Ornoth

Our move over the holidays from Pittsburgh to Austin was a long, hard road… both literally and figuratively. Here are some of the lowlights (plus a couple highlights) from the hectic, stressful, and eventful month gone by.

Final week at Hobart Street

Boxing up Hobart Street produced an unanticipated cat fortress!

Closing the book on the Hobart Street apartment

Hell is real... especially in Ohio!

Home at last, after a 1,450-mile road trip

Orny broke a couple chairs out of the moving trailer to make the wait for our movers more comfortable

We successfully moved our huge pile of mess from one place to another

The lease on our new Austin home began on December 15, but there was no way Inna and I could finish packing up our belongings that quickly, so we made arrangements with movers for December 28th.

The overwhelming sensation in December was stress. All the packing, selling, giving away, donating, or trashing all our belongings took time and the dust we kicked up caused my asthma to start acting up.

Then there was the weather. A week-long arctic blast brought record cold and wind chills below -25°F, and of course I’d prematurely sealed up the box containing my winter coat and boots. It was like the northeast -- where I’ve lived for my entire life -- was taking one final, vicious swipe at me for daring to move south.

The brutal cold snap laid bare some of our old apartment’s frailties. The window in our spare bedroom fell apart in my hands. The jerry-rigged kitchen sink plumbing gave way on Christmas Eve, and the landlord’s Christmas Day repairs only revealed further downstream blockages, presumably due to frozen pipes, so we were left with no water in the kitchen. All this trauma happened while Inna was out of town for four days, visiting family. It made me very glad we would be getting out of that death trap, if only Mother Nature would let us! But all this sure made it easier for us to leave Pittsburgh.

During the bitter cold, I had to post no-parking notices and claim four parallel parking spaces in front of our house that would be required for the 28-foot U-Pack trailer that we’d be loading into. Although it was a nerve-wracking wait for other people’s vehicles to move on, I was finally able to clear the space and the trailer was dropped off on time.

That night before loading day, Inna and I stuffed our cat Begemot into the car to go set up a temporary household in her mother’s condo a couple blocks away. But in the middle of a quick stop to pick up Indian food on busy Murray Ave, the car refused to start! This did nothing to assuage my anxiety about setting off on a 1,450-mile road trip in a 14 year old car!

After some worried fiddling, we managed to get the engine to turn over and drove our reduced household over to our temporary digs. But Begemot immediately hid himself in an inaccessible corner of the basement. And after we fished him out and confined him in our bedroom, he kept us awake the entire night while he suffered his own sneezing/asthma fits and freaked out over being in an unfamiliar place.

That was our segue into:

Week at Mom’s

After our first sleepless night at mom’s, the cold snap broke, and we went back to the apartment to meet four guys from “Zooming Moving” of Salem, Ohio who would load our belongings into the trailer. They seemed smart and fast, taking 2½ hours to load our 155-ish boxes and pieces of furniture into less space in the trailer than we believed possible. It was magical watching our place rapidly clear out, then seeing everything stuffed trash-compactor style into a tiny section of our trailer (FYI that was a clever bit of foreshadowing, there). When we asked them at the last minute, they even squeezed in four chairs that Inna had feared she’d have to give away.

Once the trailer was locked and the guys gone, Inna called and arranged to have U-Pack pick it up. I visited my oral surgeon for a previously-scheduled followup that was painless but carried disappointing news. Afterward I circled back to the old apartment and found the trailer had been hauled away, so I pulled down the parking signs and went across town to visit El Burro: a favorite burrito joint.

That was on Wednesday the 28th, but we didn’t plan to leave Pittsburgh until the following Tuesday, to avoid being on the road over the New Years holiday. So we had a week to close up the old apartment and hit up some favorite places, which included ice cream at Bruster’s, lunch at Pamela’s diner, and dinner from Thai and Noodle Outlet. For Inna in particular, it was the end of an era, having lived in that apartment for 12 years!

On one hand, it was a major relief that we could stop working like slaves; all the packing and planning was finally done and over with! We even had time to run a load of laundry! And we watched with delight as our stuff traveled to Ohio, then spent the holiday weekend in Arkansas, and arrived in Austin on Monday, eight days earlier than our promised delivery date!

On the other hand, we found ourselves with too much time and nothing to do, combined with the uncomfortably cold temperature of Inna’s mother’s condo. The waiting was especially hard on Inna, who -- having committed to the Austin move -- was eager to hit the road.

