On this day I drove from Montpelier, Ohio to Pittsburgh. It was a much shorter drive than I thought it would be, man those east coast states are small!
I made it to Mellon Institute right around dinner time, where I met up with John. It's weird, my fate and John's fate are inexplicably intertwined. When I was an undergraduate at CMU, John was my organic chemistry lab TA. When I was a graduate student at Nebraska, John started as an assistant professor in the department. And now when I am back at CMU visiting, John is a research professor at CMU. John let me crash at his place for the duration of my stay in Pittsburgh, for which I am grateful.
We went and had dinner at Primanti Brothers in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh (fries on sandwiches, mmmmm) and then went to the CMU Carnival fairgrounds for a while. There were plenty of lame booths, but a few good ones; the PhiKap one stood out to me. Of course I stopped by the APhiO booth to say hi to the crew. Nobody recognized me, of course (I didn't expect them to) but I chatted a bit with a few of the people who seemed to be in charge and they said that the chapter is doing fine. They were still selling funnel cakes an the lines were still very long. You'd think people would get tired of funnel cakes after all these years, but I guess not.
On the way to carnival, I got to see some of the new additions to the CMU campus. There is a new building in the midst of construction, something like a "center for innovation". This seemed like an awfully vague title to me. I mean, why not call it the "building of good things"? There is also a new performing arts building, I suppose it's not terribly new to the campus but it's new since I graduated. Oh and there's the university center, Skibo's replacement. It just seems way too fancy. When I was a student, Skibo was a run down student union that, really, didn't offer too much. Now the students are spoiled with this immense complex that has pretty much everything under one roof.
While at carnival I ran into Scott, Jen & the family. I got to see Owen for the first time, he's a cutie! Freder is getting really big, too. It's hard to believe that he's almost 4 years old. (Yes, Scott & Jen, that means you are old.)
John and I also had a couple of beers at his favorite bar, Mitchell's. However we didn't get to stay too long as, according to John, "a fight was brewing". (Yeah, it's that kind of bar.) But that was fortunate, I suppose, since we wanted to go see the buggy races in the morning.
