#Kennywood Address

[pittsburghbeautiful]

Kennywood Park

Exploring the Magic of Kennywood: Pittsburgh’s Amusement Park Imagine a place where nostalgia and thrill blend so perfectly it feels like stepping into another world. This is no mere daydream; it’s Kennywood, Pittsburgh’s premier amusement park and a place of both yesteryear charm and modern excitement. Whether you’re seeking the adrenaline rush of roller coasters or a leisurely stroll down…

[pittsburgh-pa-near-blog]

Events

Are you planning to visit Pittsburgh, PA one these days? Usually, travellers and backpackers prepare an itinerary before going on a trip. In that case, it is easier to do it if you are aware of the pre-scheduled activities in the city. It is one way to maximize your trip. Who knows there are amazing activities there that suit your interests? This coming February 21, 2020, there will be a The Brick Bar: Pittsburgh event at the South Side Works at around 5:00 pm. On March 5, 2020, the 2020 Pittsburgh Smart Business Dealmakers Conference will take place at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown at around 7:30 am.

Judge Accused Of Making Racist Remarks Asked To Resign

PITTSBURGH, PA - The Pittsburgh chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has called for the resignation of Allegheny County Common Pleas Court Judge Mark Tranquilli, who is accused of making racist remarks about a juror. Read more here.

The legal practice is a serious job and it requires following moral and social responsibility. In other words, lawyers should maintain the highest standard while being active in the legal profession. It is also applicable to judges nowadays. No wonder a judge who was accused of making racist remarks was asked to resign in Pittsburgh, PA area. Basically, Allegheny County Judge Mark Tranquilli allegedly referred to a black juror as "Aunt Jemima." The Pittsburgh chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has called for the resignation of the said judge who is accused of making racist remarks about a juror.

Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh, PA

Are you familiar with Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh, PA location? Maybe, you have heard about the place before. These days, a lot of travelers and backpackers visit the place as part of their travel itinerary. One of their reasons is the unique beauty of the said tourist spot. Basically, it is an amusement park located in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. The park first opened on May 30, 1899, as a trolley park attraction at the end of the Mellon family's Monongahela Street Railway. The exact address of the place is 4800 Kennywood Blvd, West Mifflin, PA 15122, United States. Lastly, a lot of guests mentioned that the whole area offers quality family fun.

What are the services offered by Taggart Plumbing nowadays? There are a lot of services and all you have to do is to take note of each one, maybe you’ll need to fix it one day through their help. Basically, the company offers emergency service, commercial plumbing, water heaters, tankless water heaters, shower installation, sewer repair and replacement, repiping, backflow prevention, garbage disposal installation, water filtration systems, hot tub and pool heater gas line installation, power backup, water softeners, hydro jetting and gas line repair. Lastly, the company is on demand plumbing and HVAC certified company so you can rely on their services.

Link to Map

Kennywood Park 4800 Kennywood Blvd, West Mifflin, PA 15122

Take PA-837 N, I-376 W, Boulevard of the Allies, I-579 N, ... and Babcock Blvd to Bernice St in Ross Township 30 min (17.1 mi)

Continue on Bernice St. Drive to Longvue Dr 2 min (0.4 mi)

Taggart Plumbing, LLC 191 Longvue Dr, Pittsburgh, PA 15237

[ciathyzareposts]

Infocom Marathon: Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986) – Part One

Written by Joe Pranevich

Sex sells, but few things market a product better than controversy. Throughout much of the 20th century, it was an adage that a book or a play “Banned in Boston” was guaranteed to sell well elsewhere. Oscar Wilde once said that, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” Barbara Streisand discovered that the fastest way to get a lot of people interested in taking photos of her house was telling them that they could not. So it was in that spirit that Steve Meretzky penned A Mind Forever Voyaging as a controversy-magnet, guaranteed to get the conservative pundits wagging their tongues about his leftist pollution of young minds. The controversy never materialized and that game flopped. Unperturbed, he pushed for yet another game that could “go viral”, but this time he aimed to incite the ire of the pundits (and the libido of the players) by embracing sex. Could an assault on decency succeed where AMFV failed?

