When right next door is unique, do you notice? (Mar. 4, 2008)

Current mood: enthralled

WQED-13, the PBS television outlet here in Pittsburgh, produces a 30-minute magazine show called OnQ. On tonight's show, two of the three 10-minute segments concerned not only the unique, but to me, unique and VERY close to home.

Record-Rama is -- or rather, was -- a retail store selling used records. Not only that, it was -- or rather, still is -- reputedly the largest, privately owned record collection in the world, with some 3.4 million recordings. Beyond that, the amount of records for sale was enormous. In fact, I blogged about this in one of my earliest posts on MySpace [link]

What makes -- made -- it so special was that it was so close to home, barely 3/4 mile. If I needed a needle for one of my nine turntables, all I had to do was trot (or bike or bus or unicycle) that little bit of Perry Highway, and there it was. Oh well, it's gone now. Sigh. I wonder what will become of that mountain of 78s. I could have spent all day in there.

Second thing on the OnQ show that's close to home is even closer: Adzema Pharmacy. It is one of the very few full service, independent pharmacies still around, but what really makes it unique is the 7-day breakfast and lunch counter. Since it's right up the street, not even a quarter-mile away, I never thought about it much, and since I'm in the place three, four times a week, and have been for the 17 years I've lived in this house, its uniqueness doesn't really register.

Where can you find another restaurant-in-a-pharmacy? Forty years ago they were everywhere. Fortunately, this place isn't going away anytime soon. Business is apparently still booming, on both the restaurant and the pharmacy sides.

Forgot to mention that it's also a great place to just shop. It's a lot of the reason I never go to a mall, never go to a Wal-Mart, and rarely go to any other retail outlet. Like the fictional Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion monologues, "If you can't find it at Ralph's, you can get along pretty well without it."

Record-Rama and Adzema Pharmacy are/were hardly a half mile apart on Perry Highway. I just hope that whatever goes in where R-R was is at least half as useful as its predecessor, and that the new Walgreens two miles up Perry in the other direction doesn't kill off Jay Adzema's prescription business.

Updated footnote: The OnQ video clip for Adzema is available here. The clip for Record-Rama appears not to be available, August 2011.

* * *

Original comment from 2008:
Stuart Strickland
Sad news update: The founder of Adzema Pharmacy, Jay's father Bob, passed away a couple of days ago. Here is the obit from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:


Robert P. "Bob" Adzema
ADZEMA ROBERT P. "BOB"
Age 79, of North Myrtle Beach, SC, formerly of Pittsburgh, on Thursday, March 6, 2008. Husband of Joan (Staab). Father of Diane, Amy, and Jay. Grandfather of Zeke, Max, Jake, and Eli. Private Funeral. In lieu of flowers donations in his name to the American Heart Association.


I do not know if he got to see the WQED piece, but I'm sure he knew about it.

March 1: Springtime! (Mar. 1, 2008)

Current mood: hopeful

Yesterday afternoon we got this from the National Weather Service here in Pittsburgh:

"URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PITTSBURGH PA
629 PM EST FRI FEB 29 2008
..HEAVY SNOW WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT EST TONIGHT...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN PITTSBURGH HAS ISSUED A HEAVY SNOW WARNING...WHICH IS IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT EST TONIGHT.

UP TO 4 INCHES OF SNOW HAS FALLEN ACROSS MUCH OF THE WARNING AREA SINCE EARLY THIS AFTERNOON. AN ADDITIONAL ACCUMULATION OF 1 TO 3 INCHES BY MIDNIGHT TONIGHT WILL BRING STORM TOTALS TO 5 TO 7 INCHES BEFORE THE SNOW TAPERS TO SNOW SHOWERS.

A HEAVY SNOW WARNING MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW ARE FORECAST THAT WILL MAKE TRAVEL DANGEROUS. ONLY TRAVEL IN AN EMERGENCY. IF YOU MUST...KEEP AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT...FOOD...AND WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY."

Hardly a harbinger of spring, is it? Well, as the song goes, that was yesterday, and yesterday's gone.

It's March! And just like I said in December about winter, and in September about autumn, by my definition it is now spring because the calendar changed. Sure, as I write, six inches of snow sits in the yard, but:

* The birds are back! All manner of twittering can be heard outside.
* It's bright out! The highest the sun gets on December 21 is now attained by 9:30 in the morning.
* The sap is rising! Maple syrup production is going full blast.
* The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is out!

Can warm days be far behind? Can the sound of peepers on mild evenings be more than a couple weeks away?

