Christmas lights

Every year, the city of Boston puts up lights along the Commonwealth Avenue mall. This year, since we live right in Kenmore Square, I'm lucky enough to see it right out my window every night.


I also managed to catch a teeny-tiny sliver of the moon last night.


It's been feeling very un-Christmas-y over the past week or so though because the weather's been so warm. Not that I'm complaining, of course, but it's a little weird to be able to go running in shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of December.

I'm really looking forward to going home next week. My thesis advisor, on the other hand, wasn't overly excited to hear that I'll be out of town for two whole weeks. I'm not really planning to get a lot of work done while I'm at home, but it's amazing how unproductive December will end up being with my final project (completed and turned in yesterday), my final exam (coming up on Tuesday), and losing the last ten days to being out of town.

Oh well. I'm sure my thesis will be able to sufficiently ruin my life for the next 5 months, so why have it ruin the next two weeks?

My latest body jewelry

Before going in on Monday, I wondered what it would feel like to have these panels taped to my back for 48 hours. Turns out it feels pretty much how you would expect that much tape to feel: itchy. But the patches were removed and read today, so I only have one more trip to the dermatologist's office on Friday before I can shower again! The bath thing takes way too long. Plus, I've ended up dumping a lot of water on the floor while washing my hair in the sink, and my upper back is perpetually sticky. Definitely looking forward to the shower.

I didn't end up having a reaction to the contact lenses or the solution, but since that part of it was a pretty ghetto experiment, I'm not sure how much to trust the results. I had a couple weak reactions to two of the other substances on the regular patches though, indicating that I have contact allergies to colophony (also called rosin, which comes from pine tree sap) and black rubber mix. I got some information sheets from the doctor to explain more about what these substances are found in and how I can avoid them. The black rubber mix is pretty self-explanatory, but just in case a patient is confused, the sheet has some handy advice:

In general, avoid contact with black and dark gray rubber. If an object looks like it is made of rubber and it is black, it will probably be a problem.

Colophony is a little trickier. It's in many cosmetics and several industrial products like adhesives, varnishes, asphalt, soldering materials, drive belts, and linoleum. Kinda makes you think twice about using makeup if it's equivalent to rubbing asphalt into your cheeks.

The sheets also have some advice on how to test a particular product on yourself to see if you're allergic - put a small amount on the same patch of skin every day for a week and see what happens. The sheets caution, however, that you shouldn't do this for things like varnishes, solvents, or RUBBER TIRES.

Boston bricks

Several months ago, I got a Boston guidebook so that I could read about all the things that I haven't seen/been to/eaten during my past 5 years in Boston, hoping that I could cram them all in by next June. Last Sunday I made it to the Boston Bricks, a little public art in Winthrop Square. After wandering around the square for an embarrassingly long time looking for these arty bricks on the wall, I gave up and turned around, only to stumble over them on the ground (literally) on my way back to my bike. The bricks show different places and events unique to Boston, and so in tourbook fashion, I took several pictures before leaving. :)

First, get your bearings.

Next is the Longfellow Bridge, whose supports sort of look like salt & pepper shakers. It looks a little more like this in real life.

It's made of cheese!

Every good city needs a clock tower...

...and a way to measure the length of a bridge. Smoot was a short dude, an MIT fraternity pledge back in '58, and his frat buddies decided it would be a good idea to use him to measure the Harvard Bridge. The length: 364.4 Smoots + 1 ear.

Cape

I was doing a photo search for Cape Cod but wasn't coming up with anything desktop-wallpaper-worthy, so I searched for just "cape", and this is one of the images I found. Hopefully someday soon, I can go to the Cape of Good Hope and stand on the edge of the Africa and look out on 270 degrees of water. *sigh*

Florida

I've been so lazy since getting back on Sunday. I kept thinking I would feel all "refreshed" and "motivated" when I got back, but the only productive thing I've managed to accomplish since Sunday morning is buying groceries. Tomorrow I'll get back on a regular schedule, I swear...

Florida was awesome. :) We spent Saturday & Sunday in Jacksonville with the parents, and then drove through St. Augustine on Sunday on the way to Orlando. We spent Monday at Cocoa Beach, where I got to meet the real people I had to impress: Josh's nieces and nephew. Adults are relatively polite even if they don't really like you, but little kids are pretty honest about their feelings. They, of course, were adorable, and I was glad that we got to go to Disneyworld with them on Tuesday, since the park is so much more magical when you're under 10. But Disneyworld was HOT and crowded because of all the Memorial Day kid traffic. We finally made it through the line at Splash Mountain by the end of the day, and then of course it was time for pictures... so here we are in front of Cinderella's castle, appropriately damp:


My eyes looked pretty red and freakish by the end of that day, so we didn't go back for the parade of lights at night, which would have been cool. My eyeballs didn't look much better on Wednesday, so we spent most of that day just lounging around. Thursday we went to Busch Gardens in Tampa, and it turned out to be the perfect day - there was a huge thunderstorm in the afternoon so the park mostly cleared out after that, which meant that all the rollercoasters had less than a 10 minute wait to ride. I think we rode Sheikra 5 times in a row. :) The ride is crazy - you go up the initial hill and turn a short corner, and then the car dangles you over the edge of the first drop for about 5 seconds before throwing you down a 90 degree dive. Just enough time for you to gape at the track and pee in your pants. If you're interested, you can watch the video here, but I don't think the movie does it justice - the ride at least feels a ton faster in real life.

The night before we played some mini golf on a course that included a scavenger hunt and some live alligators! I was all excited to find out that they had alligators, but then later we went to a Go Kart place that also had alligators... so apparently I'm a big sucker for tourist traps.


But it seems that the alligators aren't the real thing you should be watching out for...


Ahh, vacation... I miss you already.

Thursday

Somehow it hadn't hit me yet that everyone was going to be leaving until Ann came over for the last time on Thursday. We were good friends in high school, but we didn't stay in touch during college, and it ended up being a mutual friend who told us that we were now both in Boston for grad school. It turned out that we were both big OC fans but didn't have anyone else to watch the show with us. (hecklers don't count!) So every Thursday afterward, Ann came over and we ate Subway and watched the OC. In honor of this past Thursday being the season finale and Ann's last week in Boston though, we decided to forgo the usual Subway routine and try the happy hour at Daisy Buchanan's. We made it back in time for the OC to watch all the characters graduate from high school (with an appropriately tragic ending), and then as Ann got up to leave, I realized she'd be the first person I'd have to say goodbye to this spring. It's nice that we're both from the same hometown and will have more opportunities to get together than those friends from college who are moving to San Francisco and it's entirely possible that you'll never run into them again. But it was still sad... especially since we'd made the effort to "reconnect" after high school, and then we only got a semester to hang out again before Ann left Boston for the real world. :(