Boston Space

I've been meaning to upload pictures of my room but wanted to get 3 posters framed and hung up, and that took some procrastination. But I got to it today, at last. The walls are not as frighteningly yellow as they look here, they're a bit more bland but it's hard to get good lighting in there.

Kate gave me these adorable prints for Christmas that say "Some days are better than others... but the sun always comes out tomorrow"

The below poster is from a show I went to on the official first day I moved in to the apartment -- 10/15/10

Every other weekend, I try to take about a four-hour afternoon walk for fresh air, even though it's a bit cold! In the rare sun today, I took a few pictures of my 'hood:
Christmas decorations are still hangin' in there:
I like this combination of garlands:
Somerville Library:
The site that someday will be a new Green Line T stop, just a few houses away from me:
I was really thrilled earlier this year when we got our very own "Geezers Crossing" sign, and the one with the little heart is cute, too:

Cambridge Library all lit up at night:

Inman Square's famous poultry shop, they don't mince words:

More fun with the liquor store marquee:Just came back from a weekend visit to Colorado, packing a half-gallon of green chile in my suitcase, and two Costco-sized bottles of Cholula. It was both great and terrible to see Chris and Derby. I wish they were here.

I would love to blog more but I am so......... flippin'............... tired. Work has picked up, as they promised it would, and now I just save every second of free time after work to get to sleep early.

Zzzzzz.

Lord.

I spotted this statue in the driveway at work the other day.

It's a perfect symbol of how everyone's feeling about the snow this Winter in Boston, an "I surrender" kind of feeling.

A lot of my colleagues are working from home and the office has been closed three or four times since we're a school, too. I generally just take public transportation.

The conditions generally haven't been that bad, except last Monday when it was 1 degree on my commute to work. I was really bundled up, but it was like Minnesota for a few minutes there.

What's been unusual is how constant the snow has been -- it's snowing a few inches to a foot about every other day -- so it's more than Massachusetts is used to, and the piles when they haul it into parking lots are getting to be 2 to 3 stories high (really).

The local weather guys are giddy at the attention, and love any excuse to use special Wintery vocabulary like freezing drizzle and thundersnow.

My take on the silver lining -- I can't help but notice that the more perilous the weather, the more strangers and neighbors talk to one another. It's perfectly "Boston" that the worse the conditions of the day, the more likely people are to open up and talk to each other. They don't share smiles and hellos, but they'll share a complaint or an eye roll.

Snack Size Denial - 3 for 99 cents

Over the summer, my sister and I noticed these hilarious grocery-poster spoofs in the windows on the second floor of a brick building in Pittsfield and we were wondering whose they were. I finally went back again today and noticed they are pieces from an art gallery called empty set projects by Michael McKay and Monika Pizzichemi.

Some of my favorites not pictured are "Common Sense - 39 cents", "Industrial Strength Angst - 4 for $1", "Sweet Revenge - $10.99 a lb.", "Dashed Hopes - Buy One Get One Free", "Best Intentions - $6.29 a dozen", "Instant Karma - $7.49",

Greetings from Somerville

Typical neighbors! All festive and plastic and bright.

shoe shot

still a pretty Fall here, although any second, it may turn to Brrrrrrwinter

holidays mean family

I have no idea if this was intended to be funny, or even intended in the way that I'm reading it, but I really laugh hard every time I pass it on the way to work. Family comin' to town? Better start drinkin'. Also could be read as "mean family" comin' to town, better start drinkin'.

I said I was going to upload a photo of this cool Day of the Dead Matroyska doll poster that I bought the other day. Here she is. I still need to get it framed for the wall.

Also at the SOWA Art Market I bought this fun little trivet/tile of the Golden Girls which really ties the room together, does_it_not??

I can't really take a photo of my bedroom because there's piles and suitcases everywhere. But here's a couple pretty pictures of Boston at dusk, from Mem Drive, on my commute home last week.

at last!

here's a couple photos of a trip my roommate and I took to the SOWA Vintage Market on Sunday in South Boston which had lots of flea market stuff and etsy-ish artists. the tea pots are indeed a Mad Hatterish sculpture.

I bought a really cool poster of a Day-of-the-Dead style Matroyska doll, but I'll have to take a photo of that later once it's framed and hanging. also bought myself a tile/trivet of the Golden Girls (!) which is so perfect for midnight cheesecake snacking.

and recently found (finally) flip flop socks in pear-colored Asian bunnies. too cute.

great day today -- Phew.

"Everything is not enough, nothing is too much to bear. Where you been is good and gone, all you keep's the getting there."

Shug

(Sigh) I didn't even realize how much I loved it until I owned it.

I think I'll name her Shug after my favorite book, A Color Purple.

New place

This is me having coffee this morning in my new super-cozy, modest but furnished apartment and the hilarious mug with a photo of my landlord in his badass teenage years, circa St. Elmo's Fire. IKEA furniture has been delivered, and hopefully I'll have photos up of my new (well, new used) car tomorrow. All is well!

Above is my landlord's dog, Scooby, who is no longer living here but who is so perfectly cute she probably should have had a career as a movie dog like BOLT. She really doesn't like cameras though, this is her protesting.