And I had time to reflect on how even the holidays had been out to get us this year. Halloween featured my oral surgery; Inna twisted her ankle during our Austin trip over Thanksgiving, and our old apartment’s electrical panel went bad the night we returned; a frigid Christmas featured frozen water pipes and hectic packing while Inna was away visiting her father; and we were spending New Years living out of a suitcase at Inna’s mother’s condo, while our new house and all our stuff was already waiting for us in Austin!

But time passed, the calendar ticked over to 2023, and our long-anticipated departure date finally arrived.

The Drive

Between our fatigue, a stressed-out cat, and our 14 year old car, we allocated three days for the 1,450-mile drive down to Austin. We’d made reservations at Red Roof Inns along the way, relying on their open policy toward pets. Setting out, we were tired and nervous, but happy that things had gone as well as they did.

We left Pittsburgh on Tuesday January 3th in steady rain that tapered off the further we went. The three of us all fared well, and after nine hours we pulled into our motel in Nashville. I downed a terrible “jalapeno cheez chicken” from the Mexican place next door and settled in. The room was garbage, with broken lights, thermostat, and faucet. Bigi’s stress-response asthma was really bad. Then at 5am a group of assholes came around screaming and pounding on doors, and took three body-slams attempting to bust our door in. It was very reminiscent of our horrifying experience at our Austin motel in November. What the fuck is it with you Southerners that you turn into raving murderous assholes when you go to a motel?

After a horrible night we set out on the middle leg of our journey. Inna did most of the driving on a sunny day, enjoying the 75 MPH speed limit through memorable towns like Bucksnort, Tennessee. In the middle of Arkansas we had our one worrying car malfunction when our tire pressure monitor signaled too high air pressure. But it reset after we pulled aside for a lengthy stop, and we proceeded more gingerly. Our motel in Texarkana was less run-down, but I was so wary about the guys hanging out in the parking lot that I couldn’t eat. Fortunately we didn’t have any more overnight visitors, but the cat’s asthma made for another rough night.

On the final day we got up and showered, then faced our shortest drive of the trip, all of which improved our moods. After seeing a bunch of beaver-bearing billboards advertising “Buc-ee’s” truck stop, Inna decided to stop and check one out. It’s kinda of like Pittsburgh’s Sheetz -- a local favorite convenience store -- only with the ridiculous size, decor, and attitude of a huge casino. We definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore! Then, as Austin came into welcome view, we reflected on how well both the car and cat had done on the road trip; the latter experiencing only one outburst in response to Inna’s singing along with her chosen tunes.

Arriving midafternoon on January 5th, our first stop was of course the new house. After discovering that the real estate agent’s promised lockbox was nowhere to be seen, we found the key literally under the doormat and let ourselves in, giving the place a quick once-over. I got our fiber internet router set up while Bigi began to to settle in; meanwhile, Inna made a grocery run and tried to track down the king-sized mattress that FedEx was supposed to deliver for us.

We’d reserved a hotel in Austin in case we got in late, and decided that was preferable to sleeping on the floor, so we bundled poor Bigi back into the car. Our room was fine, but we had another restless night and checked out early the next morning to spend the day at home, watching for our mattress.

Taking up residence

Watching for deliveries proved very fruitful, as we received not only our mattress, but also Inna’s laptop, which we’d dropped off at an Apple store in Pittsburgh for repairs, and a huge grocery bag full of useful stuff (including notably non-Heinz ketchup) from Inna’s former Pittsburgh/now Texas friend Traci.

After making my own grocery run, I was hanging around and saw a kid park his car at the end of our cul de sac and jog between our house and the neighbor’s. I shrugged it off as a local picking up something he’d forgotten. But ten minutes later Austin cops swarmed the area, took possession of the car, flagged me to tell them if I’d seen anything, and started a manhunt complete with search dogs! Day One in our new house, and there’s both criminals and police crawling around our property. I’m afraid Bigi was the only one of who was feeling secure in our new home. But hey, it was January 6 and a delightful 78°F!

Over the next three days we worked to slowly make the place more livable. We didn’t have anything to sit on, but procured our new mattress, bed sheets, food, trash bags, a dish rack, and started laundering things. Bigi’s asthma receded and he became more adventurous, but – in characteristic feline style – he also managed to cover himself in ashes while exploring the fireplace.

