Steel city

As Silas often says, “It’s better than nothing.” We drove to Pittsburg last Friday to visit with Derek, Tina, Henry, Hans, Keith, and Rebecca. We drove back Sunday, so it was a pretty fast trip, but was definitely worth it. We ice skated, took a trolley up to an overlook of Pittsburgh, jumped on a campus communal trampoline, and most importantly loafed about drinking coffee. We’re all going camping for a week once school is out, so we’re all really looking forward to some more quality time. Ice skating was much tougher this time, as Silas wanted to sit on the ice most of the time. Henry however made his way slowly around the rink for about an hour and a half and clearly was getting the hang of it. The ice rink is about a hundred yards down the hill from Derek and Tina’s building, and I’m jealous of that for sure. On the way out to Pittsburgh we stopped and ate at Popeye’s chicken, and by the time we arrived at our destination I felt thoroughly terrible. We resolved to do better on the ride home, and we did far better, checking on Yelp along the way for highly rated restaurants. We ended up at a Japanese hibachi restaurant in Carlisle, of all places, and it was just awesome. We ordered bento boxes and it made my day for sure. A picture of my box is down below. I felt like a hundred bucks, and fortunately the bill didn’t get anywhere near that. They had sweet origami cranes hanging from the ceiling by the hundreds.

I’m in the middle of switching from Nikon cameras over to Pentax, so spent a good bit of time this week ebay’ing a bunch of camera stuff while Silas napped, and picking up a few new Pentax lenses along the way. All the pictures this week were shot with the new equipment, for what that’s worth. I wouldn’t expect anyone to tell the difference, especially on the web. Molly continues to indulge me in this, but I’m going to need to shoot the heck out of this stuff to justify it. I’m starting up a few projects now, which should be fun and challenging.

It’s a busy week for us all, with evening activities much of the week, and it doesn’t stop soon. Molly is attending a conference on campus today and Saturday. Sunday we’re getting together with the extended family to throw a baby shower for my brother and sister in law. I’m contemplating recreating the baby shower game “Jedi Baby Catcher,” which we created for a shower a few years back in Madison.  Or maybe the baby food tasting, which was really disgusting now that I remember it. Any ideas for good shower activities would be welcome, though I expect there are about million of them online. My impulse this morning is to complain, so I’m just going to log off. I hope everyone is enjoying this April weather in February. I hope we haven’t become too soft, because we’re off to Madison for a quick visit next week. Ah, I need to reserve a rental car! Off I go…