking her. This is opposite from Yellow Springs where people bring their dogs up to meet your dog, and so we're trying to figure this out. Lucas attributes it to her hyena resemblance and intimidating persona. I'm going with they can't handle her cuteness. 

Nester has commandeered this corner as his new spot. I think it's because he is close enough to jump in my lap every time I sit down. That's right - Nester has taken up cuddling. Very strange. 

Kaya is happier than she has been in months (sorry, Buda)...no more hiding in closets or shedding her fur. Well, she still does a little bit of both of those things...Lucas went to put a pair of jeans in his hanging closet organizer the other day and discovered her hiding at the back of that particular shelf section. This is the kind of thing that is fabric and hangs down with shelves from the closet rod...so it's still a puzzler how she found her way up in there. Sometimes she spends a whole day lounging about, like she's in a spa. Suppose to her maybe it is. Maybe to me a little bit, too. 

And here are two photos from right before the move, just for fun...

What good friends. Olive to Buda: Not nearly as many squirrels in the Burgh as in the Springs. Hope you are well in CO. Can't wait till Christmas. 

Olive's Room

This is my girl, taking solace in her peanut butter bone which makes her happier than about anything on earth. She is very skittish/depressed since the move (and losing her best pal Buda) and divides her time between wishing there were peanut butter in her bone, licking the peanut butter out of her bone, and napping on the bed. Let's just say the vast majority of her time is spent on the latter.

This is her spot. Although you'll notice Kaya is occupying it in this photo. New trend: sometimes a cat and a dog share this coveted space. I'm going to attribute it to 1. stress and 2. loss of the beloved couch. So I thought I was going to hate the white walls but I don't at all - I actually kind of love it, especially in this room. I think it helps that the one wall is white brick. Thanks to SJ for pointing out to me that it used to be a chimney and that's why it's brick and protrudes. Anyway the three windows look out onto the street so we keep the curtains pulled all the time...and soon hopefully we will have three *matching* white curtains. I love this room because it feels so light and airy...it is absolutely fabulous for napping, and I know three furry creatures who agree with me. 

Caption contest, anyone?

A few things that make me happy about this room...I love the grapevine wreath on that brick wall. I think that was the one thing I was most excited about putting up. 

And the window ledges are nice and wide and a great space for setting some pretty nature things. That's my pine cone from Italy. I guess I have a habit.

You, too, can decorate with sticks

I was not sure how many photos I could put into one post, so I decided to start a new one. But really, start reading from the bottom posts up. That can be the frustrating thing about blogs.
So, continuing on with the tour:

This is looking back from the kitchen area to the door entrance. The door on the right is the closet. It is crazy organized, let me tell you. It is a relief to have some closets again. Because we are in the Big City here doing the Urban thing for a few years, I had to make sure not to forget the world of non-concrete. Therefore I have put branches all over the apartment, and I like it quite a lot. I had all of them in the YS house, too, but in there it was almost like being in the jungle because the house itself was very wabi-sabi.  Here, however, everything is clean and straight and so the branches function perfectly as pieces of art and happy reminders of different natural places. And thanks to everyone who so lovingly transported all of these "sticks."

And this is standing further back in the kitchen still looking the same direction. There's my new friend the dishwasher. And isn't that a fabulous countertop? Here's our little dining nook...

It's very cozy. Although my dinner-party days may be suspended for a bit. 

Here's the rest of the kitchen. That third shelf down in the middle is full of moosewood cookbooks, btw. Lucas' grandpa made the glass-door cabinet. My dad made the shelves that are holding our pottery and plates. 

Just look at that sink. No need to bleach! Lucas put up the shelves for my collection of Teapots from Around the World. That would be 2: one from Japan, one from Spain.

And this is the stove: glass top, which is a great adventure. Luckily there is a window right next to it as it heats very differently and right now we make toast on the stove and...let's just say we're learning. It felt more like home after we put up the spice rack and the bread and puppet posters. 

One Week in PIttsburgh

So, after trying to compress 28 photos to send to you, my friends and family, and being frustrated that there simply seems to be no way to do it other than sending 7 consecutive emails, I thought I would just start this little link up and can post photos here.

So: after 8 days in Pittsburgh we are finally about settled in. Things are beginning to seem less crazy, though we are both looking forward to a return to a routine - for Lucas, that means work, and for me, that means school, which starts a week from today.

We've spent this week almost totally setting up our new home...unpacking, arranging, organizing, etc. This apartment is so beautiful and everything is brand new because it has just been refinished...after living in our "cabin" in Yellow Springs it feels like we've transcended our social status and are squatting in some rich person's flat. New hardwood floors, new windows, new doors, new outlets (outlets that work, and are copious), central air, dishwasher, clothes-washer and dryer...It's very different because there's always something softly humming in the background. And the counter is clean. And Olive is not able to eat pieces of the floor because she cannot get her teeth in between the cracks of the wood because there are...no...cracks! Here are some photos:

This is our back door. In the next installment I'll take some photos of the outside...but basically this is a very thin house that goes back pretty far, and we are separated from the two houses on each side of us by about...four feet. Yesterday our umbrella would not even go through the sidewalk alley without collapsing it. It is a large umbrella, but still. So, to enter we walk down an alley that is very nice now that Lucas has swept it and this is the door we come. There's a little (tiny) porch out there and the backyard...but that's a story for another day. We can also enter through the front of the building which is on a buzzer system, but we usually use this door. Although the first floor is the smallest of the three apartments it is the only one with a door to the outside...and a door that happens to give us direct access to the backyard. So, we dig it.

This is what it looks like when we step in the door. Living room, kitchen, bedroom in the distance. The whole width of this living space is...11 feet. Believe it or not.

This is on the left side of the 11 feet. 

...and this is on the right side. There's a cat, there's the bookshelves Luke built, there's the coffee table and the womb chair (with a new cover)...but wait - where is the couch? For those of you that do not know (everyone other than my parents and Lucas' parents, who suffered through the ordeal), my beloved   ginormous overstuffed red couch would not. fit. through. any. orifice. of this building. They even measured the windows. They took off the feet. They took off the doors. Rumor is that there was even discussion in the hallway about sawing it in half, bringing it in, and reattaching it somehow - but I don't know if I can believe this. Alas, at the end of a long day of moving and an even longer 3 years of being the select perch for cats, dogs, and recently babies, the glorious couch was given to an unwilling woman working the back door at goodwill in pittsburgh and left to fend for itself. RIP, red couch. Having only the womb chair and the wooden chair leaves me only with the bed as a place to stretch out which leads to far too many naps and this must be remedied. I feel like I should buy stock in ikea.