Whoever was on the team that signed off on how Google docs functions is a sadist. Great in theory, but the functionality of the output is counterintuitive at best and more like a Chinese finger trap. Why can't it communicate better and act more like excel? And I am fully aware that my trouble with it could possibly be due to the fact that I was born in 1965, so just missed being the right age to have started with the computer revolution and too old to easily grasp the newest thing.
Sorry that this space has been on hold for a while, but this is a "busy" time of the year for me. Some of the Fall projects are ending and intend on being more regular in writing. One of those projects ended on Friday night as the annual Community Center gala and Auction took place. I do a few things for that event and the final couple of weeks takes a bunch of time that I may normally spend here.
Going to an auction always reminds me of the things that one should never buy when attending one. Betty decided to bid on an item and she broke one of the cardinal rules of auction shopping. She "won" an outing for four for a river tracing hike in a town called Hualien. No question that it is a beautiful place and that it would be fun for those that aren't crippled, but know that with the lack of stability I have in my knees, it will be a special bit of torture that is every wife's dream.
Which gets back to the rules of auction buying. Whether it be in silent or live, there are certain words or phrases in an items description that should make them automatically be taken out of consideration. "Hike" and its synomyms trek, traipse, explore are certainly on that list. Some other red flags include, 'rise and shine', 'you and your friends', ' do it yourself' and 'learn'. Would love to hear more from you to add to that list.
One of my jobs for the auction is ticket sales and its resulting tasks of taking meal orders and table location and seating assignments. While it is busy work, it is certainly not hard, but there are always a couple of people where getting their details takes several laps, and it is always the same ones every year. Waiting till the last second to make their meal choice or payment, so that you have to hunt them down with multiple calls and emails, only for them to ask questions that had been answered weeks earlier. I get it, you're a busy guy/gal, but why not take care of things right away and clear it off your list? Methinks that you are "busy" cause you are unorganized spiritually. But my favorite this time was the guest who could not eat anything cooked in red wine. While I rolled my eyes at this affliction, as I do with most of the adults who have developed intolerance to nuts, gluten, life, I know most of them are just calling out for attention, but of course had to find out for her just in case.
It took a while to get the information from the kitchen as to what meal had red wine as an ingredient and did not find out until the day of the event. I looked for this person (who has made at least one previous appearance in this diary in the pain in the ass file and is tangentially connected to our family in a significant way) at the event to tell her that the beef contained red wine, but the fish and veggie options did not. Cut to the dinner hour and am walking around the tables and see that she is devouring her dinner. One guess as to what meal she chose.
Was worried a few weeks ago when I put in the Yin section that the heat finally broke. Since then, it has reverted back to stifling dead air humidity and full blown typhoon. Truly delightful. It's been three years and I know full well that the worst isn't over until late October, but those two nice days in September had me wishfully hoping the worst was behind. While the weather broke this week and it has been nothing short of fantastic, the shittiness of the weather when it is bad makes the climate go back into the Yang category permanently.
Replacing it in the Yin section? We let our kids go to school without the fear some nut job is going to open fire on their classroom.
Looking at the last post, the summer travelogue had us finishing off NYC. Our next destination was a 24 hour stay in Pittsburgh, PA. It is a 6 hour drive, so to break it up, we planned for a short stop in Hershey, PA to see what all the fuss was about. Didn't have enough time to visit the amusement park, but we did take a chocolate tasting class (way better than any wine tasting) and marveled at the variety and quantity of all the candy selections. The Reese's room is as close to nirvana as you will find on Earth.
All the new parks are well appointed, but there are three qualities that differentiate them. Fan base, food and setting. For fan base, I like ones that are blue collar, knowledgeable and rabid without being mean or dicks about it. Yankee fans score lowest on this scale. In San Diego, they had setting and food down, but their fans have been so beaten down and are a bit jaded from living in paradise that they are not rabid. Pittsburgh fans were just right.
As for the setting, they put the place right on the river, with the hills, bridges and downtown as a backdrop, and it being within easy walking distance of very cool neighborhoods, as good a setting as I've ever experienced.
And they had a giant pierogi race.
We didn't go on the tour with the kids as we were waiting to meet up with Betty and my friend from college, Erin, who was spending the summer in West Virginia with her parents. We were tooling around waiting for her, and all of a sudden, she pulls up in her car...I made the mistake of thinking just how perfect our karma and timing have been. We hadn't seen her in at least a decade and it was great to spend a couple hours playing 'do you remember so and so'.
