March 24, 2025 11:00 am
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This time around, I made it halfway up the hill I live at the bottom of before I had to give the ankle a rest. I did utter a series of nonsense sounds while doing so, ‘unnghhhahh’ or ‘ahh ah ooh,’ that sort of thing. The plan for this walk involved going places which aren’t terribly interesting on the surface, but are somewhat close to HQ geographical wise. Just ‘a walk,’ this time around.
The endeavor I’m involved with at the moment is encapsulated in the title of today’s post: stretching and strengthening. The stretching part involves the tendons and ligaments which were damaged during the shattering of my ankle, and the consequent dislocation of the left foot back in September. It’s amazing how profound this injury ended up being, and long lasting. See, I am special.
After all this time – six months – I’m just now getting back to a somewhat normal pattern of life, and movement. The ankle still hurts, as a note.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At the top of the hill, a left was hung, and I started walking up a more gradual hill, towards the ‘main street’ section of Pittsburgh’s Borough of Dormont. I’m still trying to understand the organizational chart of the Pittsburgh metro, as in ‘which’ elected office or agency handles ‘what.’ This Commonwealth business is still novel to me.
That’s the T light rail, moving away from Pittsburgh, and entering Dormont’s Potomac Avenue station pictured above. The PRT (Pittsburgh Regional Transit) people have been all over the local news for the last few days, ringing the alarm bell that they have run out of money. It seems that they have been propped up by first Federal Covid relief and then Infrastructure Bill money, sent by ‘Uncle Sugar’ in Washington for the last several years, and that they now find themselves more than a hundred million in the hole for 2026.
They are appealing to the State legislature in Harrisburg for a funding rescue, as Washington will no longer offer them financial succor, and the PRT claims that they will need to institute draconian cuts to their services in order to remain solvent. They offered their ‘Doomsday Scenario:’ complete elimination of over 40 bus routes, one of the T lines, and a decimation of their current schedule down to hour long waiting intervals between buses and even longer ones for the T. The doomsday plans includes layoffs for bus drivers and mechanics, train operators and engineers.
Entire communities would lose their bus, and or transit, service. Guess what? The cuts are mainly in the less wealthy ‘exurb’ places where people explicitly rely on mass transit to get to work or for their kids to go to school.
Lousy, this.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A right turn was next hung, and your humble narrator began moving south east. Pittsburgh has lots and lots of alleys, which are described as ‘ways.’ Narrow, it’s where businesses keep their dumpsters and where the junkies gambol and jump and play. Land has always been scarce back home in NYC, and alleys are a lot rarer there. Hell, if this was NYC, they’d probably try to build a long thin ‘shotgun’ style building to profitably fill that space pictured above with ‘affordable housing.’
Me? I was just pushing against the ankle’s restraints, taking long striding steps in order to condition that web of rubber bands secreted under my skin back into regular ‘ready to exercise’ condition. It’s all about stretching right now, and conditioning my muscles back into active duty mode after all of the sitting over the last six months.
Not too long after this post publishes, this afternoon in fact, I’ll be at the Orthopedic office for a check up and they’re likely going to shoot radioactive waves through my leg, in order to photographically vouchsafe the repair condition of my broken skeleton.
Fun. Back tomorrow with more.
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Posted by Mitch Waxman
Categories: Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh
Tags: Dormont, photowalk, Pickman, Pittsburgh
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