The official astronomical start of spring is March 20. By my reckoning, the height of springtime is about a month later, about the third week of April. That's when things are greenest, snow even in the air is a rarity, and it has not gotten too warm yet.

But it's March! So, everyone, run out in the snow and exclaim "Welcome, Springtime!"

Buying the salt truck but not the salt (2004, 2007)

Pre-pre-script: I wrote this in 2004. I posted this in 2007. I am posting it again in 2011. Blessed little has changed in seven years, and it had not changed in a long time when I was inspired to write it in '04. (Yes, there are some apps for high-end phones. For the rest of us, on the scale I envisioned 15+ years ago, nada.)

Navigating without a map

Current mood: impatient

This essay from April 2004 followed my Post-Gazette opinion piece from April 4 2004, itself still a viable explanation of public transit's ever-present funding issues. However, this one addresses the fundamental needs for proper transit information faced by riders, a problem still not yet addressed.

I want to solve this! I want to have someone pay me to solve this!  Help me, someone, please!

Stu

Buying the Salt Truck But Not the Salt

Imagine for a moment that you just got a new job, hired through an agency, and now need to drive there for the first time.  There is just one teeny-weeny problem: Yes, you have the name and address of the place, and you do own a map, but no road signs of any sort exist anywhere, and never did.  The highway people said that sometime they will put up a few signs along the larger roads, but with all these recent layoffs in highway maintenance, that might be a long time in coming.

That could never happen, right?  Quite true, it can't.  Our highways are very well signed, thank you.

Such, however, is the lot of the transit rider.  A vast need exists for truly useful rider information, but it is assumed that everyone who rides simply knows how to get from place to place.  That is not a correct assumption.  Commuters who drive, as a class, simply have no concept of what the rider deals with, nor do they care to.  Well, as the song goes, there but for fortune go you and I.

To help illustrate this, in late August 2000, a friend lost his home and moved in with me for a few weeks.  Though he was 100% transit dependent, I knew it was possible for him to bus to work from my house, since we worked in nearby buildings and I made the trip by bus myself each day.  However, he was thrust into a very foreign commuting pattern.  He needed to make the two-bus trip both ways without landmarks, without help, and without error, right away.

The biggest problem was his work schedule, which differed considerably from mine.  While he worked a fixed-shift, five-day, 40-hour week, no two days' work times were alike, and his days off were Tuesday and Wednesday.  The buses have entirely different schedules for weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Taking his work schedule and the printed timetable for every bus route that went within a mile of both my house and our worksite, I figured out everything he needed to know: local streets, bus stops, nearby routes, their routing variants, walking directions, walking travel times, Downtown transfer points, how to travel between those points, and landmarks to identify where to get off.  He also needed alternative travel plans in case he had to stay late or he missed a connection.  One thing I did not have to figure out was fares, since he owned a monthly pass.  Without one, figuring out fares is a project unto itself, in addition to the travelling.

This was not a trivial task.  It was a tedious, meticulous, manual process, even if it did follow a straightforward pattern.  Two hours later, I had made a suitable set of maps and figured out the weekday schedule.  Saturday's chart took over another hour, Sunday's yet another.  After almost five hours work, I had him rolling for about a week and a half.

Then came September 10, 2000, opening day for the West Busway.  Every route in my charts was modified.  With new timetables in hand and a couple of new routes in the mix, I again returned to the charts, this time cranking out the three in a little over two hours.  I didn't mind the work, as I also needed much of the information for my own commute.

This *must* be computerized for public use somewhere, I thought.  With the right programming, those charts could be assembled in seconds.  Port Authority had a website, but at the time it had little more than an on-line version of the printed schedules.  In my graduate research, I knew that information in the form I needed was not available anywhere in 2000.  Almost four years later, very little has changed. [Update, February 2008: Almost eight years later, very little has changed.] [Update, August 2011: Eleven years later, we are finally starting to see some apps for high-end cell phones, plus Google Transit is a nice start, but it is not what I want to see.]

I began to wonder just how often a scenario like this transpires.  People move.  People change jobs.  People relocate here daily.  Some workers travel to a different site every day.  If it was as difficult for everyone else as it was for me, a graduate student with formal training in geographic information systems, is it any wonder that people prefer to drive if they have a choice?