Getting our stuff home

Meanwhile, our stuff had been sitting at a shipping warehouse for a week, and we were eager to have it delivered. Because our house is on a steep hill and a narrow dead-end street, U-Pack couldn’t drop our trailer off at the house, so we had hired another moving company -- a national chain ironically named “Two Men and a Truck” -- to transfer our belongings into a smaller truck and shuttle it from U-Pack’s depot to the house.

Since the trailer had arrived early, we got the movers to bump our job up to Monday, but when we met them at the facility, they showed up in a truck that was even bigger than the trailer! And that was the smallest truck they had. No way could they move our stuff, nor would they move it into a smaller rental truck like a U-Haul. We were completely screwed. After much wrangling, their chief agreed to use a company minivan the next day to shuttle our stuff from the top of our hill down to our house. To add one more frustration to the day, I grazed a low retaining wall trying to back out of our insanely un-navigable driveway and knocked an exhaust tip from our Accord.

The next morning – January 10th – we met up with the movers and they shuttled our stuff from the U-Pack trailer into their big truck. That was when we learned the downside of the “amazing” packing job that Zooming Moving did back in Pittsburgh: lots of damaged belongings. Three pieces of wooden furniture were broken and more than half of the 22 plastic bins we’d used had been crushed. Fortunately, not much stuff had actually spilled out, so I used plastic wrap to patch together the shattered bins. But our poor stone “Boo-boo Buddha” statue – so named because he had originally come with a chipped knee – was now fully decapitated! The only good news was that our two big glass desktops had somehow arrived intact.

After loading and the 20-minute drive to our place, I showed their driver why U-Pack hadn’t dropped our trailer in front of our house: the steep, curving descent down our street, the overhanging tree branches, the sloping narrow driveway, and the limited space in our cul de sac for turning around. While using a panel van to shuttle our stuff would suck, we thought it too dangerous to try to bring a huge moving van down that hill.

But the driver was a young Black guy fresh out of high school, and he fearlessly wanted to try it. I told him it was all on them, but he actually managed it. He parked the van at a precarious tilt and chocked the wheels.

The movers still had to carry our stuff down the driveway, but they were able to unload, saving us the extra time, expense, and damage that using the minivan would have required. It wasn’t quite as magical seeing all our stuff pile up in the living room. But despite all our pointless worrying, the entire job was done in just over four hours, leaving us shoulder-deep in a fortress of cardboard boxes, broken plastic bins, and randomly-scattered furniture.

And with that, our long-anticipated move south and the month-long moving ordeal was finally complete! Even after so much stress and all the trials thrown at us, we were now in our new place in Austin, complete with all our stuff, including Inna’s car and Bigi the cat.

Our next step was to begin digging out from the mess, but we put that on hold long enough to enjoy a well-earned celebratory dinner at Inna’s favorite: Lupe’s Mexican restaurant.

Life since then…

It’s been a week and a half since our stuff arrived, and we’ve had time to address most of the mess and begin getting comfortable in our new base of operations. In the wake of our move, there’s lots of organizing, arranging, and decorating to do, but we can thankfully say that the hard work is complete and behind us.

In addition to literally “getting our house in order”, Inna and I have made our first few expeditions afield, starting to explore all that Austin has to offer. We’re really excited to start going places, seeing people, and doing things… Finally building the new life that the two of us have dreamed about for so very long.

Stay tuned for our further adventures!

When I moved from Boston to Pittsburgh, one of my friends was interested in how the two cities differed. After living here for a year, I now feel like I can make some somewhat informed contrasts.

Here’s my list of the top twenty differences between Boston and Pittsburgh.