Whether it was the sex, the return to traditional puzzle-based gameplay, or something else, Leather Goddesses of Phobos garnered enough attention that it became Infocom’s final true “hit”. TBD reviewed the game in 2017 and so I will look at this game through a different lens. Instead of a sequential playthrough and review, I am going to focus on the game’s puzzles. This game is rightly credited as having some of Meretzky’s most clever mind-benders, but does he put them together in a satisfying way? I will also place LGoP in the context of Infocom’s broader story as we progress towards the end of 1986.

My original plan had been for this to come out as a single post, but it turns out that I have more to say about his puzzles than I thought. Rather than cut it down, I’ve decided to split the work into two. Today, we’ll cover the introduction and collect the first four key items. Next week, we’ll conclude with the final puzzles and some thoughts on how the game comes together as a whole.

Another in-joke that got out of hand?

Leather Goddesses of Phobos began as an office in-joke that got out of hand. As early as 1982, Steve Meretzky, still only a game tester rather than designer, scrawled the name onto a whiteboard with a list of upcoming titles before a press event. It was erased quickly, but it became a bit of a catch phrase around the office and would be mentioned whenever a hypothetical game was needed. This repeated meme wound its way into an official Infocom product in 1984 with the re-release of Starcross. As previously discussed, the shift to standard packaging as part of the “corporatization” of Infocom led to changes in all of the earlier titles’ game documentation. The earliest titles, such as Zork and Starcross, received expanded backstories although even later games saw changes. For Starcross, this backstory included a set of the player character’s diary entries that highlighted his boredom before his date with destiny. Tucked away in one such entry is the first public mention of the Leather Goddesses:

M.C.S. STARCROSS 03-28-2186 

Underway less than four weeks and I’m about to go crazy! First, the entertainment tapes were mislabelled. It’s all highbrow stuff like operas and lectures. Leather Goddesses of Phobos was really something about the history of the Terran Union. What a rip-off! I suppose I can always talk to the computer. I can’t stand those tapes. I’ll save them for later in the voyage when I’m really desperate. I’ll play games with the computer to keep amused that way.

Although this furthers my suspicion that Meretzky was the uncredited author of some of these new materials, it wasn’t long before Brian Moriarty got into the swing of things as well. The pleasure arcade in Wishbringer featured a Leather Goddesses of Phobos arcade game. While we never got more than that title tease, the idea spread around the office enough that when Meretzky– just off of his failure of A Mind Forever Voyaging— suggested making the game “for real” that it may have felt fait accompli. Their soon-to-be corporate overlords didn’t object and before long Infocom had its official twenty-first adventure game!

Infocom struggled to find consistent sales from the earliest days.

The mass protests never manifested, but Meretzky still managed to garner a few complaints and a computer store or two that refused to sell the title. Still others were unhappy that a game sold based on sexual content wasn’t pornographic enough. Whether or not the controversy helped, Leather Goddesses sold more than 50,000 copies in the first year and ended its run at 130,000 units total, making it Infocom’s sixth most popular title ever. Not bad for a game released so late in the company’s history! This success guaranteed that it would receive a spinoff, the Infocomic Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubbermen in 1988, plus a proper sequel in 1992. Sierra would even parody the title in Space Quest IV.

Activision may have eventually become a bit squeamish about the title. Inexplicably, they did not include it in either of the two Lost Treasures of Infocom sets from 1991 and 1992. Purchasers of the second set could order the game via a special coupon, but at $9.95 (roughly $19 today), that was no small sum for a six-year old text adventure. It was also not included in any of the 1995 compilation box sets, but would finally be included in the Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom (1996). That box set was also the first to include non-Infocom games released alongside Infocom ones, but that will be a conversation for another day. It was not until 2012 when Leather Goddesses was finally included in an official Lost Treasures set, the much-loved but now dead release for iOS. I am still angry at Activision for refusing to update that app for 64-bit devices.

Also note the first appearance of the “Infocomix” branding!

