Category Archives: a sense of place

Portland Sunday

13 Monday Oct 2008

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Portland, Maine, that is (clearing up any confusion for you West Coasters). Hanna and I rented a Zipcar today and drove up to Portland (three states in two hours!) to meet her parents for the morning and early afternoon. We started at the local Starbucks — oxymoronic as that may sound — and rambled around through the bookstore, L.L. Bean outlet, and various shops before picnicking down by the ocean.


While eating lunch, we chanced to see a small steam train which ran on a narrow-gauge track along the harbor! And we also enjoyed a bit of casual leaf-spotting; Boston’s trees turn color but we’re often not outside in the middle of a sunny day to enjoy them!

Fruitlands Museum Visit

06 Monday Oct 2008

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For my history class, we had to choose a public history site connected to the transcendentalist movement to visit and report on; my friend Laura and I chose Fruitlands, the site of the short-lived (eight-month) utopian experiment undertaken by Bronson Alcott, his long-suffering wife and children, and a British friend Charles Lane. Below are the pictures I took on the museum grounds and at the apple orchard we stopped at on the way home. (The third individual evident in the pictures is Laura’s roommate Ashley).

To see a larger slide show with captions, click here.

And then yesterday got a little bit better

31 Thursday Jul 2008

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I was feeling tired and depressed, and slightly headachey yesterday (just one of those days). But I was scheduled to go to dinner and a play (see below) with a co-worker and her former roommates, and having paid for the ticket I decided to suck it up and go anyway. So we went to dinner at this place in the South End called Delux, a restaurant, which had — by the way — delicious gnocchi with smoked mozzarella cheese. And I didn’t want alcohol, well, I wanted it but when I have an incipient headache this is not a good idea so I asked if they had coffee (no) or iced tea (no). The waitress was very apologetic. So I was making do with water, when she came back a few minutes later and said to me, “This is going to sound weird, but our beer rep just brought me an iced tea from the cafe down the street and I don’t drink iced tea and I thought it was so weird because you had just asked about it and I’ll just be throwing it out so anyway, do you want it?” She brought it to me free with two slices of lemon and made my day just a little bit brighter.

A gaggle of goslings

02 Monday Jun 2008

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Goslings grow up quickly! Here’s a picture I took last week while out on a walk along the Charles river of a group of geese that look like they’re at least several families worth of goslings hanging out together. Yesterday, Hanna and I saw what looked like the same crowd of them all swimming together in a little inlet . . . I imagine when you have that many geese children all the same age, it’s useful to have other geese parents around to help out!

Now I feel like a Bostonian

30 Friday May 2008

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As most of you know, I’ve been in the midst of moving out of my Simmons dorm this week, and into an apartment in Allston.* I’m very happy to be done with dorm life, and am already planning meals to cook this weekend!

This morning, I commuted in to work on my new route along with my newest accessory–a hand-me-down mp3 player (not the iPod brand) given to me by Hanna (thanks Hanna!) It even plays NPR! I was very excited. Now I look like all the other Bostonian commuters with their little ear buds in their ears. I guess we’ll all be ready when the aliens come to colonize our brains.

Since my camera and USB cord are lost somewhere in the shuffle of packing, I don’t have any pictures yet of my new digs (it’s all boxes at the point anyway!), so I thought I’d post this MadTV clip instead in honor of my not-iPod mp3 player. Many of you have already seen it (and thanks to Brian and Maggie, of course, who introduced me to it last year), but I showed it to Hanna last night and think it’s still worth a giggle.

More soon . . .

*If anyone who wants/needs my new address hasn’t gotten it, shoot me an email and I’ll gladly provide it. For obvious reasons, I’m not posting it here!

Spring . . . maybe?

13 Sunday Apr 2008

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We’ve had a couple of beautiful spring days here in Boston this week, when the temperatures have edged toward sixty–on Thursday even seventy! Yesterday, after a morning at the Schlesinger Library doing work on my term paper, I walked home along the Charles River, where humanity was out in force walking their dogs, playing with their kids, jogging, and even (in one intrepid case) sunbathing in a bikini! I tried to do a bit of double-duty, reading Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks which is our assigned history text for the week, but I also managed to snap a few pictures along the way.

Whither the Witches?

13 Thursday Mar 2008

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This being Spring Break, as previously mentioned, Hanna and I took one entire day off to frivol. We took the commuter train up to Salem and wandered around town, visiting the Peabody Essex Museum, admiring gravestones in the Old Burying Point Cemetery, and tarrying a while at a coffee shop with the most comfortable chairs ever invented (or at least they felt that way). We did not feel much of a need to visit the Witch Dungeon, the Witch History Museum, the Witches Cottage, although we did pass by the Witch Trials Memorial on our way down to the shore :).

Here are some pictures.