• Time is a little bit different. Pittsburgh is a little further south than Boston, so its days are a little longer in the winter and shorter in the summer. But more importantly, Boston is at the eastern edge of the time zone, while Pittsburgh is at the western end; so the sun rises and sets about 30-45 minutes later.
• Pittsburgh doesn’t get Boston’s cold onshore sea breezes in the spring. On the other hand, Boston doesn’t get Pittsburgh’s periodic light lake effect snow.
• There aren’t many evergreens in western Pennsylvania. It’s mostly hardwood, unlike New England.
• Obviously Pittsburgh is hillier, but the soil is also different. Boston is granite and glacial till, whereas Pittsburgh is all sedimentary rock: visible strata of limestone, sandstone, and shale, a whopping three miles deep!
• Surprisingly, western PA has a lot fewer lakes than New England. Most rainfall winds up coursing down narrow canyons and into the major rivers.
• Because of this lack of natural reservoirs to trap and hold rainwater and snow melt, combined with the steepness and softness of the underlying rock, western PA is very prone to flash flooding and debris in the roads. The only time New England floods is during spring runoff, and that rarely washes debris into the roadways.
• Aside from its tiny downtown, Pittsburgh is a much less walkable city. Distances between points of interest are greater, and the outlying towns don’t have dense commercial or cultural centers, so it’s mostly undifferentiated sprawl.
• As such, Pittsburgh is a much more car-oriented city. There’s no subway, no commuter rail, and minimal public transportation. The automobile is a necessity here, whereas they are a liability in Boston.
• Despite that, the landscape and street design makes it stunningly difficult to get from Point A to Point B in Pittsburgh. Unlike Boston, where you can pick between several bad routes, there’s usually only one way for Pittsburghers to get where they need to go. That in turn creates horrible blighted sections of roadway like Bigelow, Liberty, Washington Boulevard, Second, Fifth, Penn, Carson, Ft. Duq, 51, and BotA.
• Because of the poorly-designed infrastructure, and Penn DOT’s unconcealed hostility toward accommodating cyclists and pedestrians, there are fewer road cyclists in Pittsburgh, and more of them are killed by motorists than happen in Boston, where government is more responsive and the cycling and pedestrian advocacy groups are better organized.
• Between that and the lumpy terrain, there aren’t as many century rides in western PA as there are back in Massachusetts.
• Pittsburgh does have a ton of railroads and former railroad and mill property. There’s a lot more post-industrial wasteland than you find in Boston, where most of it has already been cleaned up and redeveloped. In that sense, Pittsburgh is more like Lawrence MA, only on a vastly larger scale.
• There’s certainly more poverty, abandoned and/or condemned property, and overall urban blight in Pittsburgh. Property values are too high in Boston for space to sit unused and uncared-for very long.
• There does seem to be a greater rate of crime, murder, and drug problems in Pittsburgh, as well.
• There are, of course, certain neighborhoods in Pittsburgh that are gentrifying, but it’s decades behind Boston in rehabilitating itself overall. Tho they’ve made a lot of progress from their industrial past.
• In addition to property prices being lower, salaries are also much lower in Pittsburgh than Boston, which has always been a tech hub. On the other hand, groceries in Boston are considerably less expensive than western PA.
• There’s less ethnic diversity in Pittsburgh than Boston. Sure, there are some small enclaves, but Boston is far more integrated than Pittsburgh, with a greater variety and diffusion of immigrants from all kinds of ethinic origins.
• At the same time, western PA has a whole lot more uneducated, low income white folk. The substantial redneck population reminds me a lot more of rural Maine than cosmopolitan Boston.
• Pittsburgh might be widely known for its food, but I find it pretty uninspired. Their signature pizza places don’t even deliver! Frankly, I don’t know how they stay in business, because delivery makes up the majority of most pizza joints’ orders. Oh, and they call them “cuts”, not “slices”. Stupid.
• On the other hand, Verizon doesn’t sell its Fios fiber optic internet service in Boston. It does in Pittsburgh, and that’s a noteworthy plus!

I’ve already mentioned how ironic it was that work assigned me to a two-month project in the US Virgin Islands shortly after Inna and I scheduled a tropical vacation to Grand Cayman Island, so I won’t belabor that again.

That vacation took place this past week, and it was really enjoyable. Despite having been in St. Thomas for four weeks, I’d only had one weekend there, and that was the only opportunity I had to do anything recreational down there. So having a week on Grand Cayman, with no work obligations, was still quite a treat.

The only snafu we had getting there was when Inna had to sprint from her arrival gate and just barely made our connecting flight out of Charlotte. During our descent into GCM, it was delightful to see Seven Mile Beach and the cruise ships in George Town harbor. After so many fruitless trips to St. Thomas, I finally got a new stamp in my passport at immigration, which was quick and painless.