Now again imagine if the tables were turned.  No roads have signs, but transit information is available in forms aplenty, everywhere, embedded in people's psyches.  Service abounds 24/7.  Express and cross-town routes are everywhere.  Vehicles are clean and properly maintained.  And anyway, since it costs 10 times more to maintain a car than it does to ride buses, for a year, when all is said and done, why would anyone want to use a car?

Back to reality.  Transit-dependent riders somehow figure out how to get around, or so we think.  They have to, or they wouldn't have jobs, or so we think.  But hey, wait a minute, could it just be that the reason this segment of the population often does not have good jobs, or cannot keep them, is precisely because of this information deficit?  Or at least a major factor?  For even when the service is there, if you don't know that it is, it cannot help you.

What does this all mean?  Riders need information.  They don't have it.  When they do get information, it isn't enough, and rapidly becomes obsolete.  Without the right information, they become stranded, lost, late, and have paid for the privilege.  This failure to provide for people's needs persuades people to abandon transit as soon as they can, and dissuades them from ever returning.

Nor, with the on-going strangulation in transit funding, are they likely to get that information anytime soon.  In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, transit has been underfunded for decades.  People may gripe about government subsidizing transit, but nary a thought goes to the trillions of dollars that have been and continue to be spent to build and maintain roads.  Do we spend all this money on roads because it is the right thing to do?  Or, rather, has it become the right thing to spend money on roads just because we can find the money?  There is certainly nothing right about strangling transit, any more than it would be right to forego further road maintenance.  But highways have a dedicated funding source; transit does not.

To remedy the information deficit, transit company staff must be hired to provide and maintain information systems.  That requires money, money that Pennsylvania transit companies do not now have and cannot ever seem to get.

Highways have signs, even cameras, because of this dedicated source.  Sure, transit capital projects get funded (busways, new buses, etc.), but not operations.  It's like buying a salt truck, but never the salt.  Every year, it's the same battle.  Maybe they can run the buses, maybe not, but if funding is short, the first thing to go is support staff, thereby blocking or delaying progress in making things better.  Then it's fare hikes and service cuts, year after year.  Sound familiar?

What Pennsylvania legislators need to do is not just find the $110 million more to keep the buses running this year [FY2005] ($27M for Port Authority alone), not just set up a structure for dedicated funding for next year, but add to that enough to make transit better, and easier to use.

Think about that the next time you see a road sign.

[Post-Script: Port Authority of Allegheny County laid off dozens of white-collar staff in 2007, gutting its Information Technology department. Consequently, there is not even a hope of getting this project underway. Still.]

Defining the topfreedom debate (Feb. 11, 2008)

Current mood: enlightened

In a blog post from a few months ago, I briefly mentioned topfreedom, the concept by which any female can strip to the waist in any location where a male may do so, without being arrested. While I only became aware of this late last year, I've read many arguments both for and against in the time since. Typically those who want it feel it is discriminatory for men to have a freedom women do not (even men did not have this freedom in the U.S. until the 1930s), while those against it believe the sight of female breasts, or portions thereof, will corrupt the morals of minors and lead to sexual wantonness. Many, many other side issues enter into it as well, on both sides.

My point here is not to take sides (though I have), nor to convince anyone else to take a side (though you may already have), but merely to focus the discussion. What IS this debate about, really? What is it NOT about?

What the debate IS about:
* Criminality. Women's bodies are not criminal, any more than men's are, but that's not what many U.S. state laws say.
* Choice. Men can wear shirts, or not. Women have no such choice.
* Commerce. Businesses make money selling women's bodies. If breasts were routinely visible, what would do the selling?
* Empowerment. Women who dare to go topfree are solidly in control of themselves, and thus least likely to appear weak and victimizable.

What the debate is NOT about:
* Nudity. Bare-breasted women are not nude. They have pants on, or at least a swimsuit bottom. Is a shirtless man nude?
* Hygiene. Assuming she has taken a shower recently, a topfree woman is not dirty. Same goes for any such man.
* Genitalia. Breasts are not genitalia. Swimsuit bottoms cover genitalia in both genders.
* Breastfeeding. Though closely related, that is a separate discussion.

Another important distinction: Topfree vs. Topless. Topless is women at strip clubs earning money for taking clothes off in front of a predominantly male audience. That is entirely off topic. Topfree is about going out to walk the dog, lie in the sun, or go swimming in a public pool, that sort of thing, sans a top. Other people present are irrelevant.

