No, I’m not actually quitting my job to re-enroll in university for a BA in basket weaving.

Please forgive my ramblings…I blame the vicodin and cold medicine…but here’s whats been going on.

Yesterday, I returned from a five day weekend in Pittsburgh, home of my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon.
It’s been, OMG, twenty years since I graduated from that tiny little school, but it feels like yesterday.  I’ve not been to Pittsburgh for seventeen years, but once I was standing on the cut, looking down the mall at Hamerschlag Hall, the engineering and computer engineering building, well, it call came flooding back.

We arrived in Pittsburgh last Wednesday at about Midnight, picked up our rental car which turned out to be a small SUV and not the compact I’d reserved (no extra charge though).  We checked into the Wyndham Grand downtown, and were delighted to see that it is literally next to point park, the site of Fort Pitt, where Pittsburgh was born.  We had the most amazing view.

The next day, we wandered around downtown.  Strangely enough, I’d never really gone downtown in the four years I lived there.  My friends and I kept to campus, buried under a huge workload, surrounded by a moat of beer flowing from the fraternities.

We found great coffee, shopped a bit (I found some great shoes), met a really cool artist, explored some great architecture, and wandered through an old church graveyard full of revolutionary war veterans.  Cool stuff.  Afterwards, we headed to CMU and explored some of my old haunts after registering and nomming some burgers.

Friday morning, we made it to CMU early enough to catch the last few Buggy races.  Not just any buggy either, but my old buggy team, SDC.  And they kicked butt, ultimately winning (along with Fringe).  Then we grabbed nom at the all campus BBQ, saw the MOBOT races, took a tour of the robotics club (of which I’m an alum), attended a general alumni reception and otherwise goofed around.

Saturday, we headed back and attended the ECE (electrical and computer engineering) alum reception, the LGBT and Friends reception, and finally the class of 1990’s reception.  Lots of fun, but I did manage to hurt my foot pretty bad on the way to the 1990’s reception.  I misjudged when stepping off of a step, ion heels.  Possible fracture, I find out tomorrow.  Yuck.  Oh, and I caught a cold 🙁

A lot of fun and nostalgia packed into a long weekend.

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