The rental car presented some challenges, tho. I’d gotten used to the oddity of driving on the left side of the road during my time in St. Thomas, but Grand Cayman added two new elements. The first was the presence—absolutely everywhere!—of clockwise-flowing rotaries / traffic circles / roundabouts. I think there were seven in the couple miles between the airport and our hotel. The other was that the driver sits on the right side of the vehicle. That made passing easier than in St. Thomas, since the driver was toward the middle of the road, and thus able to see ahead around slower traffic, but it also meant all the controls were reversed. It took a while for me to get used to using my right hand for the turn signal, rather than my left, which was the wipers. And I never really got used to having the gear selector on the left. But I caught on well enough, and didn’t smash into anything, unlike in St. Thomas…

It wasn’t until later that we sat on a second floor porch in George Town and took an inventory of the cars passing by that we realized that about 60 percent of the cars had the driver’s side on the left (US-style), while only 40 percent had it on the right (UK-style).

The hotel—Sunshine Suites—turned out to be much better than expected. It was clean, bug-free, had both hot water and towels. It was, as advertised, across a very busy street from the beach, but that saved us about $200 per night, and with food and gas and everything else at ridiculous Cayman prices ($150 for a two-person dinner wasn’t uncommon), that mattered.

Immediately upon arriving, we fell into a daily routine that never varied. We’d get up around 8am, get a light breakfast at the hotel’s poolside bar/restaurant, and make our way across the street to Seven Mile Beach, which was really quite spectacular, and not overly crowded. We’d soak up the sun and do a little swimming, which included getting out to the 200 yard buoy: a good achievement for Inna, who is a better swimmer than she thinks. The only problem we had was on our last morning, when we seem to have both been stung by some kind of no-see-um in the water.

Around 11am we’d head back to the hotel room to shower. I’d make bacon and eggs, and then maybe a little web surfing and a nap. This allowed us to avoid being out during the height of the day, which was a serious consideration given Inna’s fair skin.

After our siesta, we’d go out and do some late afternoon activity before dinner and bed. We really didn’t chase any nightlife, preferring instead to get ample sleep.

Grand Cayman’s main attraction is the diving, but since Inna isn’t a snorkeler, and neither of us SCUBA, that limited our range of afternoon activities. Still, we managed a few interesting expeditions. On Wednesday we drove around the entire island, taking in the surf at Breakers, the quaint little East End, and the vast mangrove swamps that constitute the majority of the island. We ended up at Rum Point, where Inna found her first hammock; she quickly developed an affinity for them. After that we joined in on the island’s huge Mardi Gras celebration at the beachside Kaibo bar. It was quite a press, and we managed to find a good spot to see a reggae band called Locomotion that was playing there.

On Thursday we went to a butterfly farm, which was moderately interesting. Since there were no cruise ships on Friday, we went into the capital of George Town and took in the soul-sucking tourist shopping scene, which was about as disappointing as one would expect.

Saturday we took it easy and ran a few errands, but on Sunday we had a special plan: we rented Waverunner personal watercraft. That set us back $95 for a half hour, but it was worth it, because neither of us had ridden one before, and it was something I’ve dreamed of doing for many years. Within minutes I was doing power-slide 180s through my own roostertail, and Inna was tearing up and down the beach with the throttle wide open. What a rush!

Monday afternoon I convinced a reluctant Inna to take in the Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park in the centre of the island, which turned into a big hit. We saw the alien-looking ironshore coral that the island is based on, stood underneath an extremely toxic manchineel tree, sniffed aromatic lime tree leaves, saw some shy agouti rodents, and taunted the incredibly blasé iguanas. It was pretty cool.

As for meals… they were really mixed. We started out with the island’s one Indian place, which—after the lousy food in St. Thomas—suited me perfectly, but was nothing special for Inna. After that, things went downhill. We had very average experiences at local joints Champion House, Chicken Chicken (which proved to be about 30 meters further than we’d walked), the hotel’s barbecue buffet, and Breezes, where we saw the islands two official pirate ships and watched the sun set (despite arriving an hour too early thanks to my camera being on St. Thomas time). But we ended the week strong, with delicious meals at two nearby restaurants: Yoshi Sushi (where I had teppanyaki pork) and Deckers British pub (where I had Strongbow cider and the most amazing pork evar).

By the end of the week, there wasn’t anything left on our “must-see” list, and we felt we’d gotten everything a non-diver could get out of the island. Our routine was a perfect balance of restfulness, beach fun in the sun, and a little light tourism. And, of course, I got a whole boatload of photos, some of which you can see using the Grand Cayman tag or the 2008 Caribbean set on my Flickr account.