Thoughts of Boston

Even though I haven’t been there in 16 years, I have a lot of fine memories of Boston.

Honeymooning there with my new Wife (still my current Wife). Shopping at Quincy Market, the Science Museum, the New England Aquarium. Boston Common. Seafood. Traditional dim sum in Chinatown (meaning, the kind of dim sum place where they wheel around the food on carts).

:: I remember construction everywhere when we were there. It was the Big Dig, as they called it. What a mess.

I remember walking into a store and having a clerk say, “How are you, ladies?” We had our back to her, and she saw two long-haired folks. (The Wife had long hair then.)

I also went there as a kid several summers in a row, from 1982 to 1985 or so, because my father had annual computer courses he took…someplace. I remember doing a lot of hoofing around downtown Boston with my mother and sister. We tracked down Paul Revere’s grave, and later that same day, his house (with the help of the single nicest cop I’ve ever met). I remember Old North Church, and walking from the Science Museum to the USS Constitution. On that particular walk, we went past a brownstone on the doorstep of which was the first passed-out drunk I ever saw, the empty bottle on the ground just out of reach of his fingertips. I always wondered if he drained it, or if it ran out where it fell as he collapsed.

I remember clam chowder…at McDonald’s. I remember falling in love with public transportation in general and trains in particular. I remember the paddleboats, Faneuil Hall, and a restaurant called the Magic Pan.

Boston is a great city — it was today before the bombings, and it is today after them.

I just wanted to say that.

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A Tale in Four Photos.

Good:


Better:


Better still:


Best!


The End.

(Afternote: Did you ever notice how every single beverage in the world has its own sound when it’s being poured? Interesting how the ingredients of a given beverage impact things like the acoustics of its pouring.)

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Did the Ancient Egyptians invent the cardboard box?

It seems to me that there must be some kind of physics experiment to be done on the malleability of a cat’s size, relative to the size of the box into which the cat is attempting to squeeze his sizable arse. I’m sure this has real-world implications, such as packing food for long space voyages.

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Just because I haven't posted anything yet today….

Here’s Vidler’s in East Aurora, NY, after dark. We’d just come out of Firefly Cupcakes, which is right next door. Note the giant statue-golem of Mr. Vidler, looming over all!

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Sparkly!

I’m doing a ‘photo a day’ challenge over on Instagram, and today’s topic was ‘Something That Sparkles’. So I took this photo of my two main pieces of jewelry: my wedding ring, and my star sapphire ring. I’m posting it here just because I really like the way the photo turned out.

My wedding ring is an Irish wedding band. The Wife has an Irish band too, although hers is styled slightly differently. We got each ring set with each other’s birthstone, so those amethysts are her birthstone. Her ring has mine (sapphire).

The star sapphire ring was a Christmas gift from The Girlfriend (now The Wife) in 1996, which was the last Christmas for us as a dating couple, as we were married five months later in May 1997. I’ve always loved that ring.

Due to the nature of my day job, I never wear my rings to work. I’m afraid that some of the things I do might damage them. I keep on the lookout for a cheap ‘alternate’ ring to wear to work, but I never see any that I like all that much.

Anyway, that’s my ‘bling’, as it were. And now that I have used the word ‘bling’ on my blog, the earth is that much closer to the Apocalypse!

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