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Holy flaming pickled persimmons, it's been at least a week and a half since I've posted. Partly busy -- the last couple weeks have included some interesting interviews for the A&E section, including Chubby Checker and Judas Priest's Ian Hill. (Chubby was fun -- very soft-spoken over the phone even while making grandiose claims about pretty much inventing dancing for the last half-century ... and he may have a point.) Also overhauling the apartment. (Yeah, I know -- again. But it's starting to look really nice. At least one room. Four to go! Also somewhat tired due partly to a minor stomach bug that hasn't sickened me so much as given me intermittent bursts of quease.
At any rate, I'm going to pick up that vacation account before the memories recede into the, uh, recesses of, uh, memory.
DAY FIVE (TUESDAY, JUNE 15)
I wanted to make sure I got into the city proper at least once, so Marcy and I took the T in to Boston Commons. Meandered around there a bit; Marcy took a lot of flower photos; and we came across the incongruous site of someone lugging around a life-size cardboard cutout of Fabio in his prime. Ambled by the waterfront, along a bit of the Freedom Trail (the cemetery where Revere and the Boston Massacre dead are buried -- and yow, there are headstones right flush against the adjacent office building windows; that's what happens when a fairly compact modern city is build on historicity) and the business district where Marcy used to work. And had lunch at the Green Dragon, which was reportedly (according to the placemats, anyway) a favored haunt of many of the Sons of Liberty. It may well be true --![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kayt663 in Salem advises me that local Boston lore is often fairly reliable. Local Salem lore, on the other hand ...
In the evening, I hied to East Brookfield to pay a visit to my friends from college, Jamie and Kelly and their seven kids. They have three teenagers, and four Taiwanese special-needs children they've adopted, the fourth only a couple weeks before my visit. And they're, to my eyes anyway, ideal parents -- kind while firm, attentive to the kids' activities while letting them learn through their own discoveries and interactions; handling life through faith, wisdom and humor. (Jamie is probably among the most conservative of my friends, and he's the person this moderate keeps in mind whenever I'm tempted to paint The Right with one brush.)
They gave me much better directions back to Arlington than the ones I'd followed to East Brookfield thanks to GoogleMaps -- their directions, thankfully, did not involve going through the heart of Worcester, or actually going anywhere near Worcester, yay.
DAY SIX (WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16)
Made my way to Wellesley around lunchtime to meet another friend from college, Bill King -- had a decent in unexceptional lunch at someplace called Papa Razi -- and he took me on a Jeep tour of Wellesley and vicinity. There was some large-scale roadwork being done on the Wellesley campus, so he couldn't take me through ... just drove by and invited me to imagine the youthful Hillary Rodham thereabouts. Bill knew some interesting local history, including that of a hamlet/village that had been a Christian Indian community in the late 1600s/early 1700s and a decent model of inter-tribal and white/native harmony ... before it was scuttled by greed, as usual. I've forgotten most of the details, but it was an interesting account.
Then I hooked around the north of Boston to make my way to Salem -- got a bit lost, as a lot of people apparently do on their first visit to Salem (I have a colleague who never could find the House of the Seven Gables, even with all the signs) -- to visitkayt663, a friend I'd met online a few years back, hung out with a bit when I was last in Boston, for the 2004 Worldcon, and then gradually fell out of touch with until the Facebook Era. (For all FB's various annoyances and perversities, I have it to thank for bringing some excellent people back into my life. That goes for you too, mswewh.) We wandered around a secluded local garden, where a stranger promptly gave her a tree; then headed over to Lynn, got ice cream and strolled by the seaside. All things considered, the best of days. (When we got to some large rocks jutting out into the surf, Therese decided she wanted to take some dramatic shots of me in various poses lookin' all windswept and stuff. My FB friends among you have probably seen some of 'em; I may post a couple here sometime.) That evening she made Thai chicken and rice with asparagus, and we tried to jointly improv a story -- like that tandem writers'-group assignment hazmatplaytime had the Hacks do once (which, as I've mentioned in this LJ, led in a roundabout way to my song "Casa Blanca"), only orally. I learned I'm pretty miserable at improv. And her cat tried to lovingly munch on my fingers several times, but apparently she does that to everyone.
And speaking of improv, upon arriving back at the Mahoneys, I saw they had Marcy's keyboard out -- they were at one point thinking of coming to part of Concertino, before Bryan got word of weekend auditions for Deal or No Deal -- and were improvising songs to backing tracks programmed in ... like a song about a worm to the tune of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition." At one point I threw out the topic ("Beans!") and Marcy picked the melody ("Danny Boy"), and Bryan launched into a song more about gas than actual beans but in a traditional Irish style o' lament. This sort of thing is why I keep wanting to get this people into a filkroom.
