sun's out! time to go.

2nd cloudiest June on record, indeed. Time to leave June behind and set out for some fun (and sun! finally!) filled adventures during the month of July.

Our first stop this month was a quick trip back to the Pioneer Valley to see some intrepid travelers, long-lost friends now living in a strange place i've heard is called...Virginia? does. not. compute. Ah, well. We'll get Meg and Ben back in the northeast sometime :)

To begin the day, we met up at one of my favorite pioneer valley haunts for summer beverages and snacks, enjoying the sunshine and the relative lack of students (thank you, summer!) in an area that makes its living catering to the 18-22 year old set. On a whim, we set out for the Mount Sugarloaf state reservation in Sunderland. I think you'll agree the view is pretty spectacular:

Although I think we can all agree that beautiful views and sunny weather are best enjoyed with a parasol, preferably a pretty red one:

Sadly, however, four old friends can't be expected to merely gaze at the beautiful vista in appreciative silence. Nope, when four old friends get together, it's a safe bet that trouble will ensue. To wit:

-Ben and I continue with an old argument. Started in December, continues to July. Sorry, Ben, you're just not winning this one. (What was it we were arguing about again?)

"Fighting" quickly gave way to - what else? - robot dancing!

- Fun with viewfinders ensued. I swear, the base of the viewfinder instructed me very clearly to "step up." So I did. Here, I appear to be serenading Ben. More likely I think I was trying to avoid falling off the viewfinder. Those things are rickety!

Seems someone else couldn't resist getting in on the viewfinder action:

What you can't tell from this picture, however, is that Ben shook the viewfinder with such vigor that Meg quickly shooed him down and send him toward the car. To erase these painful memories of rabblerousing, I'll leave you with a more placid picture of "proper" vista viewing, courtesy of Meg and Caro:

Ah, yes. All is well, except if possible we miss dear friends even more.

Next up: Wedding fun on Long Island, and a quick road trip to the midwest. Stay tuned!

summer in (seattle) boston

Yeah, not even going to apologize again for the slow rate of posting. And, in my defense, it's been so cold and dark and rainy here in Boston of late that it still kind of *feels* like February or March. Or at least April. So in that regard, I'm not lagging too far behind.

Anyway. Today is the official start of summer, not that you'd know it from looking out the window. It's really hard to be an intrepid sightseeing blogger when the weather won't cooperate. But we've done our best (although I've done my worst to blog about it) and have even entered the world of DSLR photography (a long overdue and much heralded event) to better chronicle the world around us.

Ironically, what we have managed to do and see during the past couple of months took place in some pretty nice weather, since April and May were far nicer than June has been. CP finished school in May, when the weather was lovely and the magnolia trees were in full bloom. With weekends now blissfully free from paper writing and Powerpoint preparation, we took the time to get out and enjoy the less urban areas of Boston. We had a lovely day trip to the Arnold Arboretum, a place so tranquil and lush that I truly forgot I was within a major city's limits. We walked through the lilacs, helped tourists from Japan and Canada take photographs of their extended families, and enjoyed some sunshine and the illusion that the sky was actually a little bluer than in the rest of the city.
We even enjoyed a relatively annoyance- (and urine!) free trip on the Orange Line, which as any Boston commuter knows is quite a feat.

By the end of May the weather was less cooperative and we took our travels indoors. After I grew tired of waiting for never available admission passes from the public library, we finally broke down and paid a hefty sum to visit the New England Aquarium on a rainy Saturday morning. For some reason, I thought that arriving promptly at 9am would somehow insulate us from the chance of being trampled by hordes of tourists (they sleep in, right?) Yep, totally wrong about that one. The place was mobbed. In my mind, a visit to the aquarium is an appropriate school trip for students in about 2nd-5th grade, and 5th grade is pushing it. On this particular Saturday we were greeted by dozens of charter buses carrying swarms of middle school-aged children. The boys were, for the most part, the quiet and geeky sort that doesn't draw much attention; one might even say that some of the boys were vaguely interested in actually seeing some fish and other marine life. The teenage girls, however, were a different (and far more horrifying!) story.

