Burgatory for One Thousand Years!!!!

I had initially considered a second, equally large leg to my journey over the last few months to various places in Europe I have not gotten to visit, but a couple of things dissuaded me:

1. Eight weeks straight of traveling is actually a lot, I was exhausted by the end.
2. Summer is the best time to be in Seattle
3. I might have to travel to Pittsburgh

My partner’s parents had them late in life, which means they are actually pretty old and have a sizable house that they only recently moved out of after 40 (!) years living there. Naturally, there were still things to get out of it and organize/digitize/preserve:

I would have liked to have fast-forwarded here and written that the trip there was uneventful, but actually the worst thing that has ever happened to me in an airport terminal occurred when a mother rushing a daughter to the bathroom resulted in my being thrown up on. It’s hard to have this not affect your mood for the next several hours.

I genuinely feel one can learn a lot from the transit from the airport into a new city. When I took a cab into Miami, for example, I was inundated with personal injury lawyer billboards featuring perhaps the whitest old guy alive poorly photoshopped with beef-jerky-tanned bodybuilder muscles. For Pittsburgh, the experience was one of constantly noticing increasingly weirder vanity license plates:

The only billboard of note was one that invited us to visit “Burgatory”, which - while a fine restaurant name - would actually be a good shorthand moniker for the United States. This isn’t the only thing in Pittsburgh which (I think) makes it a strong contender for the median national polity:

We got an electric “compact” SUV. A contradiction in terms ten years ago, but now every car on the road is the size of a Sherman tank. We needed the space to haul boxes and it ended up being impressive nonetheless; a range of 238 miles and, despite going back and forth into the city and elsewhere, we never got it below 100. If it (1) didn’t take so much carbon fuel to make these cars and (2) they didn’t ruin cities, I would endorse them.