This morning Andy and my job is to move into the Amberson Apartments on the Carnegie-Mellon campus in Shadyside, Pennsylvania. My parents came down to Pittsburgh to help us with the move-in process. We got a two bedroom, one bath apartment on the seventh floor (seventh floor facing the circle and ninth facing Amberson) of the apartment building at the top of the circle on Bayard. It wasn’t a great apartment but it was serviceable.
I took the northern bedroom that had a view of UPMC Shadyside Hospital and Andy took the southern bedroom which had the views of the Bayard Circle. We had almost nothing to move in. It was very sad. Our only piece of actual furniture was an old, broken computer office chair from my parents’ house. Our kitchen was stocked with a single, old pot and one old, large (but very dull) knife that we used to still things with in the pot. Our only flatware was two Styrofoam cereal bowls and all we had to eat with were some disposable plastic forks and spoons that we probably got from a fast food restaurant on the way down.
Neither of us bothered to bring down beds and we both slept on blankets on the floor. It was a rather ascetic existence but it did serve to help us focus on work rather than on leisure.
We spent most of the day taking care of getting into the apartment, getting what we needed set up and dealing with the parking situation.
As of today we have no telephone which is a bit of a problem. I have had a Rochester mobile phone through Frontier since 1992. Many of you may remember: (716) 737-3461. Back when Rochester and Buffalo shared the 716 area code. But when I moved to Pittsburgh Frontier was unable to transfer my phone to that region to allow us to make affordable calls. Even though Frontier had already been bought out by Bell Atlantic they hadn’t figured out how to transfer phones between regions yet and that left us with a problem. So that is a top priority.
My parents took Andy and I out to dinner down on Walnut to a Thai restaurant there. Tomorrow will be another busy day so no one wanted to stay out late.
Just to make it clear: our apartment has no radio, no television, no telephone line, no Internet access. This is early 2000 – high speed Internet access is a rarity and almost no one has that yet. Dial up is the only real option at this point and we can’t get that here at this time. Nicklin Associates provided us with an AOL Dial Up account to use when we were in a location that had a telephone line but that does not include our apartment!
Good thing that we at least have books.