29 Sunday Mar 2009
Posted in a sense of place
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Last night, the city of Boston participated in Earth Hour 2009, a one-hour worldwide event in which people were encouraged to turn out their lights for one hour (8:30-9:30) in support of combating global warming. Hanna and I spent our hour of ecological friendliness playing scrabble by candlelight.
Hanna won infinity points for spelling “Ianto” on the board and thus won the game hands down.
29 Saturday Nov 2008
Posted in a sense of place
Sunday evening Hanna has yoga in the North End and I often tag along to sit and read or study in the Boston Beanstock Co. coffee shop. On our way to and from the T we cross the Rose Kennedy Greenway, which has these tiny little lights studding the sidewalk. Last week, I snapped a photograph. It’s not great quality, but you get the effect. I don’t think they’re constellations or anything, but it still reminds me of those night sky machines you can buy for bedroom ceilings :).
20 Monday Oct 2008
Posted in our family
Mom and Dad finally had the chance to visit me in Boston this weekend, and Dad–as usual–brought gorgeous autumn weather with him for the duration of their stay (although he also brought the first cold snap of the season). Mostly we wandered around my usual haunts, got food at my favorite coffee shop (the Boston Beanstock Co.) and pastry shop (Mike’s Pastry) in the North End, and visited lots of bookstores (because what else does our family usually do on vacation but hunt for books!). We also stumbled into the Boston city Camp Sunshine Pumpkin Festival and the Head of the Charles Regatta. You can see pictures below.
To see a larger slideshow, click here.
06 Monday Oct 2008
Posted in a sense of place
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.
21 Sunday Sep 2008
Posted in a sense of place
I haven’t posted any photos of Boston for a while, so yesterday when Hanna met me after work to walk home along the Charles River, I took my camera and snapped a few pictures.
You can see the album over at Picasa if you prefer the larger images.
13 Sunday Apr 2008
Posted in a sense of place
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.
13 Thursday Mar 2008
Posted in a sense of place
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.
23 Saturday Feb 2008
Straight from the awesomely talented hands of my brother Brian comes the Future Feminist Librarian-Activist patron goddess, Minerva (or, as I affectionately call her, “Minnie”).
Minerva was, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Roman goddess of “handicrafts, the professions, the arts, and . . . war.” I thought this was a good combination for those of us seeking to put scholarly interests to work in a real-world, politically aware, context.
Sartorially, she owes her style to the American suffragists, with a nod to the European bluestockings of a slightly earlier area. I like to imagine she will be watching me sharply from behind those spectacles, making sure I remember what I came here to school to learn, and briskly challenging me to do something meaningful with my education on the other end.
Please join me in giving her a warm and respectful welcome.
24 Thursday Jan 2008
Posted in life writing
Contrary to popular belief expressed in some circles, I do actually know how to enjoy myself outside of feminist politics. This weekend visiting friends in New York City, in addition to making a pilgrimage to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, dropping in at bluestockings radical bookstore, attending a lecture on women’s literary societies in the early republic, and seeing The Business of Being Born on the big screen, I took part in the following non-political activities:
You can check out the photos at picasa or watch a small version of the slide show below:
Now it’s back to the academic realm . . . my first history class convenes in 3 1/2 hours.
22 Saturday Dec 2007
Posted in a sense of place
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow; and, driving o’er the fields,
seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveler stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.–From “The Snow-storm” (1847) by R. W. Emerson
the feminist librarian 