Walk with me

Today was a bright and sunny Saturday here in the Burgh, and since I had no plans, I went ahead and did the Saturday breakfast thing again at Tom's Diner.  There is just something about having a big breakfast in a greasy spoon that screams all kind of awesome. Rather than just amble to Tom's (I walked again as opposed to taking the bus), I figured I would bring the camera along with me and allow you to view my journey somewhat as I do, starting with the look outside my apartment as the journey begins.  Mind you at the end of the driveway I could go either left or right, but today we opt for  right turn so I can grab cigarettes for the journey.

 

The right turn puts us squarely on McKee Place, the 400 block of McKee I might add, which is only one way, as opposed to the rest of the street which is two way.  If I would have a car, I couldn't make a right here, I would be forced to go left, and while my journey would be shorter time wise, this picture wouldn't be part of the package. 

 

 

The next turn on our journey is all of about a hundred feet down McKee where we make a right turn here, up what looks to be a crack alley, and probably isn't far from the truth.  It is a little alleyway that runs between McKee Place and Semple Street that is for pedestrians only, though it does show up on some mapping programs as St. James Private Drive or some crazy thing.  All I know is that it is littered with glass and graffiti.  Sadly my walk isn't through all beautiful places, but places like this as well.

 

At Semple Street we make another right.  The right hand side of the street has a is almost all businesses, some of which are behind me, but others line the street that we will be walking by, including and Indian restaurant, a Thai restaurant, my bar Uncle Jimmy's, Semple Street Fish House, which is the new fish and chips place I blogged about previously and finally at the end of the street we find the corner store where I will grab my cigarettes.  Mind you the girl in their on saturday morning is quite attractive, but way too young for me, so we will not take the camera inside.  The last thing I need is stories of some dirty old man in the neighborhood taking pictures of girls.  I gots me more than enough problems without adding stuff like that to the menu.

I call it the corner store (that used to be its official name before the lady who owned it sold it, now I don't know the official name, so I just call it the corner store) because it is on the corner of Semple and Ward Streets.  Exiting the store, with cigarettes in hand, the next steps are to the right and down Ward Street.  Cigarettes and greasy spoon breakfasts are kind of like green eggs and ham, they most certainly can't be good for you, but damn if they don't go together.  And unlike The Captain and Tennille, who also go together, they don't suck.  They can never apologize enough for Muskrat Love.

After strolling down ward Street for a block, and making you suffer through that god awful song, we make a right onto Boulevard of the Allies.  How the street got its name, I am not sure, but given the road conditions around here this time of year, some of the crater like potholes make the road seem like a bombed out version of Boulevard of the Axis instead.  And despite all of these turns I have made to this point, I still am no more than a 4 minute walk from my apartment, basically because I made a giant circle almost, just for some smokes.  The journey will start to straighten out a bit once we get down to that traffic light and make a left onto........

Bates Street.  As the line of cars would indicate, this is the main road into Oakland from the Parkway East.  While Fifth and Forbes Avenues are the two main drags through Oakland itself, a large number of people coming into Oakland will use this road first.  There would be more traffic if this were a weekday, but since it is Saturday morning, traffic is lighter than usual.

 

 

The bottom of bates Street intersects with Second Avenue, but we are off roading it for a block or so and taking the Eliza Furnace Trail instead.  The trail runs parallel to both the Parkway East (the bridge) and Second Avenue (not seen here) and is a bicycle/pedestrian trail that runs from downtown Pittsburgh well out past Oakland.  The advantage to taking the trail is that it is near impossible for me to get hit by a car now until I get to the South Side.  It would take a Herculean effort even by the drunkest of drivers to hit me on a path only for pedestrians.  In any event we are going to hop on the trail and make a left.

The cool thing about the trail is it takes you right to our next destination, the Hot Metal Bridge, which is actually two bridges, one for traffic and a second structure just for people.  The reason for the name is that the bridge used to connect two parts of the J & L Steel plant, carrying molten steel across the river from the blast furnaces on one side to the rolling mill on the other.  But since we don't make stuff here anymore, it is now just an ordinary truss bridge.