Much like their other titles, Leather Goddesses included “feelies” including a Lane Mastodon comic, a scratch-and-sniff pad, and even a map of one of the game’s dungeons. As usual for this period, the comic is required reading as it includes copy protection solutions for several of the game’s puzzles. The comic was drawn by Richard Howell, known for stints at both Marvel and DC as well as helming his own independent comics company. He may be best known for his work on Vision & Scarlet Witch, a series that serves as one of the inspirations for the upcoming WandaVision TV show. The comic was converted to 3-D by Ray Zone, a pioneer in commercializing red-blue 3-D art and who produced many such works during the 80s and 90s. Howell also produced illustrations for the hint book.

The manual tries to place the game in the Zork universe, at least in a tongue-in-cheek way. There are references to Zorkmids and even Dimwit Flathead. While the two previous games that mentioned the Leather Goddesses (Starcross and Wishbringer) were “Zork universe” games, I just cannot buy the technology in this game making sense in the sci-fi worlds of Starcross or Planetfall. I’m going to hold my personal head-canon that Leather Goddesses is popular fiction in the Zork universe and you can all snicker at me that I would even think about this enough to care. There is also a mail-away coupon in the manual for self-help books like you would find advertised in old comics. The address on the coupon is in Somerville, Massachusetts (the next town over from Infocom’s offices near Boston), but the street name doesn’t appear to exist. I’m at a loss to explain what they were doing here as they should either have gone with a very fictional address (so that it was obviously fake) or a real one (so that they could sell some unexpected “feelies”); an address that looks mostly real but doesn’t lead anywhere is very strange. It is also possible that Somerville renamed that street in the last three decades.

Downtown Upper Sandusky, circa 2009.

Our game begins– after a warning that the software we are about to play should not be played by the prudish– outside of Joe’s Bar in Upper Sandusky, Ohio. If you are a child, as I am, of that part of the midwest then your mind immediately went to just how awesome a place Sandusky, Ohio always seemed. On the shores of Lake Erie, Sandusky is the home of Cedar Point, one of the oldest and greatest amusement parks in the United States. Pittsburghers know that Kennywood is even better, but Cedar Point was still a pretty cool place. However, Meretsky fooled us: the game takes place in Upper Sandusky, a town along the Sandusky River a bit more than an hour south and completely devoid of amusement parks.

The primary purpose of the bar is to give us a chance to customize our Leather Goddesses experience. After a night of drinking, we have to relieve ourselves and to do so we have to select whether we are going into the Ladies’ room or the Men’s room. Inside we find a stool which we’d better grab and then do our business. That will set our gender for the remainder of the game. I’ve played through as both male and female, but other than swapping the genders of our comrade-in-arms (either Trent or Tiffany, always the same gender as you) and a few other (ahem) partners along the way, it doesn’t change much. A few turns later, the Leather Goddesses abduct us and lock us in a cell on their spaceship.

Escaping the cell is simplistic as the Goddesses simply left the door unlocked. They also left behind a surprising number of adventure game provisions (including a painting of a cat, flashlight, blanket, metal tray, and piece of chocolate). From there, we can explore their ship, easily rescue a ditsy-but-genius new friend from the cell across the hall, and teleport ourselves towards adventure. A couple of  seconds after rescuing her/him, Tiffany/Trent will have an eureka moment and work out a plan to build a device that can defeat the Leather Goddesses and save the Earth, but we’ll need to find eight surprisingly mundane objects to complete the task. These consist of: a common household blender, six-feet of rubber hose, a pair of cotton balls, an eighty-two degree angle, a headlight from a 1933 Ford, a white mouse, a photo of Douglas Fairbanks, and a copy of the Cleveland phone book. Why these items? We have to play the game to find out.

The primary thrust of the game will be to explore Mars and Venus, as well as a bit of Earth and other locations, as we track down the key items. The design of the planets are heavily influenced by the work of astronomer Percival Lowell who, in the 19th century, popularized the idea that Mars may have been an arid landscape cross-crossed by canals. This was then used and reused, perhaps most famously by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his John Carpenter series of books. This game’s depiction of nations on Mars in a state of decay may also have been inspired by Burroughs. Most of this exploration is done by locating and using “black circles” which are scattered literally everywhere; entering one will take you to some other location, usually with no immediate way back. In this way, the game keeps up tension and you are forced into situations where the only way out is to progress forward until you can locate the next circle. Gradually, we develop a network of such portals that allow us to explore at will. Once on Mars, we will eventually discover a royal barge that can be used on the still-intact canals to float downstream. Passing by each canal dock only once (until an alternate method of transportation is discovered near the end of the game), we again feel the tension of needing to do everything and explore everything carefully because there is no way back once we leave. While I may not love the setting, we have to give Meretzky credit for building a not-quite-open world in a new and interesting way and unlocking new areas to explore incrementally. It’s well done. Let’s dig into the puzzles.