New Englandy

Nope, not stock photos. This was just a day in my drive around Boston today. It's "parents weekend" in Cambridge and Boston, so the traffic was terrible but the scenery was out in full bloom and everything's especially idyllic with the trees turning colors. You might as well draw in the cartoon bluebirds singing.

I actually got a flat tire as a casualty from pulling over suddenly to take a picture of the Charles below, but oh heck, it was worth it. The white traditional church below is the Battle Green of my first hometown, Lexington, the exact spot where the Revolutionary War started. No wonder I'm such a fiercely independent type.

kismet

that's Hingham Bay

Things are going so incredibly well in Boston that I'm seriously starting to feel suspicious that I died and went to heaven and it's like in The Sixth Sense where I missed the memo. Pinch me!

These last few days I've been looking for a used black mini and was hoping to avoid the 3 major mini dealerships, and then last night one showed up on Autotrader, which just happened to be at a little import dealer/shop in Cohasset, a small coastal town which looks a lot like Maine. It just so happens Cohasset and Hingham are exactly where I'm thinking we may live. It's expensive down here, but right on the Bay, and you can either take a commuter rail train or a FERRY into Boston Harbor. It's sort of half-way between the Cape and Boston suburbia but is neither here nor there. They have a Stop & Shop, an Old Navy and a Panera but no big ol' malls.

So I'm giving it 24 hours to think it over and work out the price, but I am thinkin' this is the mini for me. It's pretty much the same one we rented in Spain.

Hanging out at Panera now, nibbling Greek salad and a "muffle" (a muffin top - wait - Doesn't Elaine from Seinfeld deserve some credit for inventing these?) and thinking about the next thing I need, a used bicycle for Porter and Davis Squares. Car, bike, mattress and TV are on my to-do list.

Interviews are going slowly but at least that's giving me some time to get settled, fingers crossed.

You know that you've got Boston blood when you walk past the former site of Filene's Basement for the first time and literally feel the knife going through your heart. Ughhh. I know they're not taking any more residents, but I think F.B. should get its own gravestone in the nearby old-as-dirt Granary Cemetary with the beautiful crooked headstones from the 1600's. Here lies the final shopping bag of Filene's Basement (sniffle) (sob).

You also know you've done time in Boston when you have trouble to adjusting to friendliness. Last month when my mom was here, she practically took a picture of it when someone "waved her in" during high traffic. She could _not_ get over it. "People now wave here?? That doesn't seem right."

I took a long walk along the downtown parts of Boston yesterday and couldn't get over the changes that resulted from the Big Dig's decades-long work. I always thought it was mainly designed to dig a tunnel and get people to the airport, but in fact, the waterfront/ seaport/ wharf areas of Boston which used to be under the highway are now on the same level with one road, and the highway is acutally under that.

The buildings didn't move, obviously. The highway did. But it's surreal to see it for the first time, when your brain has a different memory of the same things in another context. Especially because for so many years it was partially done with temporary roads and sidewalks with orange cones and scaffolding; you couldn't quite imagine the end result.

Now they've added a gorgeous string of parks through on the road divider named The Rose Kennedy Greenway (above left). Kind of like the Fenway, but pretty and safe. The area around South Station especially is almost unrecognizable. I had to rub my eyes when I saw that there was a small little Farmers Market at the top of the South Station T entrance. And with fresher looking vegetables than I've seen at any Colorado Farmers Market.

In many ways, it's just exquisite and the perfect combination of parks and city -- but the inner stubborn Bostonian in me has to hesitate for a second. Wait, is that really a freggin' merry-go-round between lanes of rush hour traffic?

'sall Good

Last weekend I went to a super duper fun kids & adults rock fest outside Boston that was put together by the Life is good (® !) folks who, besides making cute t-shirts that hippies of all ages love (you know the Life is good stick figure guy... Jake...he's even in airports now), also raise a lot of money for children recovering from trauma, and specialize in programs teaching these kids how to play 'cause they figure play is a fundamental part of life and good health.

So needless to say, they know how to throw a fun festival. They Might Be Giants brought the house down in the kids' tent while 6 year-olds rocked out on giant beanbags and rubber rocking horses while waving gigantic TMBG foam fingers (for which I was jealous).

The festival was also really well-thought-out as far as practical things, like there was a Tag-Your-Tot booth at check-in for putting a wristband on your kids with your cell phone number, there was a Musical Instrument Petting Zoo, there was a zillion complimentary Wet Wipes at the information booth (duh!) and the food and beverages were affordable ($2 tacos), often organic, mostly local, plus most of the booths were donating 100% of the food proceeds to the cause.

The highlight for me, besides meeting Finn, the Goldfish cracker, was a fairly new artist named Eli "Paperboy" Reed who's from Boston, and if you didn't know better, you'd swear this guy's record came out back in the heyday of James Brown. He is phenomenal -- and I'm still confused about the fact that he's white, but I'm trying to get over it. I hope he'll be at Jazz Fest in the future.

And yet, during Eli's performance, I have to give credit... the entire audience was completely mesmorized by the hearing impaired interpreter who had serious moves. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like it.

Then and Now

This is an amusing "then and now" of Chris and I at his parents' house on the Cape, both times taken with the camera on auto-timer propped up on the car because there was no one around to take a picture. Top photo is Winter 1998, bottom is Summer 2010... I think the house probably changed the most.