Some topics require more than a sentence. Sexual intent, for instance. Women determine whether they are being sexual, and when, and where, and with whom. A topfree woman taking the dog for a walk or reading a book in a chair at poolside is not being sexual. It is NOT in the eye of the beholder. Any such response in said beholder is the responsibility of the beholder, not the woman, and we already have rules that deal with that (assault, battery, stalking, terroristic threats, etc.). If the woman IS acting intentionally in a manner to stimulate a sexual response, that has nothing to do with whether she is wearing a top. Therefore, sexual intent is off-topic, and must be left out of the discussion.

More on the criminality aspect. In some locales, state law concerning indecent exposure is closely tied to those concerning sexual predation. Pennsylvania is one of them (18 Sec 3127 [may have to page down to 3127],and Ch. 31 in general), Thus, as I currently understand it (IANAL), if a woman goes out to walk her dog wearing only a pair of jeans, she could be forever forbidden from setting foot on public school property. If her voting district is in a public school, as mine is, that even further extends the reach of this discrimination.

Obscenity often comes up. Opponents of the idea believe the very sight of breast skin is obscene. Unfortunately for all, this is a subjective term, and we could spend all day arguing why X is obscene but Y is not, and still have no resolution. So that we can have a reasonable discussion at all, then, the discussion must declare off-topic all matters which are purely subjective. Morality is another. So is public acceptance. So is attractiveness. These may matter, but not in an objective discussion.

As I said, many other important topics come into play, some of them plausible ramifications of both the status quo and topfreedom. It's too much to get into here. All I wish at this point is to raise the issue, direct the discussion to just the relevant points, and plead for people to keep an open mind. Here in culturally backward suburban Pittsburgh, we're not even starting to get started on this yet. But we will. This isn't the first curve that I've been ahead of.

My daughter, the wrestler (Feb. 2, 2008)

Current mood: triumphant

So my kid comes home from school one day back in October, and having completed the cross-country season, decides to go out for a winter sport.

Wrestling.

I do not refer to my son. No. My 14-year-old daughter.

I would post a photo of her, but she doesn’t want her picture on the Internet in any form or fashion. (She doesn’t even want me to mention her name.) But the stats speak for themselves: She’s 5’7", 131#, solid muscle, and has a real give-’em-hell attitude about her.

Oh yeah, she likes the makeup and the long & flowy dresses, too. Think Taylor Swift. So, if anyone is going to turn Western PA middle school wrestling on its collective male ear, it’s going to be her.

In her first interscholastic match back in early December, she did get pinned, but it took well over a minute. In the previous match, though she didn’t play, her first-string teammate in that weight class got pinned in 30 seconds. In her second match, she went well over two minutes. In practices, she’s gotten pins on 160-pounders. I’d say she’s doing pretty well. She isn’t first string, but she’s only in her first year.

She’s one tough cookie, too. While she can be the dainty lady anytime she feels like it, she can also be a Tasmanian devil, which makes life around here certainly interesting. A few weeks ago, she and my wife were rebuilding the floor under the downstairs commode, an all-couple-day project. Call a plumber? Naaah, the women have everything under control, so kindly please stay out of the way, thank you.

The biggest problem so far has been her diet. She really, really needs to build up muscle mass, on the way to developing raw power, so needs to concentrate on consuming protein. The problem is that she [was at that time] a vegetarian (with eggs, milk & fish OK), which strictly limits what she can consume. Since she now has to watch her weight, too, to maintain her current weight class, she can’t just eat anything willy-nilly. Sarah has figured out a lot of the requirements and restrictions, but holding to it is quite another thing.

Being female is a lesser but significant issue. Pound for pound, males tend to have more muscle without even trying, so she’s at a natural disadvantage. She can make up for it through education, strategy and physical training, but it’s a lot of work. Wrestling is a full-body workout. So far, so good.

We get lots of questions from parents about her choice of winter sport. First and foremost, why wrestling? The fast answer is that she got the impetus to try this from a book, There’s a Girl in My Hammerlock, by Jerry Spinelli, about a 13-year-old girl who joins the boys’ wrestling team. It came up for discussion a couple of times in 2007, and we indicated that if she wanted to go for it we wouldn’t stand in her way, so off she went. Are we worried about her getting hurt? No, and in fact, the day before she joined, she did get hurt in an ice skating accident -- a pure girly-girl activity, from her perspective -- and ended up with a huge bruise. But wrestling is a contact sport. Of course you’re going to get hurt, or at least deal with a considerable amount of pain. The key is in learning how to minimize the chance of injury, while maximizing the chance of pinning your opponent.