Second game in a row with a killer Venus Flytrap!

Puzzle #1 – Venus Fly Trap One of the two black circles that we can discover on the Leather Goddesses’ ship leads to a jungle on Venus and our first real puzzle. It also happens to be one of my least favorite, an example both of how clever Meretzky can be and also how he can overdo it. I suspect that playtesters had difficulty with this one because they added a second solution that is at least more straight-forward than the first.

Immediately after we arrive, a Venus flytrap approaches. It blocks a path to the west, so you know going west must be important. As it chases us east, we quickly reach a fork in the road where the path circles around a pit in the ground. My immediate thought is that we are supposed to get the pit between us and the flytrap, perhaps lure it to the other side then sidle around so that we can go west without it catching us. That idea was completely wrong. If we hide in the pit, the plant will go away, but she comes back when we emerge. How are we to get past her?

At the beginning of the game, we found a piece of paper with a grid of letters on it in Tiffany’s cell. She claimed to not know what it was and that she wrote it in her sleep. Converted to a spreadsheet for easy editing, the grid looks like this:

  My first guess was that it was a code, especially as a code is mentioned in the Lane Mastodon comic. Unfortunately, that is a dead end. My break came when I noticed the word “HEADLIGHT” in the second row from the bottom. When we first discovered the paper, Tiffany had not yet had her “eureka!” moment, but by now we know that a headlight (from a 1933 Ford) is one of the key items that we have to find. Searching carefully, we realize that this matrix is a word search puzzle and some variant on the names of each of the eight objects can be found inside. If we find and remove them all, a secret message is revealed:

The message reads: “HISSING FRIGHTENS FLY TRAPS”. I follow its instructions to hiss at the flytrap chasing us and it is destroyed, allowing me to reach the western edge of the jungle. There, we find a can of “untangling cream” and a circle leading to the hold of a mysterious spaceship. More on those later. If we had not worked out the word search, we could eventually discover a wooden trellis and a bag of leaves. By combining those over the put, we create a flytrap trap that has the same effect.

I wish I loved this puzzle because the idea of a word search isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t make any sense in context. Tiffany wrote it before she designed the anti-Leather Goddesses weapon and it’s strange that she would have embedded a solution to a completely unrelated puzzle inside. Tiffany’s subconscious may be clever, but this feels a bit too clever. If there had been a hint somewhere– perhaps Tiffany remarking about a dream that she had while we were running away from the flytrap– it would have worked better for me. As it is, I solved it on my own but it wasn’t as easy as it looks.

Science!

Puzzle #2 – Weird Science

The second major puzzle on Venus is easier but requires trial and error as we navigate a tricky scripted event. We stumble on a mad scientist’s lab in the jungle and are led inside and forced to participate in one of his experiments. We are taken down to the basement where we discover a cage with two gorillas inside (one male and one female), next to a slab covered in strange equipment. We also immediately notice that the cage contains a six-foot length of rubber hose, the first of our key items. We are quickly strapped to the slab and the scientist presses a button. We immediately discover ourselves in the cage, in a gorilla’s body, with an amorous gorilla of the opposite sex nearby.

While the scientist watches carefully, we are given the choice whether or not we want to “frolic” with our gorilla counterpart. Is it bestiality to have sex with a gorilla while you are a gorilla? I have no idea. Regardless of how we choose, the scientist notes our response with excitement and leaves us in the cage.

