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Found in Blick am Abend, on the seat next to me on the tram ride home yesterday: As for Game Six, Let's Go Pens!!

I arrived in Zürich at ten on Sunday morning, having spent eight hours on a plane from Newark, two hours on the runway at Newark waiting for the storm to clear out of the way of the transatlantic routes from New York, four hours in the Continental first class lounge (advantage: first class) waiting out my layover, two hours flying from Atlanta with a crowing rooster in the cargo hold right below me (me: “Is that a…”, guy beside me: “Yeah.”), two hours at the Houlihan’s in the atrium of Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson having breakfast with my cousin on my last way through Atlanta for a while, an hour on a plane from Memphis, two days repacking and reviewing what I’m having shipped to myself while finalizing a customs manifest the customs guys here declined to even bother looking at after they saw how detailed it was, and two days on a truck driving what was left of my stuff from Pittsburgh, country music blaring. Yes, I know I don’t like country music, but what could be more appropriate for driving the stuff you just cleaned out of your house across Kentucky in a rented truck on your way out of the country after a divorce in which your ex-wife ended up with your car and your cat? Replace the cat with a dog, the car with a truck, and Switzerland with, er, Texas or Alabama or something, and you’ve got a country song right there! Even so the pleasantly efficient and helpful Swiss woman behind the counter at Kreisbüro 7 who registered me as a resident of Zürich yesterday said “Ah, Elvis!” when seeing I was born in Memphis, so who am I to say what’s country and what’s not? ...

Eight years, nineteen days ago, I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a convoy from Atlanta consisting of a ten-foot cargo truck and a slightly battered green ‘95 Honda Civic with about ninety thousand miles on it, and moved into a seven hundred square foot third-floor walk-up with central air one block off Walnut in Shadyside with my fiancée. ...

I think it’s safe to say it’s crunch time now. I’ve got a little more than a hundred hours left here in Pittsburgh, the final details of my arrival in Zürich are very nearly sorted out, and now it’s down to the disposition of individual boxes and the things in them. ...

Every so often, I run a 5k. By “every so often,” I mean “about once a year.” This one 5k is pretty much all the running I do, outside, of course, of the occasional Four Concourse Dash at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International. The rest of my exercise has been decidedly lower impact -walking, cycling, kayaking, wall-climbing, and the ever-so-important Biannual Headboard Toss (see below). So pretty much every time I do run, I’m a stiff, aching mess for quite some time afterward. ...

Another day, another set of tourists through the house. This group stayed two full minutes, which is I think a new record. I can barely get from the basement to the top floor via each room in two minutes, and I live here. ...

Time, it feels, is running out. My standard policy with respect to moving is basically not to move, which given that I've moved once every two years or so pretty reliably since 1995, is probably not a good standard policy. What this means is that I generally leave the actual mechanics of moving off to the last minute, madly throwing things into boxes when the truck pulls up downstairs, and utterly failing to sort out the mess after the fact. (This should perhaps be an indication that I have no real use for most of my stuff, but that's another issue entirely.) So it is this time. Twenty-one days is not at all last-minute given my history, but given the somewhat different logistics of crossing the ocean, feels it. I've tried tricking myself into moving by pulling the art off the walls (always the last to go in the past) and I think it seems to be working. Indeed, I probably would have gotten some packing done last night had it not been for Game 1 of the Yuengling Conference Finals, absolutely worth it in every way, especially considering the result. (Speaking of, Malkin's shortie last night, I must say, was not only poetic payback for the mugging he took on his short-handed attempt of a few seconds before, but also made up nicely for his penalty "shot" against the Rangers last series, and beyond that, was one of the prettiest goals I've seen this year in its simplicity. But reviewing individual goals in pretentious art-critic style isn't getting any furniture down my stairs, so I digress...)

At the corner of Murray and Bartlett in Squirrel Hill lies the 61C Cafe, named after the bus route that stops at its front door; it has come to be my standard weekend morning hangout these last days in Pittsburgh. This is largely because, invariably, someone wants to come by at some insane hour of the morning to see the house. I’ve actually been woken up one Sunday morning by the sound of people in my living room due to a terrible misunderstanding between the realtors involved. And if I have to hide away from my house for half an hour on a Sunday morning, there might as well be some damn good coffee involved. ...

On my return from Tucson tonight, I walked, as usual, straight from the gate to the taxi stand, because while the 28X (see all previous grumbling about the Port Authority) is perfectly serviceable for a ride from my office (which it stops right in front of) to the airport (which it stops right in front of), it’s certainly not worth waiting for at midnight for the privilege of spending an hour on the bus and forty minutes walking home. ...

It’s a good thing that Pittsburgh’s hockey team is better than its public transit system, because otherwise I’d be in a mood. Things I won't miss about the Port Authority: Bus trunking. I don't know if this is what this is actually called, but if you have, say, three different routes to the suburbs that share the same route through the city, each with a thirty-minute frequency, you can schedule them in a couple of different ways. The smart way would be to stagger arrivals, thereby providing a ten-minute service frequency through the common routing area (i.e., the city, which is the bit of the route that actually has the density required to support public transit). The not-smart way would be to have three buses come along one minute after each other (or, better yet, following each other), thereby providing a thirty-minute service. Ten-minute service is almost frequent enough to be dependable even without precise timing. Thirty-minute service is not. Guess which one the Port Authority uses? Bus packing. Yeah, thirty minute service. I suspect they do this because, at least on the 61 routes through the southern bit of the East End, they don't have enough space on the buses for all the people (largely students and staff at the Oakland universities; people like me) who want to ride them, so frequently a full bus will pass you. Then another full bus will pass you. Hopefully a third full bus won't pass you, because then you're waiting thirty minutes for another full bus. You are, anyway. I'm not. I'm walking. That one driver on the 67H who doesn't know where the Schenley Pool stop is and for some reason wants to fight me about it. I should not have a blogworthy feud with a bus driver. And yet I do. Anyway, a lot of this is not really the Port Authority's fault. They don't have any money, because they are an American public transit authority, and we pretty much decided public transit was for other people half a century ago. Mind you, this not having any money doesn't keep them from digging a half-billion dollar tunnel under the Allegheny River to carry the seventeenth-largest light rail system in the United States the distance of a fifteen minute walk. But it does serve Heinz Field, and this town loses its senses when it comes to da Stillers, so this is two rants for a later date, and one argument I'll lose by fiat. Moving on.