Different Mixers Redux [Man and Bits of Paper]

Our new roomate Nicole lived just previous to living with us in a house called S----- (named for the street it was on), also called the Fraggle Yurt of Love. I met Nicole at a function run by a campus org we both belong to, KGB (which does not stand for Keeping Geeks Busy), which is its own crazy set of stories. KGB, generally, is an organization composed of the geekiest of geeky kids, on a geeky geeky campus. We follow Roberts Rules of Order (The same ones congress does), but all of our committees are jokes, like the Trebuchet Target Committee, or the Committee to Destroy Ohio (they collaborate sometimes), or the (Name of Still Living KGBer) Memorial Robot Committee.

N. is the most recent in a long line of KGBers (mostly officers of the org, actually) to live in S-----. In fact, I asked around, and the last time someone signed a new lease, as opposed to an addended lease or a sublet, in S----- is, and I am not exaggerating, EIGHT YEARS AGO. Put another way, there has never been a time that S----- was unoccupied, or where people had to, say, FULLY move out, in EIGHT YEARS.

About four years ago, there was a cadre of rather messy people living there, and since then all new roommates have been self-selecting- OK with living somewhere messy. That is to say, since that initial messy time, the house and it's occupants have just gotten messier (compared to the past).

Finally, just this summer, Nicole and the other most-recent-yurt-live-ers (mostly the others- Nicole is actually really clean, but susceptible to house-inertia, so I guess she's culpable as well) had the place so ill-kept that they simply could not find other humans willing to live there, and so, finally, after eight years, there were no new KGB tenants. The lease ran out, and the house had to be emptied.

Anyway, that's all lead-up to this story:

My friend Matt used to live in S-----, three or four years back, and not overlapping with Nicole's stay. When he moved in, he brought with him three boxes of Kitchen supplies (Plates, utensils, cookware, etc). His new roommates and him looked through his stuff and the stuff already in the kitchen, and sort of traded upwards- using his stuff to replace less good stuff, but not unboxing his stuff if there was already, say, a really good Soup Pot, much better than his newly-brought Soup Pot.

What went down into the basement was two of his three boxes, as well as three boxes of kitchen supplies that were rarely-used, or that his new additions had replaced, which belonged to maybe seven people (three current roommates and four previous ones who had left some of their stuff behind.

Matt moved out of S----- a year or two later. When he did, though, he packed his kitchen stuff pretty hurriedly. When he got to California and unpacked, he found that he had packed so hurriedly that he hadn't even packed HIS OWN kitchen supplies. Out of the seven pots/pans and seven matching lids he had, no lid actually correctly matched a pot, and there were TEN different manufacturers represented.

Then the really strange up memory hit. He remembered how this had happened- When he was in the basement packing up his supplies, he had looked through not two white boxes (IE, the two he had actually put down there), but through two blue ones. But the five boxes he and his roommates-from-a-year-ago had put down there were white or brown- the blue boxes must have already been down there. Thinking about it further, he realized that the table he had been using to hold these boxes up and sort through them was ACTUALLY NO TABLE AT ALL BUT SIX OR SEVEN OTHER DIFFERENT BOXES ALL LABELED "S----- KITCHEN" PUT DOWN THERE IN THE PAST NEAR-DECADE BY THE COUPLE DOZEN ROOMMATES BEFORE HIMSELF.

(the epilogue: the landlord ended up actually hiring someone to clean out the basement, as none of the current roommates actually could figure out what was down there or who owned it. That person worked for three days and took out four dozen trash bags and as many or more boxes.

One of the other most-recent-yurters put it this way in her LiveJournal the night that they finally all moved out:

that house had entirely too many hit points.

but it's over. we gutted s-----.

my key locked that door for the final time. i don't feel like i had much to do with the house's living history, but i sure as hell witnessed and played a part in the long, anguished demise.

Nicole moved in with Rigel and me, and is visibly relieved to be living in a clean house.)

Cleaning Other People's Houses [Man and Bits of Paper]

It's a good feeling to clean a friend's house. To see order emerge from seeming chaos. It's good for the friend for you to be there, both for moral support, and to shed some fresh perspective on the situation.

It's good to be able to look at a disaster area and say "Oh, we can fix this. Go get that empty bookshelf."

It's good to have the right tools from having cleaned your own house.