 

Okay, I took a picture that didn't involve a turn, unless my plan was to step off of the bridge and plummet into the Monongahela River below.  IN any event, it is the view of downtown Pittsburgh from the Hot Metal Bridge, the bridge in the shot is the Birmingham Bridge, astute readers of the blog will remember that the last time I went to breakfast, one of the bridge decks on that span dropped about 8 inches.  The bridge is still under repair, though they have opened two of the four lanes of traffic that cross it, but really, if you know a bridge is unstable, would you cross it?  I will stick with the structure I am on, thank you very much.

At the end of the Hot Metal Bridge is the South Side Works, which is a business retail development hat takes up about four blocks or so.  I don't shop there all that much, there isn't a whole lot there that I am interested in to be honest.  I went to the movie theater there once and the sound in the theater was just abysmal, which is something that will keep me from coming back.  Most of the other shops there are just out of my price range.  Mind you the last time I bought an outfit, I got the pants for $10 and the shirt for $6, so it doesn't take a whole lot to get out of my price range.  Anyway, Hot Metal Street ends on the last street we will have to go on for this journey.

Lastly we make a right onto East Carson Street, and a mere 12 blocks from here is Tom's Diner.  I would take pictures along East Carson, but to be honest, it is mostly bars and once you have seen one bar over here, you have pretty much seen them all.  Another thing that kept me from pulling my camera out of my pocket is, unbeknowst to me, at the restaurant next door to Tom's Diner, Chelsea Clinton was doing a Q&A session, and since I was keeping my camera in my pocket, I don't know that the Secret Service would take kindly to someone pulling a metal object out of their pocket, so I didn't get any pictures of the former First Daughter.  Which is a shame in that she is probably my favorite of the Clinton clan.  But while my journey to breakfast may have ended on Carson Street, I did go grocery shopping afterward, which allowed me to garb this photo as well.

People following along on the comment thread to the last blog will appreciate this photo.  Everybody else will be clueless.

A couple of notes before I go.  Many moons ago, I mentioned that I would only leave the 5 most recent comments in my guestbook because I didn't want it filling up the entire page, and that I didn't want graphics posted there.  If people want to add graphics to something, add it in a personal message or as a comment to an entry, but don't hog up the main page with oversized graphics.  Well today I went about policing that by deleting all of the guestbook entries that had graphics and changing the settings on the guestbook to no longer allow HTML, which I assume is a new feature from Multiply and hopefully will solve that problem once and for all.  I also changed the home page music, I have enough stuff stored away in Imeem that I can change the music from time to time, and today just felt like time.

Finally, remember when I said I was going to start playing volleyball on Thursday nights.  Well after about a month of procrastination, I finally went about doing just that and I learned how old I really am.  I had been meaning to play, but usually Tuesday and Wednesday, I am lucky if I get 12 hours of sleep over those two days, so it was very easy to get off of work Thursday and just go sleep rather than try to get a small nap in and then go play volleyball in a few hours.  This Thursday though I finally got up the motivation and went.  We played for two hours, which was good enough for 5 games.  The team I was on went 3-2 and it was probably a good level of play to get back in on, everybody had a general idea of what they were supposed to do, as opposed to just smacking the ball around like a family picnic.  Mind you it was far from a professional level, I would say it was a competent level of play, which is about what I would hope to do given I hadn't played in about 15 years.  All went relatively well, except I think I hurt myself at some point.  I had the typical bumps and bruises that go with diving on the floor, but on one particular ball, someone mishit it and it went veering off in the wrong direction.  I opted to go in pursuit and try to save it and I made a move in the direction of the ball, knowing I was going to have to hustle and the first sprint step I took I had the weirdest sensation.  It was like my body was moving forward but something inside my body wanted to stay in place, sort of like in the cartoons where the smoke outline of the character stays ion place after the character has run off, except what wanted to stay in place felt like my intestines or something.  My body has been sore ever since, nothing to keep me from doing that which I always do mind you, but enough to make me thing I probably pulled something. 

Well, I better scoot, it is almost 4am and I have to work in the morning.