Matt’s Blog

You can always tell how good someone's day is going by how much their roller on their mouse goes. On really bad days all I can hear is VRRP VRRP VRRP from around the cube farm like someone rubbing corduroy together vigorously. On the good days, there is just the occasional VRRP but all is quiet. Today was a good day.

Nothing quite like sitting next to a cadaver while learning about biology 101.

A lost dog followed me home the other day. I was walking up to my house and it decided to come to me for help. Luckily it had a tag on it and we were able to get it back to its home. It was fun to play with though. Its been just over a year since my dog Marti died and I miss her a lot. Playing with this fun dog reminds me how much joy they bring and how fun they can be.

That lovely bay window on the left side of the house is my apartment. I <3 it!

So this weekend I moved to a new lil apartment in Sugarhouse! So here are some pics!

Mcdonalds sign I saw while driving home from work read: extra large kid for $99

In a follow-up of sorts to my previous post on the downtown Salt Lake reconstruction, here is a flash tour of what the new shopping complex is going to look like, sky bridge and all.

http://www.downtownrising.com/city_creek/flash/tourVid_large.php

I still don't like it and I'm pretty sure that it will be another mall that people commute to from the suburbs instead of becoming an urban high street experience like they want it to be. It does have mixed in residential, but so does The Gateway. The housing at The Gateway, much like the housing in City Creek, will be overpriced and under desired. In all honesty I would love to be proved wrong and to have Salt Lake City take on a much more urban lifestyle. I can't help but feel that the stigma of non-mixed zoning of downtown buildings and the availability of cheap land outside of downtown will be the bane of this development's existence. It's good that this project has the backing of a large organization (the LDS church) to ensure that it survives to a time when urban Salt Lake may become a reality.

Peter Conrad on the city of Pittsburgh:

Hunched in its ravine, it is a hard-bitten, proletarian town, populated by immigrants...from beyond the Carpathian mountains. Bingo parlors abound, as do establishments dealing in prosthetics.

Maybe it's because my boyfriend is Polish but this amused me quite a deal. And if you're like me and couldn't remember where the Carpathian's are, here's a lil mappy.