A couple of years later (according to the police report, it was April 16th 1989), I am in DC visiting friends. I had already graduated, but some old friends from Argentina were visiting DC and decided to go back and hang out with them. The Argentines had left and I was there a couple more days as most of my friends were still in school or the DC area. One evening, was at a party and at around two in the morning, another girl from the Argentina semester group, Monica, and I think it is a great idea to go visit our friend Erin who was living in Wheeling, West Virginia. Monica didn't have a car, but I had borrowed my friend Laurie's 280Z for the week (as she was in Florida for Spring break). I should probably say that I "rented" her car as I gave her 40 bucks to do so.
So off we go in the middle of the night/wee hours of the morning. Obviously, this is before cell phones and even email, so we had no idea if she was even home. I can't even remember how we knew which way to go as neither of us had ever been near West Virginia before. About 5-6AM, I am starting to feel the effects of the night before and realize I cannot drive any further. I should also mention that when we left DC, it was a pleasant Spring night, but as we passed through the Alleghenies, there were some snow flurries.
I turn to Monica and say that I need to rest and ask if she able to drive. She is awake enough but says she has never driven a manual before. "No problem" says I..."I can teach you". Took a few minutes, and a few grinds of my friend's transmission, but she gets the hang of it, and since we are on the highway and the need to shift gears is minimized, I drift off to sleep. Until...
I am woken up to Monica screaming while our car is spinning 360 degrees on black ice. Believe the signs that say Bridges Ice Before Roadway. It is 6ish in the morning on a weekend, so traffic is light and so hit no other cars, but end up in the large gully separating the two directions of the freeway. The car is in the ditch sufficiently so that we cannot drive out, but we could detect no damage. We are both a little freaked and somehow manage to hitchhike to a gas station that has a tow truck that can help pull us back on the road.
We get back to the car and immediately notice that it is not in the same position we left it. Some other car had spun out on the same patch of ice and smacked into our car. We pull it out and take it to the gas station where we learn that the frame is cracked. The car still drives however, so Monica and I climb in and head back to DC in total silence the entire way. As we are leaving the gas station, I look to my left and see the Pittsburgh skyline, which was as close as I had been to that city until we saw Erin there this summer.
In the next diary installment where we visit DC, will finish this story about what happened after our return.
So back to Pittsburgh 2015. The kids finish Carnegie Mellon tour and meet Betty, Erin and I at famous Pittsburgh establishment Primanti's for lunch. Our Pitt tour is at 1:00 PM and Erin has to get back to her kids, so we take our picture and start to say our goodbys. I snap this photo of the kids in front of the Taiwan Café and we are laughing as it had unsurprisingly long since gone out of business. You can see the back of our rental car parked there but cannot see the homeless guy sleeping outside of the Café.
We figure that we can retrieve them, so send the kids on the tour, say so long to Erin, and then the fun begins. Since the Taiwan Café is closed, we go into the business next door to ask who we should call to help us with the sewer. The business is a tanning salon cleverly called the Tanning Pitt. The girls in there give us a number for the city department of water and power, who then says we need to call 911. We feel a bit awkward doing so, but when in Rome... At the same time, a Good Samaritan lady has taken interest in the homeless guy sleeping outside the Café. Have seen my share of people sleeping on the street and this guy looks quite happy. He is using his coat as a pillow, it a warm, but not hot July afternoon, and he has a nice looking leftover salad lying next to him. We figure he's OK, barely gave his presence a first thought and certainly not a second, but Good Samaritan lady feels he is in distress and must have also called 911 simultaneously as to when we did. A few minutes later, a half dozen cop cars and ambulance show up for the sleeping guy (who they ultimately take away in the ambulance but leave his salad on the street...figure he must have been pissed about that). We debated the merits of the Good Samaritan and her actions the rest of the day.
After the ambulance left, we approached the cops telling them we had just made a 911 call about the keys. He heard that call and that someone should be coming out but also added the first brilliant suggestion as to how we should get them back. The cop says, "what you need is a big magnet on a string". We ask if he has any ideas where to get such an item and he does not. Then he says he may have one back at the station and would check. We never see him again.
About an hour later, a trash truck pulls up. They look curiously at our situation and have no solution to offer. The car is partially parked on top of the sewer grate, so we can't lift it. He says they aren't equipped to help us but thought they would stop by to tell us that they heard on the radio that the department of water and power was not going to come out. While we appreciated their appearance, we knew that we had to proceed with option two as they drove off.
