Did I mention that there are rules to Mystery Vacation clues? Well, there are. The most important, and really only, clue is that the clue recipient cannot look up any of the clues. This is especially important given the wonderful ease of using google. Believe me, the temptation is strong, but it takes some of the fun out of it if you discover the destination before hand, a fact I found out accidentally after telling my site mate, Margie, clue #11 (the country was the largest producer of cork), who had just read that little tidbit and so promptly told me the answer. So, to those of you at home, you may look up clues to your heart's content, but no telling David!

Second clue: Mystery vacation destination will shortly hold its annual crane festival.

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Pittsburgh has some great "things to do" that we've been trying to take advantage of this year. As opposed to last year, of course, when I ran around in circles trying to organize conferences during school and David sat watching and shaking his head in faint disgust. One of our new favorite "finds" is the Drew Heinz lecture series. David went to hear Susan Orlean a few weeks ago. He enjoyed reading The Orchid Thief, but she is not, apparently, the world's best lecturer (too much reading, not enough talking).

Tonight, though, we went to see Bill Bryson, who's mostly known for his travel books like A Walk in the Woods, and I'm a Stranger Here Myself. Wow, did we have a fabulous time. Last summer while in The Gambia we each read A Short History of Nearly Everything and enjoyed it thoroughly, though we have yet to read any of his other books (don't worry, they're on hold at the library). He's out promoting his new book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a memoir about growing up in Des Moines during the fifties.

One of the things Bryson said he missed about the fifties was the humor. He thinks we're too serious now, and no one really jokes with each other the way they used to about small, everyday things. When he was living in New Hampshire in the mid-nineties, there was a storm and his neighbor had a small, bushy tree blow down. The next morning, as his neighbor was cutting the tree up into smaller pieces and putting them on top of his car to haul the whole thing away, Bryson came out and joked: "Oh, I see you're camouflaging your car." David nudged me and said "That's something Papa would say." In fact, much of the evening was a reminder of Papa's humor, bad puns and all, which made it even more enjoyable.

In addition to telling funny stories and reading passages from some of his books, Bryson took questions at the end. The last question was: Why, when you can live anywhere in the world, do you choose to live in England? It turns out his wife is English, and they've lived in England previously, but have also lived in New Hampshire for quite sometime until moving back to England a few years ago. He said it wasn't any one thing about New Hampshire that made them move, though avoiding another New England weather was a reason; it wasn't that we keep electing George Bush, and he'd finally gotten used to driving around with "Live Free or Die" on his license plate, although he'd always thought it was a bit extreme. He could see "Live Free or Bitch Mightily," but thought being willing to die is a little much. I laughed so hard I got tear stains all over the inside of my glasses.

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David and I have been following a rather stringent "diet" lately, much to the chagrin of my family, by giving up sugar. It's not really a diet, more a life-style change, which makes it worse, I think, for most people when they hear about it. We've already more or less successfully given up hydrogenated fat (that's tough; we have to read labels on everything now), I'm a vegetarian when we're not traveling, we've cut out eggs and many dairy products and generally, everything has gone really well. But once we got back to Pittsburgh after this summer, we decided we needed to give up sugar, too. Sugar really messes up your system and we've (weirdly) turned all sorts of healthy in the last few years. So, other than the debauched weekend of Uncle Alan and Ellen's wedding (how could we not eat a piece of the cake?), we haven't had sugar this semester. Until tonight.

Craving pizza (clearly we haven't given up cheese), we went to Joe Mama's to eat. They have pretty good Italian-American food, and it's a nice place to eat that manages to balance it's mostly undergrad crowd with a grown-up feel. We had a stuffed portobello mushroom for an appetizer and then split a roma, mozzarella and basil pizza. But then, I heard the waitress talking about their tiramisu with a customer and I decided I had to have some. Fortunately, David has this great argument about moderation-in-all-things, so I got to use that to convince him that after 6 or 7 weeks of going without sugar, once wouldn't hurt us.

Of course we promptly felt like we'd consumed an entire 5 pound bag of sugar and were left feeling vaguely ill. We had to stop on the walk home because we each had a stitch in our sides and I'm now having to employ the backspace key with annoying regularity because my fingers are too jittery to hit the right keys.

It'll be a long time before we have another tiramisu. Unless we go back to Italy, of course.

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Carnegie Library, Oakland

With famous industrialists-turned-philanthropists Frick and Carnegie, Pittsburgh is a city with some really fabulous architecture. We live across the street from a neo-romanesque church (which I didn't even know existed as a style) and campus is full of the neo-gothic style. But the Carnegie complex, which houses the original Carnegie Library (Free To The People), with it's grand looking entrance, is decidedly neo-classical.

Inside, the library, there are some really neat features including: access to an enormous consortium (thereby enriching my life with even more books); extremely helpful librarians, so that ordering new books is relatively simple (though the Circulation staff tends to be a tad surly); and one of my favorite features, a 'World Fiction' section. It's on the ground floor, with the other new book sections, and since I know you're dying to hear what those sections are, I'll tell you: fiction, non-fiction, mysteries, horror, science fiction, gay and lesbian, short stories, biographies and African American, plus, of course, paperbacks, new or otherwise.

World fiction is supposed to include new translated fiction, though in that idiosyncratic way that computer databases are updated, I've found the newest book by an author back in the 'regular' fiction stacks, while their second newest is still out in the 'world fiction' section, but whatever. As long as I find new authors, I don't really care. I really appreciate this section, because otherwise, I would never find these books. So little gets translated into English, that if they weren't rounded up into a separate section, I'd glance right past them while browsing the shelves. And nobody wants that!

However, being a library lover, means I'm a little compulsive about visiting the library. I've already maxed out my hold list (set at 50), and I'm continuously in danger of maxing out my checkout limit (also 50). Which is why my reading list is never truly current: I'm too busy reading to update. But how can you pass up all those books? Plus, there are all the movies and CDs. There just isn't enough time in the day.

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Inflicting my tendency to rant on unsuspecting readers regarding how much I dislike the current state of the world and what's not being done to help people in developing countries doesn't seem very nice, some how, especially since I can go on about development and inequality. However, international development is what I study, which is why I gave a presentation, this weekend, on maternal mortality in Africa at a conference at which one of the main themes was the Millennium Development Goals. Carol Welch, the U.S. coordinator of the Millennium Campaign gave a brief overview of the 8 goals, and it occurred to me that probably not many Americans know about them, which is too bad (and which is why this post is full of links!), since the goals are an example of one of the only times every country in the UN reached an agreement on the need to take action against poverty. So go check them out: they're pretty cool.

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