Tea Leaves

We were in Seattle for a long weekend this past week. This is the first time I’ve been back since a trip about ten years ago. As before, Seattle is a great food town, especially for seafood. And, in the last ten years they have finally learned how to make a cappuccino. Here are a few places to try.
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Pete mentioned last week that I was in Paris on one of my periodic visits. These started over ten years ago when a friend of mine got a long term consulting gig over there and we went and visited and got hooked on the place. Now I try to take a trip once every year or two. This trip was much like the others. Mostly what we do is walk around, sit in the gardens, and eat. On the other hand, there were new things too.
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One of the odd things about Western Pennsylvania, as a region, is that there is an urban/rural divide that seems more stark than nearly anywhere else I’ve been. You can travel half an hour outside of town and find people that have lived in the area all their lives, but never been downtown. Likewise, you can find people who live in the city who never find occasion to leave.

This is a shame, because there are things in both places that are eminently worth experiencing. One of the highlights of getting out of town a little bit — especially in the autumn — is the fairly large number of small farms and orchards where you can find great locally-grown produce at reasonable prices. Today, I’d like to tell you about one of them.
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As promised, here is a second list of things that I like about PIttsburgh. Also as promised, no food places.

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Tonight, in a pensive mood, I did something I haven’t done in a while: I picked a direction, started driving, and got myself good and lost. I ended up in Clairton.
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So, it turns out that there are people who are really, really enthusiastic about Mac OS X, as I discovered at the Tiger launch party in Shadyside last night.

And now, I have photos to prove it.

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It was just this past summer, and I was in my favorite French bistro in Toronto: La Palette. It is small, comfortably crowded, and quirky. It was a wonderful day. Kensington Market was closed to auto traffic in a “take back the streets” sort of moment. Live music blared from three different bands. And a summer shower forced us all inside — wet, but happy. I was looking forward to a simple plate of steak frittes. The beer list at La Palette is great, and I was able to enjoy a Hoegaarden Verboden Vrucht, which I haven’t had since the last time I was in Antwerp, nearly 8 years ago now.
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I’m still in my office, rather than on my way to Toronto, because Pittsburgh — inland though it is — has had its own close, personal, and somewhat intimate encounter with Hurricane Ivan. To call what has happened here “flooding” is somewhat of an understatement.

17 September 2004, is officially the rainiest day in Pittsburgh’s recorded history, with 5.08 inches falling in a single day.
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applestore-done.jpg”>Inside the Apple Store

The Pittsburgh Apple store is open. Welcome to the neighborhood.

The kids section is fun, everything is hands on, and the staff is (as should be expected) friendly and knowledgable. Three cheers for genius (and CMU grad) Meredyth for giving me the tour. Plenty of Birkenstocks were in evidence, as was lots of brand new, shiny merchandise. I don’t even need a new Mac and I found myself glad that I left my wallet in the car.

I believe psu may be following up with some photos of the opening day’s line soon.

Update from psu

In the line.

Here is my picture of the line. This is from about 1/2 of the way in, and you can almost see the head of it three blocks up. The car in the foreground is iconic, I think.

Signs

As promised, here are some photos of the soon-to-open Pittsburgh (Shadyside) Apple Store. I concur with the opinion that it doesn’t look anywhere near close to done, but then my experience in constructing anything other than computer programs is severely limited. Perhaps Steve will visit. We could have coffee at the relaxing and sociable café, Jitterz, across the street, and down one block.
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Château-Fort de Bonaguil

In the latter years of the 15th century, after losing a lawsuit brought against him by his vassals, the Baron Berenger de Roqueteuil is reported to have said:

By Lord Jesus and all the saints of his glorious Paradise, I will raise a manor house that neither my unpleasant subjects will be able to take, nor English if they have the audacity to return there, nor even the powerful soldiers of King of France.

And that is just what he did, creating the awe-inspiring Château-Fort de Bonaguil over the course of 40 years.

Bonaguil is located between Perigord and Quercy, and is open to the public. If you’re brave enough, you can climb its decaying ramparts and contemplate the surrounding woods.

T.E. Lawrence said of Bonaguil “It is so perfect that it is almost ridiculous to call it a ruin.”

The land that Pittsburgh sits on is a rumpled place, a piece of rough cloth thrown carelessly on the table. A very long time ago, this place was a flat plain made up of the debris washed down from the left side of the decaying Appalachian mountains. This grand flatness was then itself carved up and out by rivers and kills and everything in between, leaving a landscape of close valleys and hills of oddly similar height.

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Find a map of Pittsburgh and spread it out upon the table. Make it a good map, detailed enough to show all of the actual streets downtown and surrounding, perhaps even the paper ones that fly off into space above the rivers or worm their old ways under newer steel and stone. Put your finger on the Monongahela river where it reforms itself into half of the Ohio. Begin to drag it east, up the channel. Put ripples in the water with your nail past the Fort Pitt bridge, past the Smithfield Street Bridge, past the little train bridge that carries the T and holds a name that no one remembers (Panhandle Railroad Bridge). Let your finger feel the draw of that mighty river, navigable in entire, and keep pushing east.

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