Then we get the questions about modesty, about touching body parts and being touched. (Sigh.) It’s a controlled activity -- fighting, really -- in front of at least a couple dozen people, dressed in a uniform, with a referee on the mat just inches away. I fail to see why the subject is important, or even significant, and if it is, why it’s OK when two boys are in the same positions. If some boy does try to pull a feelie on her, it will get her mad, which will work to her advantage. She knows this. She also knows boys won’t touch places they might otherwise, which is also an advantage to her.

No, what she’s doing is knocking down barriers, and in so doing, messing with people’s heads. That’s something she’s good at. I just wished she’d had the opportunity to get into it a few years earlier. Like any first-year wrestler, she’s learning an entirely new sport, new rules, new moves, new everything. It would have been a lot easier for her if she’d started at 5 or 8 like a lot of the other kids. Her coach and team as well have to learn to deal with having a girl on the squad, as it’s the first time a girl has stayed with it for more than the introductory meeting and maybe one or two practices. In school district history. And this is a huge district, with well over 700 in a graduating class, which makes it all the more amazing that she’s the first.

The fun part about going to her meets, even if she doesn’t wrestle, is watching the looks on the faces of opponents and coaches when they figure out she’s a she. Guys turn red. Or blanch. You can almost hear them gulp. Coaches do a double take. Overhearing a couple of wrestlers as she came out of her locker room just before one match, exchanges like "What weight class is she? Gee I hope I don’t have to!"

So why don’t more girls wrestle? Parents, mainly. Just after her daily practices, the pee-wee team practices. Not a single female is to be seen. At that age, the gender differences are minimal, and girls would really have a fighting chance (pun intended). So as I see it, if you’re going to get more girls wrestling, you need to get them in when the boys do, between 5 and 8. To get that to happen, the minds of parents would need to change. Sexism starts early. Like at birth. I remember being asked when she was born whether I wanted a boy or a girl and answered a baby, and why would it matter? Anything open to one gender was open to both -- then -- to us.

Someday. Meanwhile, at least one girl is out there, showing the boys she can too wrestle.

Sidewalks after a brief snowstorm (Jan. 24, 2008)

Current mood: hopeful

Long title or executive summary: If you even half try to clean a sidewalk after a snowfall, you will be rewarded in time with a bare, dry sidewalk. Not even to do that means you are endangering the safety of a lot of people, many of whom are bus riders. This discourages bus use and makes our use of cars more entrenched.

A couple days ago, in my blog post about traveling to a friend's calling hours, I mentioned the sloppy snow that came down that day here in Pittsburgh. There wasn't much, not quite two inches. In the next 36 hours, though, it first got sunny, then very cold. That snow didn't so much melt as turn to slop when it hit ground, then froze solid.

That in turn has made for some particularly nasty conditions for bus riders. Few things in pedestrians' lives are less pleasant than frozen slush.

Last night, I made an unexpected late evening trip home by bus and got to experience a variety of sidewalks first- ... um, first-foot. I started in Oakland, Pittsburgh's second Downtown, changed buses Downtown, then hoofed it about a mile across a school campus and along a couple of sidewalk-less suburban streets, before making it to my house.

The parking lot where I started was heavily salted, so was bare and dry. The place is visited daily by a large contingent of physically handicapped individuals, so of course its walkways will be sacrosanct when it comes to snow and ice removal.

Crossing the street, I first waited at a bus stop in front of an in-city convenience store (Centre at Neville, for you natives). The owner, or someone, had cleaned the sidewalk off pretty well. I hardly noticed any. Thank you, whomever!

Downtown, I had a five-block stroll between buses, all on major streets which tens of thousands of people trod each day (Sixth Avenue at Wood, then to Liberty Avenue between 7th and 9th Streets, then 9th itself to Penn Avenue -- an 81B-to-12A/1D transfer). Where there were empty storefronts, there was no snow removal at all. Other places were not only bare but dry, or had just scraps of frozen slop around objects like lamp posts and mailboxes.

At the next bus stop (9th at Penn Avenue), on the side of a corner pizza shop, apparently nobody cared to clean off the walk on 9th, though the front on Penn was quite clean. Clearly this owner cared about his shop traffic, but not one whit about bus riders. This was very treacherous, not only along the building wall but right up to street edge, where people have to step in order to board the bus. Only a path along the walkway, parallel to the street itself, was bare.

I do not know if anyone got hurt here, but it was so icy it was difficult to stand. The thing is, five minutes with a broom yesterday would have made it so much easier.