Ach, that's enough for tonight.
Words: Fables: War and Pieces by Bill Willingham et al. Not quite as compelling as the last collection -- surprising, considering this represented a climax of sorts -- but still solid, with some great moments.
Sounds & Images: "C is for Lettuce" by Worm Quartet
State O'Mind: Content
At any rate, I'm going to pick up that vacation account before the memories recede into the, uh, recesses of, uh, memory.
DAY FIVE (TUESDAY, JUNE 15)
I wanted to make sure I got into the city proper at least once, so Marcy and I took the T in to Boston Commons. Meandered around there a bit; Marcy took a lot of flower photos; and we came across the incongruous site of someone lugging around a life-size cardboard cutout of Fabio in his prime. Ambled by the waterfront, along a bit of the Freedom Trail (the cemetery where Revere and the Boston Massacre dead are buried -- and yow, there are headstones right flush against the adjacent office building windows; that's what happens when a fairly compact modern city is build on historicity) and the business district where Marcy used to work. And had lunch at the Green Dragon, which was reportedly (according to the placemats, anyway) a favored haunt of many of the Sons of Liberty. It may well be true --
kayt663 in Salem advises me that local Boston lore is often fairly reliable. Local Salem lore, on the other hand ...In the evening, I hied to East Brookfield to pay a visit to my friends from college, Jamie and Kelly and their seven kids. They have three teenagers, and four Taiwanese special-needs children they've adopted, the fourth only a couple weeks before my visit. And they're, to my eyes anyway, ideal parents -- kind while firm, attentive to the kids' activities while letting them learn through their own discoveries and interactions; handling life through faith, wisdom and humor. (Jamie is probably among the most conservative of my friends, and he's the person this moderate keeps in mind whenever I'm tempted to paint The Right with one brush.)
They gave me much better directions back to Arlington than the ones I'd followed to East Brookfield thanks to GoogleMaps -- their directions, thankfully, did not involve going through the heart of Worcester, or actually going anywhere near Worcester, yay.
DAY SIX (WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16)
Made my way to Wellesley around lunchtime to meet another friend from college, Bill King -- had a decent in unexceptional lunch at someplace called Papa Razi -- and he took me on a Jeep tour of Wellesley and vicinity. There was some large-scale roadwork being done on the Wellesley campus, so he couldn't take me through ... just drove by and invited me to imagine the youthful Hillary Rodham thereabouts. Bill knew some interesting local history, including that of a hamlet/village that had been a Christian Indian community in the late 1600s/early 1700s and a decent model of inter-tribal and white/native harmony ... before it was scuttled by greed, as usual. I've forgotten most of the details, but it was an interesting account.
Then I hooked around the north of Boston to make my way to Salem -- got a bit lost, as a lot of people apparently do on their first visit to Salem (I have a colleague who never could find the House of the Seven Gables, even with all the signs) -- to visit
kayt663, a friend I'd met online a few years back, hung out with a bit when I was last in Boston, for the 2004 Worldcon, and then gradually fell out of touch with until the Facebook Era. (For all FB's various annoyances and perversities, I have it to thank for bringing some excellent people back into my life. That goes for you too, mswewh.) We wandered around a secluded local garden, where a stranger promptly gave her a tree; then headed over to Lynn, got ice cream and strolled by the seaside. All things considered, the best of days. (When we got to some large rocks jutting out into the surf, Therese decided she wanted to take some dramatic shots of me in various poses lookin' all windswept and stuff. My FB friends among you have probably seen some of 'em; I may post a couple here sometime.) That evening she made Thai chicken and rice with asparagus, and we tried to jointly improv a story -- like that tandem writers'-group assignment hazmatplaytime had the Hacks do once (which, as I've mentioned in this LJ, led in a roundabout way to my song "Casa Blanca"), only orally. I learned I'm pretty miserable at improv. And her cat tried to lovingly munch on my fingers several times, but apparently she does that to everyone.And speaking of improv, upon arriving back at the Mahoneys, I saw they had Marcy's keyboard out -- they were at one point thinking of coming to part of Concertino, before Bryan got word of weekend auditions for Deal or No Deal -- and were improvising songs to backing tracks programmed in ... like a song about a worm to the tune of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition." At one point I threw out the topic ("Beans!") and Marcy picked the melody ("Danny Boy"), and Bryan launched into a song more about gas than actual beans but in a traditional Irish style o' lament. This sort of thing is why I keep wanting to get this people into a filkroom.
Ach, that's enough for tonight.
Words: Fables: War and Pieces by Bill Willingham et al. Not quite as compelling as the last collection -- surprising, considering this represented a climax of sorts -- but still solid, with some great moments.
Sounds & Images: "C is for Lettuce" by Worm Quartet
State O'Mind: Content