Me: "Why are all these shirts everywhere?"
Him: "I... I don't really have that many hangers."
Me: "Oh, well, I just cleaned out S------- (the name of another house). We now have a couple hundred plastic ones at my house. You can have, say, 50?"
Him: "Oh, I guess that would work."
Me: "Also, I'm bringing 409, Goo Gone, Windex, and Pledge. And my vacuum."
Him: "Ok.... *looks around* Oh my God, yes."

It's good to rediscover a floor.

Pittsburgh knows Kung Fu! Or so I though. [Aphilotus! Aphilotus!]

I thought Pittsburgh had a Black Belt, until I talked to our other contributor, Edward.

Let me explain.

Having just moved back to Pittsburgh from California exile, I am, well, excited. My fiancee and I are madly scrambling to furnish our new apartment, and so we have been driving all over the city, which has lead us down some interesting roads.

We did a lot of driving, and we passed a lot of Belt signs. The belt system is an innovation Pittsburgh made in the 1940s, developed by local traffic engineer Joseph White. They are collections of connected roads which, when followed in sequence, form long circular ring-roads, or belts, around Pittsburgh, in leiu of and then as alternatives to interstate highways.

The system looks something like this:


(image credit: http://www.routemarkers.com/usa/Pennsylvania/Belt_System/)

And the belt signs look something like this:
(image credit: http://www.routemarkers.com/usa/Pennsylvania/Belt_System/)

A few interesting points about the Belt system:
Roads that are belts retain their origional names. So, for example, there are signs on Shady Ave in Squirell Hill that it is Shady Ave, but also that part of it is the "Blue Belt"

The Highland Park Bridge is the only double-belted road, being for its span the carrier of both Blue and Green

The Green, Orange and Red belts are not complete circles- the Red Belt especially, as it is only that northern arc from Leetsdale to Tarentum. The Red and Orange belts cut off at the edges of the county (though Orange does continue unofficially, twelve miles of it being decomissioned in the 1970s, which gives me some exploratory notions), while the Green belt runs into a number of geographic issues (The western hills in Robinson township, for the most part), which make continuing its arcing curve prohibitive and/or trite.

The belts are arranged concentrically, and labeled after the colors of the light spectrum- Red at the edge, down through Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue to Purple (Purple was of course added in 1995 to try to help lost tourists in our lovely double-gridded downtown).

Imagine my surprise, then, when on Penn Ave headed north through Wilkinsburgh, well inside the yellow belt's purview, I came upon these signs:
The first time I came upon them I did not really notice them, save for the abstract notions which wiggled into my brain that a) some tiny extra piece of the Red Belt ran through Wilkinsburgh, and had its own detour and b) the Black Belt existed, and also had a small detour on Penn.

This lead to some confusion, when I mentioned a week later to Edmund that I had traveled along the Black Belt while picking up furniture, to which he replied "What? There is no Black Belt. Though if there was, Paper Street would be part of it."

And so just this morning I googled "Pittsburgh black detour" and found that others had been confused as well.

According to this March 2008 article in the Trib, the detours are color-coded designatory overlays (just like the Belt System) designed to route traffic away and around really bad accidents on the various parkways (just like the Belt System), and that the detours are colored Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Black, and Brown (the first four of which are also colors represented in the Belt System).

More confusingly, according to the Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways document revised and rereleased by Penn-Dot in 2008, there is not just one Black Detour, but thirty-eight, and not just one Red Detour, but twenty.

I am not sure if any same-color detours actually intersect each other, as the document is 210 pages long (it can be found as an 8 MB pdf here), but I am tempted to try to find out.

At the very least, I did find the two detours that the specific signs we found (On Penn near Ardmore) actually reference
RED DETOUR:
(image credit: Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways page 116)
BLACK DETOUR:
(image credit: Emergency Detour Routes For Limited Access Freeways page 124)
They detours, then, split at Penn and Swissvale, Black heading further down Penn, and Red turning right on Swissvale.

Adding to the confusion, though (and perhaps explaining part of why two clearly different road systems managed to get mostly the same color scheme), is that in the above maps, pulled straight from the EDRFLAF document, RED is colored BLUE, and BLACK is colored RED.

Looks like Penn-Dot could use some better in-house graphic designers. They might want to take a cue from the brilliant Pittsburgh Wayfinder System, which... was also a Penn-Dot project, as far as I can tell.

Oh well.