Escaping is the most difficult part. We do not have the strength to bend the bars, but the game implies that we almost do. How can we get a little more strength? The answer relies on us figuring out the properties of one of the items we found earlier: the chocolate bar delivered with our food way back when we arrived in the Leather Goddesses’ cell. If we had eaten it at any point, we would have received a bit of a “buzz” thanks to the sugar. If we eat it right now, the added sugar and energy it provides is enough to allow our gorilla-self to bend the bars. Unfortunately, the bar is being held by our human-self so that means that we need to quickly put it in the cage during a brief window (1-2 turns) after we are brought downstairs but before we are strapped to the table. Once we are free, we can push the red button to return to our own body, but we should not do so until we (as a gorilla) take the hose out of the cage and untie our human-self. Otherwise, we just wasted time and the game is unwinnable.

This is a fun “on rails” puzzle to solve, but it’s all trial and error and passing items into the cage during that brief window. I worked it out but honestly thought that gorillas (like many other animals) were unable to eat chocolate. Once we get the timing down and do everything we need to do, it’s a fun sequence.

Before we leave Venus, we’ll need to finish exploring the jungle. There’s a coin hidden in an old phone booth, a “Tee Remover” that can be bought off of a traveling salesman, as well as a black circle that gets us back to the main ship. Experienced players may have more difficulty with the traveling salesman than it would appear since he will only accept the flashlight as trade; I was very reluctant to trade my only light source in fear that there would be other dark areas to explore and so only did this when I was stuck elsewhere.

Poor King Midas!

Puzzle #3 – King Mitre Mars is the largest explorable area of the game, although we will have to navigate some puzzles to get to much of it. The area that we are dropped into initially consists of several ruined castles and deserts, surrounded on three sides by a martian canal system. There’s a canal boat north of King Mitre’s castle– more on him in a moment– but the canal is a one-way trip and can land us in an unwinnable state. The first puzzle we find is perhaps the most famous puzzle of the game: King Mitre.

When we arrive in Mitre’s throne room, we get a long infodump where we learn that the Earth legend of King Midas who turned all that he touched into gold is just a corrupted form of the story of King Mitre who turned everything he touched into forty-five degree angles. The game itself admits that this makes no sense, but we go with it for the sake of the puzzle. Much like in the legend, the now depressed king has turned nearly everything, including his daughter, into a forty-five degree angle. He needs some help. What are we to do?

The answer lies in the odd machine that we bought off the salesman on Venus, the “Tee Remover”:

‘It’s a TEE remover,’ he explains. You ponder what it removes — tea stains, hall T-intersections — even TV star Mr. T crosses your mind, until you recall that it’s only 1936.

The “Tee Remover” is a small device with a door and a button. You place something inside, shut the door, push the button, and it will have all of it’s “T’s” removed. It’s quite clever. Later on, we’ll be able to turn a rabbit into a rabbi and many other fun jokes, but for now the key thing is to realize that the “untangling cream” that we discovered in the Venusian jungle can quickly become “unangling cream” when we remove its t’s. If we apply that to King Mitre’s daughter, she reverts to normal. The king becomes so overjoyed that he provides us with an eighty-two degree angle in reward. How he did this when he can only create 45-degree angles is left as an exercise for the reader. We take it and continue on our quest.

As you leave, you hear behind you the sound like a forty-five degree angle landing on a pile of forty-five degree angles. “Oh shit! Not again!”, you hear Mitre moan.

The joy in this puzzle comes from working out what the “Tee Remover” does and how we can apply it to the situation. Depending on whether the player went to Mars or Venus first, it’s possible that this puzzle could have remained a mystery for a while. Unfortunately, this is the only case where the Tee Remover comes in useful; while there are other t’s to remove for added humor (“rabbit” into “rabbi” is my favorite), there are no more where we need it to solve a puzzle. Overall, this deserves its reputation of being the most “fun” puzzle in the game, but it still doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Elsewhere on Mars, we can discover a marsmouse on “Hickory-Dickory Dock”. As a mouse is one of the key items, we try to pick it up and fail. Despite the name suggesting that this puzzle would have something to do with a clock, the actual solution is trivial: show the mouse the picture of a cat and it will become stunned enough to pick up. It’s a bit of a letdown really, but that is two key objects in just a few minutes!