What did I learn from this experience? Adolescent girls REALLY don't like the smell of fish ("EEEEEWWWW! HOW CAN THE PENGUINS EAT THAT SHIT!!!@#%@"); adolescent girls REALLY don't like to touch fish in the "get up close and personal with nature" exhibits; adolescent girls can roll their eyes more frequently and with more force than any other age group I have ever encountered. A fascinating anthropological lesson for us, and it leads me to offer an apology to any family member who might be reading this: I'm sorry for my adolescence. It couldn't have been fun.

On the upside, we actually did see some marine life. I'm pretty much a huge sucker for all animals (I find skunks cute. And most rats. Oppossums are questionable, but not totally out of the running), and I did enjoy stalking the sharks who lived in the giant circular tank in the middle of the aquarium:

Have to say, totally glad there was a vast expanse of plexiglass between me and this guy.

On the whole, however, I was pretty disappointed by our aquarium trip. For the admission price I felt there wasn't a whole lot to see; reportedly there are new outdoor exhibits opening later this summer, and that might help make for a more fulfilling experience. The aquarium itself is also housed in a building whose interior, at least, is so ugly I could swear it was designed by the same architects who brought us the UMass Amherst library, campus center, and Herter Hall, leaving something to be desired in our aesthetic experience of the place. But like I said I am a sucker, so seeing penguins, otters, and tropical fish makes me a pretty happy camper.

On the occasion of having now been officially moved away from the Pioneer Valley for a year (and also on the occasion of having a dentist appointment in the Pioneer Valley), we dropped by the Smith campus to see how it was holding up after two straight weekends of commencement and alumnae reunion partying. As much as I loved my four years at Smith, there is something really wonderful about the peace and quiet of a campus without students. We wandered the grounds, admired the gardens, and took a stroll up to the empty Quad, a place still foreign and unfamiliar to me. In my years at Smith I only ever really visited the Quad at night, sometimes a bit (!) inebriated, so is it any surprise that I still can't get the names of the houses right? Afterward we wandered downtown and sat outside drinking beer and eating some tasty pizza, enjoying the slower pace that Northampton offers during the quiet summer months. NB: Some Smith nostalgia feels fairly inevitable right now, having just completed J. Courtney Sullivan's (Smith '03, same as me) debut novel, Commencement. Although I have a lot to say about the book (and will probably do so in a subsequent update once I've thought about it a bit more) that could be construed negatively, Sullivan is quite gifted at capturing - for better or for worse - the very real details of my Smith experience with such painful, painful accuracy that I really felt like I was reliving my years there all over again. More on that to come.

This is my kind of graffiti. Found on one of those Quad houses,
but don't ask me which one!

Lastly, I have come to the end of the internet. In a manner of speaking, at least. It's probably more accurate to say that I have come to the end of Boston, or that I have now been in Boston long enough that I don't feel like I'm living in an altogether unfamiliar place. Familiarity hasn't exactly bred content, although it is something of a relief to wander around and never feel completely - or even at all - lost.

To that end, and to break in the new DSLR, CP and I took advantage of the one nice sunny weekend day this month to wander around Boston and see what we could see. We wandered around the North End, the Waterfront, Quincy Market (a place I haven't been since I was a bit tipsy at an ungodly hour of the morning last summer on a very scary day), and parts of the new Greenway, amusing ourselves with the camraderie and the lost tourists and the monuments and memorials I'd somehow never stopped to look at:

It's strange, having been here over a year now. I don't feel like a tourist, but I don't feel like I really live or belong here, either. On its best days Boston is an impressively beautiful and stately city in which to live and work; on most others, however, I occasionally stare with envy at the tourists on their duck boats and trolley rides and wish I was like them, visiting for a day or three and then heading back to another city, another state, another country. What can you do? You really can't go home again.

Up next: Things get more exciting, I promise. Upcoming trips for weddings and graduations; a possible run in with Aerosmith (strange but true); and I'm bound to find someplace to make trouble sometime soon.

Well, this update is a long time in coming, eh? Like I said in the beginning, my blogging attention span is somewhat short. I'm also going to blame the long days at work, a recently-developed compulsion to watch this on DVD from start to finish, and my inclination to do this:


No, not turn into a cat. (Although maybe?) But wow, if I could get through winter by sleeping 20 hours a day and using the other four hours to eat and lay in the sun, I think I would be a lot happier. Winter has sapped my initiative to do anything but the most basic of things: eat, sleep, work, repeat.

