When I get on the bus in the morning I stare at these rooftops and wonder if they did it on purpose.



If you were a preschooler in a city, your school might look like this:



Here's a cool bridge that you can walk across if you're brave:



Sunday afternoon my boss gave us interns some of his season tickets to the Pittsburgh Symphony. They were playing Mahler's Resurrection with the Mendelssohn Choir. So off I went.

There was a ton of traffic because they had a lot going on downtown - the Arts Festival, the Gay Pride Festival, and a bunch of other stuff. So some folks had been waiting for the bus a long time.

I noticed the lady in front of me kind of lolling about, but the woman sitting next to me seemed to be supporting her. Then the supporting lady got off the bus and the lolling lady started lolling a lot worse, and I realized she was having some kind of seizure. It looked like she might bang her head so I jumped up and held her head. Somebody else got the bus driver to call the paramedics. We ended up getting her on her side on the floor of the bus with her bag under her head for a pillow. A few of us stuck around until the paramedics showed up. She was about my age and still had on a hospital bracelet -- someone had just let her out of the hospital. Luckily there was a guy there who said his mom had epilepsy and he just kept holding her hand and saying "It's ok Tammy, help is on the way."

When the paramedics got there I got off the bus (luckily just a few blocks from Heinz Hall) and called my co-workers to let them know I was on my way. Luckily I'd left early (I always do because you never know whether the buses will be running on time) so I got there in plenty of time. I was pretty depressed and a little disoriented and stopped in at the CVS across the street to get Advil and some water. Then I headed into the hall.

It was the perfect place to be after such a disturbing experience. I've never been much of a Mahler fan--he always seems so schlocky and post-romantic and hyper-chromatic. But they played the Resurrection Symphony (No. 2 in C minor, for anyone who wants to look it up). OH MY GOODNESS. It was magnificent! He starts off in the lower registers and gets them going to a real fever pitch, all in the first movement. Then in the second movement he does this hilarious pastorale Teutonic fantasia stuff--I kept having flashes of Bugs Bunny in drag on a fat horse. (I know, that's Wagner but same idea.) The third movement is this delightful snaky peasant dancy kind of business, and then in the fourth movement the solo contralto comes in - again, lower registers, which is frankly a relief. And of course the fifth movement he gets the whole thing going, choir, organ, tubular bells, harps, off-stage horns and drums, on-stage horns and drums--if he'd known how to write for a kitchen sink, he would have thrown that in too. If your hair isn't standing up on the back of your neck by the end of the piece, you must be comatose.

After the concert the boss said "how about a bite to eat, my treat?" So of course we accepted, and had an awfully nice time with him and his wife and another attorney and his wife. They are really cool, funny, kind, intimidatingly smart folks to work with. Then to top it all off the boss gave both of us interns a ride home, and pointed out landmarks along the way.

Today was the Penguins victory parade. They were already lined up at the barracades when I got downtown at 8:00 am, and they didn't leave until 3:00 in the afternoon. In between it was quite a hootenanny:

Random marching band:


Hockey players:


Either hockey coaches or hockey owners, I'm not sure which:


An exuberant ensemble:


Amphibious vehicles (irrelevant but no one cared):


Somebody famous:


Penguin fans that I work with:


My favorite part of the parade:


Before the parade:


During the parade:


After the parade:



Whoopee!