Just when I thought I was a savvy Bostonian...

Yes, it's true. After living in Boston for four and a half years, I've fallen under the illusion that I fit in here, that people don't look at me and immediately assume that I'm from out of town. I've learned my way around most of the major neighborhoods, I can get from point A to point B on the T (short for MBTA, the public transportation system), and I can maintain my balance on the trains when they lurch forward or stop quickly. This month I've become one of the masses who commutes to work on the bus.

So. This morning I left my apartment and saw the bus stopped at a light just before the bus stop. I half walked, half jogged to the stop so that I'd get there in time, pleased with my luck at not having to wait in the cold for the somewhat unreliable #1 bus. I waited in line behind a girl who was paying her fare with cash, which entailed shoving her 3-times folded doller bill into the much-too-small slot, feeling somewhat smug that I could just swipe my pass and not hold anybody up. As usual, all the seats were taken, so I grabbed onto an overhead hold and prepared to stand for the short trip. Instead of holding onto the steel rail, I grabbed one of the cloth handles that hangs on the rail, because the actual rails are just tall enough so that I look a little ridiculous hanging onto them, almost as if I'm hanging from the monkey bars. Plus, the rails are located directly above the knees of the people in the seats, so it's a little awkward to be standing practically in someone's lap. (It also leads to a sort of face-in-crotch situation.)

Anyway, the bus got across the bridge and had to stop for a red light, not a sudden stop or particularly jerky, but I wasn't paying any attention, so all of a sudden I was very quickly sliding toward the front of the bus. I was still hanging onto my cloth handle, which had the nerve to slide along the rail, and then instead of just sliding forward, I was sliding to the left, which meant that I started to swing uncontrollably in a giant circle. Turning, turning... I was completely off-balance and swinging in front of the seated passengers until some nice girl in the front of the bus grabbed my shoulders and stopped me from continuing to twirl like a merry-go-round. (I also ended up practically hanging in her lap, so maybe it was just self-defense.) While the bus was still stopped, I quickly let go of the offending cloth handle grabbed onto the (stationary) rail and planted my feet directly underneath me, secretly hoping I would disappear or the bus would swallow me up. Thankfully no one laughed, or at least they did it quietly enough so that I couldn't hear it, but man - when the bus stopped at MIT, I could not get off fast enough.

An email forward

The perfect example of how a picture is worth a thousand words. Just think how long this takes to explain to somebody! :)

Alaska

Wow, if this National Geographic photo doesn't make you want to go to Alaska RIGHT NOW, I don't know what will. Ahh, my travel list gets longer and longer and I keep getting poorer and poorer. Stupid grad school.

My new pet peeve

Websites that don't load until whatever stupid banner ad at the top has done all its stupid animations, chickens running across a field, Netflix DVD's flying themselves into your mailbox, etc. It's especially annoying when you're just hitting the "back" button or only interested in quickly checking the headlines (like who else Cheney's shooting) and you have to wait 10 seconds while some ridiculous ad prances across the screen. Granted, maybe I shouldn't be griping about this when the most offending website is people.com, but still! When a girl's gotta see pictures of U2 from the Grammys, these things are important!

15 minutes of fame

Well, maybe one day of fame: my officemate's picture is in the New York Times today, as part of a story on the weekend's snowstorm! The article is here, and if you scroll down and click on the photographs link on the left, he's in the last picture in the slideshow.

More Chicago pictures

Josh took way more pictures than I did on our trip, and his camera is definitely snazzier than mine (and of course, his good pictures wouldn't have anything to do with the operator.... :) )

A cooler shot of the water tower:
On Saturday afternoon, I dragged Josh into both the Hershey's store and the Ghirardelli store. The stores were right next to each other on our way to the L station, and the scent of chocolate was much too powerful for me at snack o'clock. We discovered that the delicious aroma was coming from inside Ghirardelli, but the better snacks were at Hershey's. So, I decided to get a cupcake... the largest cupcake I've ever seen.
Later that day, we stopped at Millenium Park and saw this shiny bean-shaped statue (that I'm sure has a more appropriate name than "shiny bean"). It gives a cool warped view of the skyline.
We got a little closer to the bean to see our squashed selves reflected in the mirror:
We saw this collection of flags at the end of Navy Pier. Actually, we saw this collection all over the city, but we couldn't figure out what the flag on the right is. City flag? Our-place-is-3-times-better-than-your-place flag? It's not the Illinois flag, because that one's on the left.

Blizzard

Well, I'm not sure I'd call the snowstorm that's hit the Northeast over the past 24 hours a "blizzard," but it's definitely been a storm. I slept through most of it, going to bed around 2am last night and not waking up until noon (hey, what are weekends for?), but we're still under a blizzard warning while the snow continues to fall this afternoon. I went outside to take the trash out and promptly buried my right calf in the snow, trying to hold the door open. After changing into more snow-friendly clothes, I went outside again to see what everything outside the alley looked like (the window in my room only offers me a view of the shaft of the building).

Here's the view from the front steps of my apartment building:
Looking down Marlborough street:
Marlboro Market is the liquor store kitty-corner from our building... also the cheapest place around to buy milk. You can see it off in the distance on the left.
The corner of Mass Ave and Beacon. This intersection is usually awfully crowded, but everything is eerily quiet today.
Apparently there's been enough traffic in and out of our building today to keep a footprint path cleared on the front steps.

Ironically, the moment I stepped outside my apartment, I saw the #1 bus stopped at the corner of Mass Ave & Marlborough. Apparently you can wait for hours in perfectly good weather for the bus, but as soon as the weather sucks, hey! There's the bus. I also saw a guy trekking down Mass Ave, in the street, wearing snowshoes. Another couple I passed was on their way home from Whole Foods, braving the stinging wind and flying snow with yellow ski goggles. It's amazing what you can see when you're out for only ten minutes.

I don't think I'm going to make it to the Tech meeting tonight.

My friends at 78

Compliments of Robin Riedel. :)

Bye, Natalya

My little hamster died yesterday. Some of you may remember that I originally had two hamsters, and although one died very early on, the other one lived happily for over a year - in multiple homes and states, and throughout a very long roadtrip in a rental truck. She was a trooper, and whatever your personal feelings may be on the rewards of having a pet hamster instead of an animal with more personality, it feels like a little piece of me is now missing. I spent an entire year unconscious of the fact that the first thing I did whenever I got home was peek into Natalya's cage to see how she was doing, and now it's hard to look past my desk into a big empty aquarium with no hamster.

Natalya was never a big fan of the camera, but I'm glad I got a few shots of her over the past year.