In spite of the winter doldrums, we've still managed on occasion to get out and about. Most recently, we went and saw this exhibit the first day it opened, and our reviews are largely positive. While Shepard Fairey has gained a lot of notoriety from his contribution to the Obama campaign, I was impressed at the depth and range of his work. Particularly amusing was the experience of watching a group of little old ladies view Fairey's renderings of famous punk rockers. Billy who?!!!, indeed.

Sadly we have no photos from the exhibition, but we did get some nice shots of the new (to us at least) ICA.




An impressive building, with an even more impressive upstairs view of the Harbor:


We definitely enjoyed the Fairey exhibit, but both of us were in agreement that the rest of the ICA's exhibitions were mostly "meh." If their collection development improves I'll visit again, but for now, I'll take a visit to MassMOCA over the ICA at any chance I get.

And so, we wandered back toward downtown Boston.
In truth, we were quickly driven indoors to the Silver Line due to the ridiculously cold winds. (Insert another wish-to-hibernate reference here.) Nevertheless, it was a nice way to spend an afternoon, especially if you were lucky enough (as we were) to score reduced-cost admission passes, courtesy of the public library. You can say a lot of things about this recession, but one upside has been rediscovering the wonders of the public library...

Otherwise, we are both living right now in a state of routine that could, at any moment, give way to total chaos. I'm working for a company that is struggling (like most these days) to stay afloat, and CP is interviewing for jobs both near and far. It's both petrifying and probably completely healthy to live your life in such a way that you never really know where you might end up in a day, week, or month, but such as it is: we both hate it. In terms of where we are, and where we want to be, this picture pretty much sums it up:

Where we will actually end up remains to be seen. Stay tuned.

Holy crap, it's December!

Holy crap, indeed. Christmas is right around the corner!

As you can see, Somerville is dressed appropriately for the holiday. The above is quite a conservative example; never before in my life have I seen so much holiday kitsch shoved into a four-square-mile area. Once (if?) it ever stops snowing, I promise to take and then upload the finer examples of what the Somerville city website terms "folk artistry." (!)

Anyway, this dispatch from Somerville is long overdue. It was with some shock that I discovered my last post was almost four months ago; I promise to rectify that in the coming months. Some day, this blogging thing will stick! To be fair, the last few months haven't exactly been blog-worthy. To wit:

-Job searching. Boring! However, if you need a resume revised, call me.

-Surgery. Fun! My first stay in a hospital, where the constant offers of morphine were actually a bit alarming. As was the guy that kept trying to violently escape from the post-op ward. Like I said, fun.

-Obsessively following the election. Gut-wrenching! Sadly, I thought this was one activity that might dissipate after the actual election, but I fully admit my addiction to political news and gossip. On the upside, having a date with this Valley resident every night at 9pm has made the political news palatable.

Less palatable, of course, was the outcome of the Prop 8 vote. Although fully aware that the gesture was probably ineffectual, we attended the Join the Impact rally in Boston. It was an impressively attended rally, however, and the number of Massachusetts politicians who attended and voiced their enthusiastic support of the GLBT community was a reassuring sight. It also turned into something of a mini-Smith reunion (of course), and I was pleased to see other Seven Sisters students in attendance:


Several weeks later, it's still hard not to feel infuriated by Prop 8 and similar ballot initiatives across the country. I had higher hopes for us in 2008. Keep your fingers crossed that California Attorney General Jerry Brown changing his mind is a sign of better things to come.

Otherwise, things have been fairly quiet in Somerville. As the title of this blog suggests, we've been jaunting around a bit, catching sights like the trine of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter, and stopping by the beach in Rockport so that I can finally claim to have visited the Atlantic in Massachusetts after living here for ten years. We've been back to the Valley for some parties and good visits with friends (and also to take the LSAT; more on that in the future), enjoying some good meals (and quite a few So Valley! moments) and the picaresque beauty that sadly, you can really only find in western Mass. The photographic evidence of our jaunts has been limited by my inertia and constant forgetfulness, so consider it my new year's resolution to more properly document what I consider to be a (pleasingly) dull life.

One final public service announcement, however: With your impending vacation days, do yourself a favor and see a) Milk and b) Slumdog Millionaire. Finally a couple of movies on which I don't actually mind spending ten dollars a ticket.

down on the farm...

