We both needed a vacation. I needed to be surrounded by something a little more urban and Mark probably needed to be someplace a little less, well, San Francisco. We had a new (to us) Buick to break in. Charleston and Pittsburgh proved to be the perfect choice.

I’ve had a fetish for Pittsburgh since my very first visit in 1997. Even then, I thought it was both more aesthetically pleasing than San Francisco and also a more realistic place for mere mortals to live. I love the diners, the variety of neighborhoods, the fact that a viable working class coexists with a major collegiate presence, and that whole Rust Belt vibe. Pittsburgh has a very undeserved bad reputation as an ugly, grim, depressed sort of place. It’s not. It is, however, one of my favorite cities, and it’s probably the most likely big city I’d ever consider relocating to.

But the trip started in Charleston, following a drive up a series of back roads that took us through Mt. Airy, Princeton, Beckley, and the Kanawha River Valley,a nd offered several Kroger locations for our convenience. Once in Charleston, we found an ancient Italian restaurant and had dinner before retiring to out stylish accommodations at the Kanawha City Red Roof Inn.

Wow. Is there anything you can’t get from Sears?

More random thoughts for a rainy Wednesday afternoon:

• This amused me far too much this morning when I was stuck in the lab with not much else to do. I’d really like to see a similar one for San Francisco, but it’s not enough of a priority that I’m going to look for one right now, because…
• I’m off to Fresno with my mom tomorrow for an early Christmas with Mark and the in-laws (and also for breakfast at the Chicken Pie Shop). There will be a brief lunch stop to see friends in San Francisco as well.
• As of this morning, the semester from hell is more or less officially over me. The exciting bibliography is turned in, the giant XML file is done, and my contributions to the group project are complete, at least for now. Next semester, we’ll be trying to publish the damned thing.
• Should you find yourself inclined to acquire one, be forewarned: Time Warner’s DVRs are garbage. Biggest pieces of shit I’ve ever seen. We’ve already given up on one and returned it, and the other will probably follow soon. It’s not just the lousy interface; the actual hard drives are no good, either.The great thing about our big switch, though, is that it’s made me realize I don’t watch much TV these days anyway, freeing us to save lost of money by moving back into the land of ghetto cable.
• Off to Dewey’s now for sugar cake and Moravian cookies.

Not to sound opportunistic or anything, but I like it when other people’s mistakes work to my advantage.

For example, last week I finally bought a copy of a long out of print book by Victor Gruen that I’d been wanting for quite some time. I’d never seen a decent used copy for less than forty or fifty bucks, but this one Amazon seller had one for about twenty. It had an intact dust cover, but the seller noted somewhat apologetically that there was writing inside the front cover from when someone had given the book as a a gift. I think that may be part of why it was priced so low.

As I looked at the book yesterday,  I noticed that the signature looked an awful lot like the name of the author, and that the inscription looked an awful lot like something an author would have written. After a quick Google search or two to verify the signature, I realized that I did in fact have a book signed by one of my favorite commercial architects of the 1950s (the designer of America’s first enclosed shopping mall, among other projects) and at a nice bargain price.

Congratulations to my betrothed on being noticed by all those cool kids in the creative class. Enjoy it now, as their attention spans tend to be a little on the short side.

Randomly Friday:

• Since one of my primary professional passions is making old newspaper archives available online, this is pretty exciting to me. I’m a little disappointed that the demo suggests there will be no built-in mechanism either for printing or saving the content in question, but it’s still better than nothing. I assume the print and save restrictions are part of the copyright agreement wit ProQuest and (presumably) with the original publishers.
• Warning to candidates: don’t mess around with librarians. We will fuck you up. Or at least cause you mild embarrassment in a relatively polite and professional manner.
• Speaking of libraries (sort of), I ran across this interesting book in my local one the other night. It’s a good read; the author derides such modern “geniuses” as LeCorbusier, Sert, and Gehry among others not merely for having needlessly expensive and  ridiculous-looking buildings that don’t integrate with their surroundings, but also for designing buildings that don’t even serve their stated purposes well, either because of generally bad design or through astronomical maintenance requirements. It might be worth owning, methinks.
• The crazy week is over. I still have a lot of work hanging over my head, but I may be able to sneak out for a little drive this weekend, assuming gas prices don’t jump a dollar or so over the weekend like they did during Katrina.