Pittsburgers call Cleveland “The Mistake on the Lake”

Puzzle #4 – Cleveland Rocks!

In a desert east of Mitre’s castle, we discover a fountain and a black circle that has been drained of color. If we use the black stain that we discovered on Venus, we can re-power the circle and are transported to the mythical land of… Cleveland!

Cleveland is, literally, a joke. After the sprawling expanses of Venus and Mars, we suddenly find ourselves cramped in a tiny suburban area that is somehow cut off from the rest of the world. Meretzky pokes fun at this, but the minimalism of this area feels jarring compared to the dynamic environments elsewhere. I’m sure that was deliberate:

You suddenly find yourself longing for the slime pits of Venus or the sandstorms of Mars. This particular section of Cleveland has exits to the northeast and south.

We can explore two backyards and enter one tiny house. The yards have a bag of leaves and a wooden trellis that we can take, both of which could be used in the alternate Venus Flytrap solution. As it is, the sack is only useful for me as a way to ease the inventory limit.

Inside the house, we find a bedroom with a window open to a neighboring street. Just outside is a 1933 Ford with an intact headlight– one of our key items! If this had been a real location, it would be simple to just go around to the public street where the Ford is parked and pick up the headlight. Instead, we can only get there by climbing out a second-story window. How can we do that? Searching the room, we discover a sheet on the nearby bed. We can tie it to the bedpost, but it’s not long enough to reach the window. We cannot move the bed or tie the sheet to anything closer. The solution is to make the sheet longer by ripping it into strips and then tying them together to create a makeshift rope, then tie the assembled rope to the bed. We are too heavy for the rope, but Tiffany will agree to go down instead. Doing so seems like a mistake:

Tiffany climbs down the rope and unscrews the headlight. Suddenly, a truck barrels down the road and hits Tiffany, carrying her out of sight. Moments later, you hear an explosion. As the smoke drifts past the window, your eyes fill with tears. You hang your head in sorrow for a moment to honor your brave, loyal companion who gave her life that humanity might be safe from the terrible scourge of the Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

Of course, she is revealed to have survived the blast a turn or two later after a misadventure with miners on Pluto or something similarly nonsensical. I could not solve this puzzle on my own and had to take a hint. I worked out that I could tie things to the bed and I was trying to use the sheet as a rope, but I never thought to rip the sheet into strips and assemble them that way. I suspect that I have not watched enough jailbreak movies. Tiffany also usually ignores you when you ask for help, but she leaps to it this time.

My biggest issue with this puzzle is how unnecessary it seems. We’re in Cleveland. The car is parked on a public street. It breaks my sense of immersion in the game to have such a clearly constructed puzzle only make sense within the realm of a game. Had Meretzky had duplicated the exact same puzzle in a motel on Ganymede, I am certain I would have enjoyed it more. Either way, we have picked up our fourth key item. Only four more to go!

But… we’ll just have to wait until next week for our shocking conclusion.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/infocom-marathon-leather-goddesses-of-phobos-1986-part-one/

[suzannemsabol]

We spent the weekend in Pittsburgh. We took Scarlett to Kennywood for the day and had a nice little weekend away. See, she’s having a blast on tiny tiny rides.

On Sunday morning, we drove the 3.5 hours back to Columbus. Now, I hadn’t slept really well over the weekend and the drive kinda took it out of me. By the time we got home, I still had to do laundry, figure out what the fuck we were going to have for dinner, get groceries, and take Scarlett to swim lessons. I had a full day of shit ahead of me and already noon.

Kroger (a supermarket chain) has this thing called Clicklist where you can buy your groceries online, the store gathers them up for you, and then you just have to pick them up. This sounded like an amazing thing in my sleep addled brain. Ross and I decided to give it a go.

This….however…was a mistake.

When we moved to Worthington a few years ago, we started by going to the grocery store near our house. One week, they just didn’t have garlic bread. Another week we couldn’t find the yogurt. It was always stupid shit like that. When I was in college, my friend Audrey lived in DC around Dupont Circle and there was a Safeway that she liked to call The Soviet Safeway. You might think that’s insensative but it was because there would be empty shelves where toilet paper was supposed to be. They just didn’t have toilet paper that day. This Worthington Kroger was a little like that and we started calling it The Worst as it’s formal name. Like: “Can you stop at The Worst on your way home and get some milk”.