Ok, I have to admit: Massachusetts weather is *much* better than Florida weather. Since arriving in Boston last Friday, we have had nothing but beautiful weather here. No rain, abundant sunshine, low humidity and gentle breezes. Beautiful.

To take advantage of the nice weather, we have been spending some extra time visiting our farm. We first joined this farm last year, and were spoiled by last summer's unusually perfect growing conditions - everything was a bumper crop, undisturbed by insects or blight or bad weather. This year has been a bit more of a mixed bag, the way it should be, I think. Nevertheless, the weather in late August and now early September has improved dramatically, and you can see the results. A few shot's from yesterday's visit:




Two weeks ago, you couldn't pay the tomatoes to ripen. Yesterday, an unbelievable abundance of heirlooms, plum tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes:

We also nabbed a big bunch of sunflowers to take home. They are growing all over the farm:

After moving away from the Pioneer Valley, visits like the one we had yesterday remind us of what we loved in spite of everything that made it difficult to live there. We enjoyed the beautiful weather and the spectacular views; got some good coffee that we've been struggling to find since being in Boston; and watched - now, with a satisfied sense of detachment - the hordes of undergraduates beginning their first day of classes at the local colleges.

Once home, we spent the evening making and freezing a season's worth of pesto. Today, we do the same with our tomatoes, putting up sauce for the fall and winter. Speaking of tomatoes, it was interesting at the farm yesterday to overhear people who couldn't tell each variety of tomato apart. I have always been a fan of reading about the history of food and people's relationship(s) to it, and CP of late has also become a fan of this literature. Thus, we have been talking recently about how many Americans simply do not know how or what to eat anymore. Scary to think that we have entered an age in which a tomato seems more foreign to us than the pre-packaged, processed food that appears in every major grocery store. Scary, indeed.

A cure for the post-vacation blues....

Okay, so we're a little sad to be back in the real world of cover letter writing, bill paying, and grocery shopping. Never fun. But it's hard to feel too sad when the weather is a perfect 80 degrees and sunny with a gentle breeze. There is no humidity to speak of, and there is just a touch of fall in the air. Perfect, perfect late summer weather.

Sunday for us is Flour day. If there is one thing both of us love, it is a perfectly executed baked good. Cooking is definitely a skill and sometimes a difficult one at that, but baking is an art. Northampton offered us some good baked good options, but none that can top the creations that we get each Sunday morning from Flour. Usually we sample their muffins and super strong coffee, but today - in honor of our post-vacation blues - we splurged and brought home some of Flour's famous sticky buns:

If possible, they are even better than they look, and they look pretty darn good.

Bunny, too, is enjoying the nice weather and the long weekend:

More updates to come when we figure out how to enjoy the rest of the long weekend.

It's over. (The vacation, not the blog.)

It's over, folks. Now that we're home and unpacked I thought I'd offer my final thoughts on the trip. From here on out, look for this blog to be a chronicle of our "staycation" activities in Boston and a general place to record our activities, near and far. In the meantime, we reflect.

AFG's Trip Down Vacation Memory Lane:

The Good:

-JetBlue. Good (free!) snacks, good seats, good on-board entertainment to distract from the prospect of plummeting to one's death. How can you lose?

-Our lodging, both at the Omni in Orlando and at the Saratoga Springs resort on Disney property. Both of these properties were - in different ways - pretty spectacular. The Omni was beautiful, modern, and luxurious. Saratoga was a bit more family-friendly and worn in, but Disney gets the details right. Disney solves problems. Any issue we had was a) minor and b) solved incredibly quickly, often before we even noticed a problem.

-California Grill, Contemporary Resort. I know I raved about this in an earlier post, but several days have gone by and I am still thinking about my meal. Friends and I have spent much time discussing the demise of "fine" dining here in Massachusetts (our standards aren't even that high, but when nearly every restaurant now requires you to bus your own dishes, you start to long for something better), so it was refreshing to have a meal that involved good food, service, views, and company. We really are missing the boat by rejecting slow food. Just saying.