When I exited, I was in Car Heaven, the suburbs. Not a sidewalk to be seen, at least along a road. The school's parking lot and sidewalk were bare, though.

Finally, I faced my usual nemesis, Perrymont Road. Strangely enough, it wasn't that bad. The postman's delivery truck had made a nice path along the entire what-passes-for-a-shoulder, so it was fairly clear. I ran most of this, mainly because I was only wearing a sweater, and no cap, so in 21°F cold I was freezing. I was probably in the actual road for a lot of it, too, since it was dark and I could see oncoming traffic for hundreds of yards ahead. The road, of course, was spotless by this point.

Moral of the story, it doesn't take much to clear a sidewalk. Up to an inch or so, even a broom will do a decent job. Get it clear, including up to curb edge if you have care of a bus stop, and when the sun comes out, as it does even in snowy Pittsburgh, every last trace will magically disappear. But left to itself, it will get mushy then freeze, making for a very slippery, very unstable surface. Even we healthy adults have trouble negotiating this. Imagine what trouble it is for blind, lame, or heavy individuals, who cannot recover from even a minor unexpected weight shift.

As long as it is easier to get around by car, we will keep driving everywhere. My goal in life is to make it easier to get around by bus, even when it isn't convenient or would be the obvious first choice. Clear sidewalks would help so much!

How not to travel to Monroeville (Jan. 22, 2008)

This afternoon I made a trip to Monroeville, attending the calling hours of a former co-worker. The funeral home was maybe 200 yards from my eye doctor's office, to which I had traveled by bus and bike on a nice day in October.

By contrast, today was snowy and sloppy, not unlike the conditions for my January 2 trip Downtown by bike, but I had no burning desire to douse my $90 dress pants in slush and slop. Instead, I simply walked a mile from bus stop to funeral home in my $90 dress pants, along Routes 22 and 48, after earlier hoofing a mile and a half to catch the bus into town, and another almost half mile Downtown transferring.

Amazingly enough, my pants stayed clean and dry. Chalk it up to a lot of experience dodging puddles and slop. Yes, it can be done. Having sidewalks makes it easier. PA48, though, is plust jain mucking fiserable. At one point, you have a choice between thick mud, or walking in the posted-45 driving lane.

I am blogging, though, to tell you about the bus connections. I got there; I got back. It wasn't pretty. I didn't spend a pile of time ahead of the trip trying to figure this out in exquisite detail. I just knew to get Downtown on a 12A, see if I'd just missed a 67A, and if I had, to catch an EBA to Wilkinsburg where I could catch that same 67A.

It almost worked. Almost. What I did was 12A-EBA-67A, but the EBA I caught got stuck in a driver changeover at the East Liberty Garage, making me just late enough to miss the 67A in Wilkinsburg. Had I caught the 68D that zinged out the busway that preceded the EBA, and gotten off at the first non-Busway stop in Wbg, I might've made it. Oh well, live and learn.

Going back, I got a ride from the funeral home to my old dear stop at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, from which I'd caught hundreds of HP Holiday Park Flyers over the years. Despite the park & ride lot being closed, I boarded with two other people there -- for an afternoon inbound trip -- so it's still a popular stop.

The unforeseen problem with the normally placid HP was having to get booted off the bus at the Herron Avenue stop on the busway because the bus lays over 15 minutes prior to arriving Downtown. Oh bother, that didn't used to happen! So I stood in a drippy snowy rush hour greyness waiting for yet another EBA to ferry me the last two miles into town. This delayed me maybe another 10 minutes. Grumble grumble. All this time, of course, there must have been 15 buses flying inbound on the busway, either not yet in service, or other inbound expresses, none of which could be expected to do the EBA's work. I can understand this, but it's still damn irritating. I'm just glad it wasn't a minus-ten chill factor.

Anyway, once Downtown, I simply hiked over to my usual 13C stop and caught my usual 5:20 trip home. I was the last one on, so stood all the way to the park & ride, but I didn't mind. At least that was a known devil.

Total trip time traveling to there: Left at 12:25, arrived 3:25, most of an hour being spent at the Wilkinsburg Library, writing. Total trip time back: Left at 4:25, home 5:55, almost ordinary considering that I used to do this daily for four years. I think the median trip time then was 89 minutes, so that's right on schedule. I just zone out and read the paper or study or pay bills or something.

Anyway, the trip was do-able, just not very pleasant on the mid-afternoon part. We need sidewalks everywhere. The trip home was spot-on unchanged from 1992, perfectly acceptable in my book.