Here’s where we should have known better.

The only store near us that has this new Clicklist feature is The Worst. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to spend an hour and a half running around the grocery store and I just wanted it done. So we decided to try. You have to try…right?

First, setting up the account for this was ridiculous. Evidently, I already had an account set up in Korger but who knows what the password is, cause I don’t. I hit the forgot password link, you know where they send you an email to reset your password. It never came. It still hasn’t come. So, I had to set up this account with a different email address. Whatever. Fine. I place my order at 1:53 pm, making the deadline for a pick up window of 6:00-7:00 pm. Great!

We go about our day. We go to swim lessons and spend about an hour at the pool after lessons because Scarlett loves the pool and I’d rather spend my time having fun with her than grocery shopping. We decide, since we don’t have food in the house, that we’re going to order something and Ross can go pick that up with the groceries and it will be perfect.

Here’s the thing. I should know better. This shit never works out like I hope. Something always goes horribly horribly wrong and all of our good intentions are scattered way the fuck off track.

At 6:15 pm, Ross leaves to pick up the food and the groceries. Before I know it, Ross is home and I’m like, this was so easy.

No. Just no.

He got the food but they were running a little behind on the groceries. He told them he would come back.

Flash forward to 7:15 pm

He got home at 7:50 pm.

I guess the guy parked next to him had been there for an hour and had passed the point of no return since he’d already paid for the groceries and now had been waiting for an ungodly amount of time. When The Worst finally brought out the groceries, some woman from the Deli was in charge. She loaded the bags and Ross was like, “That’s not enough for $128 worth of groceries.” So, she’s digging through crates and finds the rest. It wasn’t in bags. It was just kinda thrown in the crate.

Now, Ross works retail for a living and this whole experience made him PISSED OFF. All he kept saying, when he got home, was that it was unacceptable. I’d be fired. Over and over again.

I guess there’s a place where you have to either check or uncheck a box approving substitutions. This is where someone…not you…goes through and if they don’t have something, they make the judgement call to replace it with something else. I don’t remember seeing this box but I clearly didn’t uncheck it. They made substitutions. One of them was for applesauce. I ordered the Simple Truth brand – which is a Kroger Brand by the way – and they didn’t have it. How do you not have your own brand! Soviet Safeway! Ross absolutely refused one of the substitutions because he knows that I don’t play with my coffee. So, now I have no coffee and I’m going to have to go the grocery store anyway.

He went through everything with a fine-toothed comb, crossing off as he put all of it away. Some of the substitutions they made were weird and I’m not sure I’m okay with them but I wasn’t sending him back. No way, no how. I didn’t have bail money on me.

#TheWorst We spent the weekend in Pittsburgh. We took Scarlett to Kennywood for the day and had a nice little weekend away.

[katiezstorey93]

Crafton to Sponsor holiday house tour

November 4, 2016 12:00 AM

Crafton Borough building.

By Linda Wilson Fuoco / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Christmas in Crafton House Tour this season comprises eight homes, including a house after sitting empty for 20 years saved and an 18-room mansion — except for its raccoons and other animals that lived there.

A number of architectural styles are all represented, with building spans which range from the 1890s through the 1930s.

Every one of the houses on the Dec. 11 tour will be decorated for Christmas — often using unique touches that reveal the hobbies and interests of the men and women who reside there.

Brian and Pam Kanai and their daughter, April, 6, can welcome people to their three-story, four-bedroom Victorian house, built in 1896 in what Mrs. Kanai said that her research reveals is the Eastlake-stick design.   Since purchasing the house in 2010, the couple has done   “classic Victorian-inspired renovations” from the kitchen and bathroom.

What makes the house unique is its entertainment park-themed decor.

“We are entertainment park fanatics. In fact, we were married 10 years back about the Jack Rabbit roller coaster at Kennywood,” Mrs. Kanai stated.

Park memorabilia, purchased by the few at parks all around the country, is shown throughout the house. They have lost track of the number of parks they have seen, but Mrs. Kanai stated she’s ridden over 350 different roller coasters.  