The Not-so-Good:

-Florida weather. August is not for the faint of heart. When you're not dodging tropical storms and hurricanes (See: Fay; Gustav; Hanna), you still have afternoon thunderstorms, oppressive heat and humidity, and evening temperatures that rarely fall below 80. Even in our air-conditioned room, we could still feel dampness and see mold growing between the panes of glass in the windows. Bring the Benadryl, folks; you're going to need it.

-Bad parenting. I know I sound like an 85-year-old curmudgeon, but seriously parents; let's do some parenting, ok? I'm not sure when personal boundaries or clean language went out of style, but it was weird to feel out of place because I wasn't touching strangers lewdly or swearing at the other members of my party. Isolated incidents are one thing, but we saw a lot of bad behavior from both kids and parents.

-Disney bus system. I generally had high hopes for Disney in this age of environmentalism, but my hopes were dashed. The bus system is now so inefficient and unreliable that I can see why the masses bring their cars, RVs, and Hummers-replete-with-car-toppers. If you're a family with a limited time schedule, you don't want to spend half of your day in the hot Florida sun waiting for a bus that may or may not come.

And on that note, wherefore art, Disney, thou innovative recycling system and energy efficiency plans, etc? Disney has a captive audience of young minds it could educate about the importance of recycling and resource conservation, and yet generally does little to earn its "green" lodging designation. It was nice to see plastic recycling receptacles in the theme parks, but our hotel room/buildings didn't have receptacles to recycle anything, plastic, paper, or otherwise. I shudder to think at the amount of unnecessary waste Disney creates in a day. I mean, COME ON - even Wal Mart has gone green (?!).

-Disney Dining. Disney has made changes in dining options and prices that punish users who don't buy the Disney Dining Plan, and yet sometimes punish those who do, as well. Confused? So were we. If we go again we may buy into the Plan, but I think I'll need to obtain an advanced degree in calculus to figure out the cost benefit analysis. And while prices in general were lower than I expected (we spend more on food at Fenway for similar things), I think the quality has declined in some areas.

The Horrible, and/or Will-Never-EVER-Do-or-See-Again:

-Universe of Energy, aka Ellen's Energy Adventure, Epcot. With gas nearing 5 bucks a gallon, do we *really* need to see free advertising for Exxon? I mean, I know it's novel when you combine propaganda with a moving ride vehicle, but enough is enough. Two thumbs WAY DOWN.

-Beverly, the Italian (and Coke-produced) beverage featured at Club Cool, Epcot.

OK, so for those of you who aren't familiar with this particular "attraction," it's basically Coca-Cola propaganda disguised in the form of a beverage tasting center where you can taste Coke products from around the world. Some of them, like the Coke/orange soda mix from Germany are quite good. Beverly from Italy has a notorious reputation as being disgusting; stupidly, I doubted this and thought that other tasters must not have discerning palettes. I was wrong. So wrong. So wrong I actually spit it out of my mouth in public, manners be damned. Never again.

Other thoughts:

-It's readily apparent that the American dollar has tanked. During the week we noticed many American visitors (like ourselves) eating lower-cost meals or snacking while many European and Canadian visitors flocked to the more expensive signature restaurants and stayed at the deluxe resorts. There is no judgment meant by this observation, except to suggest that it's really a strange turn to think that so many Americans cannot as easily afford amusement and leisure in their own country, to say nothing of our inability to enjoy the value of the dollar abroad. I suppose we were overdue for this. We spoke to many Canadians throughout the week who were laughing at our present misfortune; one woman said that never in her lifetime had she seen the Canadian dollar higher than the American!

-Disney is still great, but it's not the Disney of my youth. I suppose this is true for most things in our lives we try to revisit; they never stay as they were. But I think there is an undeniable reality that in this time of economic uncertainty, Disney is cutting costs with the best of them. It really did feel at times like Disney had outgrown itself, and you could see these new found limitations in a decline in service, a rise in wait times, and a lack of property upkeep that would be unthinkable just ten years ago. I'm about to read this book to learn more about this shift.

Nevertheless, we had a great time and agreed that Disney has an edge on hospitality and professionalism that most other tourism outfits can't match. Our left-brain critiques were no match for our right-brain fun, and thus, we find ourselves eager to return. If and when we do, expect a report here!

In the meantime, we're busily crafting our list of fun, blog-worthy things to see, do, and recount. Stay tuned!