Pittsburgh, Pa

Our niece Macey had a baptism and birthday in Pittsburgh last month. She was nice enough to invite us. Actually, I don't really recall being invited at all. I think we invited ourselves. So, a big thanks to my sister Katie and her husband Levy for letting us come stay in their house and use all of their oscillating fans while we slept in their guest room for a long weekend. It was a lot of fun for us as we hadn't previously had the chance to meet our 9 month old, very smiley neice named Adeline. Also, my sister Kelsey showed up, too, after a year of partying in Hong Kong. It was good to have her back on American soil. The baptism was very sweet, and Macey was successfully cleansed of her sins. All of the kids were fun and they made sure that Lindsay and I were thoroughly entertained. We can't wait to see the Minharo family again.

Levy and I grew up together in the same ward and now we are brother-in-laws. We have the kind of long term bond that allows us to eat shaved ice + custard deserts in touristy areas and still look totally raw.

We spent a lot of time around the Universities of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, which neighbor each other with campuses that seemed a lot more beautiful than Arizona State's.

The city of Pittsburgh loves the Steelers and dinosaurs. One of the dozens of dino monuments all over the city. Levy is lurking in the background wishing it were a real life jurassic beast so he could lay on its side and feel it breathe, and then inspect its droppings to better diagnose why it is so sick.

The Minharo house and 2/3 of its kids.

Just trying to blend in.

Hold onto your butts. Samuel L. Jackson would be so proud of these real T-Rex bones. Pittsburgh loves dinos so much that they would settle for nothing less than real bones and real marrow at their Museum of Natural History.

On Saturday night we got club-weary after a long night of bumpin' and grindin' so we left the spot and walked across the street to a train/trolley that takes you up the side of Mt. Washington for a scenic look at the three rivers and downtown.

Lindsay kicked a tree root raised sidewalk slab on accident while carrying Adeline in the dark on our way to a psychedelic fireworks show for Community Night. It seemed a little too real for me because we were creeping around this old colonial style neighborhood, while tons of rockets were booming and red-glaring right above us, and then one of my soldiers got wounded and started losing too much blood all over the place. It all felt so George Washington.

Earlier in the year we saw a show on food network with a bleached haired host about great eats in Pittsburgh, Pa. It had a place called Primanti's on it, which it turns out was the first place Katie, Levy and my mom took us after picking us up from the airport. It was so nice we had to go twice. Lindsay loves sandwiches.

Macey loves journaling at the bar with the locals.

From the look of terror on Adeline's face, Macey must have been whispering some crazy threats. Adeline already had a black eye from a bathtub brawl with Atticus, and she wanted no more violence.

We hit the Falls Ravine Trail on the last and most humid day of our trip to work up a Richard Simmons worthy sweat and cleanse our pores of all the Primanti's we ate.