Though a tree has traditional decorations, one of their Christmas trees is decorated with entertainment park memorabilia.

Amusement parks and roller coasters’ love has been passed down to their daughter, that was two years old when she took her first ride on Kennywood’s Jack Rabbit.

Another house on the tour, the 18-room mansion, was built more than a century ago and contains among the wraparound porches in Crafton, a pond in a secret garden and a subway, carriage house.   A chapel has been added to the house, complete with an altar, stained glass, statues and an organ. The mansion is now the scene of several parties, a number of them affairs.

The self-guided house tour will be held from 1-6 p.m. Dec. 11.   Tickets are $20 the day of this tour or $15 when purchased in advance at www.Crafton.org or in person at   the borough building, 100 Stotz Ave., or Crafton Public Library, 140 Bradford Ave. Tour booklets will be handed out at the library at the day of this tour.  

Proceeds from the house tour benefit Crafton’s parks and amenities. Christmas funded the new pad pool that opened last summer in Crafton Park in Crafton House Tours.

Volunteers and Crafton officials have lined up tasks. The city’s first yearly Light Up Night will be held in 4 pm Dec. 3 in Crafton Park.  

From 10 a.m. to pm this day, children can make foreclosed houses in the Crafton Community Center. Price is $5 per child. Space is limited, so advance registration is needed at Crafton Public Library. Every child will be given a gift and refreshments.

Kids and adults can clubs with Santa and his Elves through a Girl Scout fundraiser from 1 to 6 rebounds Dec. 3 and 4 at the Crafton Mini-Golf Course. No sign-up is demanded.

Linda Wilson Fuoco: lfuoco@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1953.

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[themichigami]

Forgotten roller coaster history...

I’ve been poking around with bits of research that weren’t really meant to be research, only interesting historical bits discovered while living here.  I was watching a special about Kennywood a good while ago and they mentioned the builder of one of my favorite vintage rides (The Turtle, also known as the tumble bug style ride at other parks) was Traver engineering of beaver falls, the town where i currently reside.  I perked up a bit, because i like learning about the places i live and this was the first i’d heard of an amusement ride company having existed in town, why was this not a thing spoken of with as much nostalgia as people spoke of the torn-down movie theaters and other long-gone factories along the river.   And so my curiosity piqued, i learned via the internet that the odd white house alone atop a cliff i’d noticed when moving to town had been built by Harry Traver, owner of the company, and that at one point he’d bought the property of yet another older ride company in town called Zarro, which built many famous rides in the early 20s.  Most of the facility was destroyed by fire in the 60′s, though a few buildings remained intact and another company bought the lot since the ride company was now done for.  the man himself passed in 61 according to wikipedia, the fire happened in 68, so at least he never had to know how it all went out. The old recorded address of the plant was weird and apparently pre-road-renaming though and confused google maps and many searches when i tried to find out where it had been located, because several of the local people i had asked were also as clueless as i had been about the place’s very existence.  After a bit of work, i found out though which business now owns the lot, and one of the surviving old buildings from the original ride company is still in use on the property, supposedly with a few bits of ghostpaint signage still visible from its previous use.  I don’t know how tourist-friendly they might be, but possibly before the end of summer I might find someone to take me out to that end of town and up near the house on the cliff to get some pictures and make an actual write-up about it. It’s a fascinating little bit of history that such a HUGE company existed here in town, and so few people remember it ever even being here now, which kind of bewilders me.

[pittsburghbeautiful]

17 Things that Will Make You Smile After a Devastating Steelers Loss

Who wants to talk about the game yesterday? Didn't think so. Here's 17 things to make you happy in spite of what we won't talk about...

Let’s face it, there was nothing good about that Steeler game. The whole city wants to forget it ever happened. To lessen the sting of that Jags win, we put together a list of 17 things we hope make you smile. 1. Knowing you’re not a Browns fan. 2. Juju Smith-Schuster’s French bulldog Boujee. 3. 124 days until Kennywood’s opening day. 4. 235 days until the 2018 Steeler season begins. 5. The…