We then called the rental car company. Obviously, a spare set of keys was not in the area as we picked the car up in NYC and it had Florida plates, and we learned it would take 24 hours to have another set cut. As we had an AM appointment in Baltimore the next morning, staying in Pitt for the night was not an option. The solution was to have it towed to one of their locations 3 miles away and we get a new car. The phone calls took about an hour before they found a tow truck and location to take our ride to, but that it would not be until 4-5PM before they would arrive. They also mentioned that we would be charged some hefty fees for key and car replacement. Since we had a couple of hours to wait, Betty went back into the Tanning Pitt to ask to use the restroom. The girls were surprised we were still there and came out to talk to us. We then decided to make constructive use of our time and tried to fish the keys out in hopes we could get out of town and save the penalty fees.. The girls think for a minute and then remember there is a 4 ft wooden stick behind the door. We grab a hook from the shop that is used to hold tanning supplies, tape it to the end of the stick and I try to fish out the keys. By the way, written on the wooden pole were the words "Pimp Stick". I put the stick/hook device in the grate and it barely reaches the water and definitely not to the bottom where the keys are. The girls go to the back of the shop and find another 4ft long piece of PVC pipe. We tape it all together into an 8ft long pole. I made the girls pose with me and the pole.
The kids come back from the tour and finally, around 5ish (remember this started at 1pm), so does the tow truck. The dude gets it on top the flatbed, looks at his paperwork and says, "I'm taking you to the bus station?" I say I don't know but the rental car lady says our replacement car is 3 miles away. The cab only fits two people so the Tanning Pitt ladies suggest a place for the family to grab some dinner and I hop in. About 10 minutes into the drive, I say to the dude that this feels like more than three miles away. He tells me he decided that the bus station was wrong and that we were going to the airport instead. Uh, OK dude. 40 minutes later, at 6pm we get to the airport.
The rental car guys were not expecting us, but they rallied quickly and pulled up a new car in a couple of minutes. All of our luggage was still in the trunk, so as they are pulling the new car around, I tell the tow truck driver we need to get into the car, which has been locked the entire time. He opens it easily enough with the slimjim and we push the truck open button, which doesn't work without the key in the ignition. Fuck.
So now what...the back seats fortunately fold down so there is access to the trunk, but the hole to get in back is not large. Just big enough to pull through a carry on sized piece of luggage. Fortunately, that is what we had, but we had a lot of them and the trunk was packed so tightly, that it was impossible to just pull them through. I had to rearrange the bags like a puzzle, then cram my fat ass into the hole to reposition the other stuff in order to start getting the bags out.
New car and all luggage in tow, now had to drive the 50 minutes back to where the family was. Walk into the restaurant and there they are, with a giant piece of cake that was only half eaten as they were full. It was now 7pm and I was pretty hungry. As we had a 4 hour drive to Baltimore ahead of us, asked if they had gotten me a sandwich or something. They hadn't.
As I saw the skyline of Pittsburgh in the rearview mirror could not help but think that my two times seeing it resulted in convoluted driving misshaps. About 10 minutes into the drive to Baltimore, Babydoll and Betty are passed out in the back seat. I look over at the Boy and he has a pensive look on his face. I ask him what he is thinking about and he said school. Putting the idea of schools into his brain was the point of the trip, so I felt like a decent parent and that the mission was accomplished. As he tilted his seat back, he felt the need to tell me how much I would have liked the restaurant. That his open faced garlic sausage sandwich was incredible. My stomach grumbled as he fell asleep.
The next three hours were the best of the day...listening to sports talk as western Pennsylvania turned to darkness. At certain points, fireflies lit up on the shoulders of the highway while I pondered life and the road ahead. Things like, why do they require that slow moving trucks travel in the far left, instead of the far right, lane in Pennsylvania, and what is the difference between the signs that say "Falling Rocks" and "Fallen Rocks"?
Was certainly trying to make up for lost time and was going as fast as the traffic and safety would allow. About 3 hours into the drive (about an hour away from Baltimore), I feel Paul stirring in the passenger seat. Am cooking along at 91 miles an hour in the right lane (as the 18 wheelers are going slow in the far left), when Betty screams "Oh My God!" from the back seat.
I get that in the stupor of waking up from a long nap, passing a truck on the wrong side at 91mph may have been disorienting, but freaking out the driver surely didn't help. She swears she saw the speedometer say it was over 100 but I know for a fact it was 91 when she flipped out and did not go over 93 during the entire drive. Paul sheepishly tried to confirm that it was 91 but wisely shut up as we spent the next 5 minutes yelling at each other about safety. I put the cruise control onto 60 mph and we drove in silence for the last 40 miles.
I had a bag of Fritos out of the hotel vending machine for dinner at 11pm (along with a Reese's peanut butter cup that I had saved from the day before) and laid down on the bed to watch one of the channels I miss most living overseas...the Game Show Network. A vintage episode of Family Feud was on and the first question was, Name something that happens while traveling that can ruin a vacation...the second most popular response? Losing your keys.
Nice recap... all true except the 91 miles.... the digital speedometer flashed 3 digits...100 !!
ReplyDeleteOMG! What a story! ah adventure! whew, bet you were really glad to arrive in Baltimore and put it all behind you.
ReplyDelete*Leslie