I froze my feet waiting to see the fireworks. By the time these things finally went off at midnight, I wanted to set off pyrotechnics in my shoes just to warm up…
Category: Personal
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Photoblog – First Night Boston 2007
Okay, so it was a little antisocial of me to not go to any New Year’s parties…
But, you know, I always just kinda feel lost at events like that – so I find it’s more exciting and fun to take the bike into town and dodge taxicabs and drunken revelers.
I don’t usually attend many of the First Night celebrations. I’m not really into the performance art-type stuff that much, and a lot of events are oriented more towards little kids. Maybe next year I’ll take advantage of the First Night discounts for the museums. If I’m not traveling, that is…
But what I do like about First Night are the ice sculptures and fireworks. So, I took the road bike and went into town to see the sights. The bike is probably the best way to get around Boston. So I got to see both fireworks displays and all the sculptures (except for the one at Northeastern that I couldn’t find).
I was a little disappointed by the ice sculptures this year. Apparently the organizers wanted some insurance against the warm weather that ruined previous ice displays, so they arranged for some sculptures to be made of plastic boat wrapping instead. And some of the ice sculptures were mounted on scaffolding instead of ice pedestals.
But they were still impressive and pretty. I’ve put a selection of my pics online. Hope you enjoy…
(larger pics oline at
http://www.lee-toma.net/photos/061231_First_Night_Boston/ )Lee
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Family Photos – Grandma’s 80th birthday
Diana, Sam, Tara and I got together for a low-key 80th birthday party for Grandma. We had a nice dinner out at a Japanese restaurant in Quincy, and then spent a while back at home.
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Biking the Nashua River Rail Trail
It’s good to get out and burn off a few calories after Thanksgiving. Thanks to Steve & Liza for hosting our bike day.
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Turkey Turkey Turkey
I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and got to relax with friends or family.
Okay, I know it’s Thanksgiving, and by the time you read this you’ll probably be sick to death of turkey, but I like to beat a dead horse (who doesn’t?).
You know, growing up in and around Boston, the only wild animals that I was used to seeing were pigeons, squirrels and the occasional crow, seagull or songbird. Once I saw a pheasant, and I almost jumped out of the school bus. I wondered if I was imagining things?
Maybe I just led a sheltered youth? Or is the wildlife returning? These days I live less than a mile from Boston, and I see deer, foxes, chipmunks, hawks, raccoons, skunks, and turkeys. Lots of turkeys. I saw twelve at one time, just down the road.
Here are a couple views of the hideously ugly birds at the nearby Blue Hills Trailside Museum.
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House Decorated for Halloween
Snapshot of Diana’s Halloween decorations.
It was so popular that we used up ten bags of candy by 7 PM…
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Cranberry Country
I am a bit of a railfan. I sometimes joke that when I was little, I wanted to grow up to be a railroad engineer. Yet, when I got my engineering degree, I was surprised and more than a little disappointed that I didn’t get to work on trains.
Anyway, I’ve wanted to visit the local Edaville Railroad for a long time. And as a bonus, I got a taste of cranberry country while I was there.
Well, it turns out that Edaville is geared to kids. What’s that you say? Yeah, I know, I’m still a kid. I mean it is geared toward little kids… Holiday decorations and stuff for the kids riding around on the train with their parents. So, I felt more than a little out of place there. But it was still interesting to learn more about cranberries.
One of only a handful of native fruits, the Pilgrims called it the “craneberry” because the blossoms reminded them of the head and bill of the Sandhill crane.
In my travels, I’ve seen crops like corn, soybeans, sunflowers, corn, rice, strawberries, beans, grapes, corn, olives, peaches, apples, corn, wheat, cabbage, corn, tobacco, corn and… more corn. Yet cranberries are special – kinda rare and different.
New England is not well suited to growing most conventional crops, but the cranberry is unusual in that it thrives in the wet sand and peat found in southeastern Massachusetts. The cranberries grow on the vine, and are harvested by flooding the fields (bogs) and threshing the berries loose with a mechanized harvester. They are then packaged up and shipped to consumers throughout North America, who then make cranberry sauce once a year. And they only eat it ’cause it’s got so much sugar in it…
Personally, I prefer to make cranberry sauce with as much apple as cranberries. Kinda dilutes the tartness of the berries enough to be more palatable, and reduces the need for sugar. I also like to add strawberries, even if that is less than traditional.
Anyway, back to Edaville… On my train ride with the kiddies, I spotted a fox, a crane, and then a hawk. And following the birds skyward, I also saw a helicopter. Screw the kiddie rides! I wanted to go on this one!
So, I bought my ticket and went on my first helicopter ride, getting a front-seat view of cranberry country from the air. It was a short but sweet (and loud) ride, and I liked it a lot. I can see why Charles (currently working on copters in Afghanistan) would want to fly…
Enough writing. My attention span has expired. Here are my pics. Hope you enjoy.
~ Lee
Edaville Railroad – colorful cabooses
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Happy Halloween!
061031 0600 Happy Halloween!
Selected photos from the display at Lookout Farm in Natick. They brought in artists from around the nation to create their breathtaking display of jack-o-lanterns.
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Painting the living room
I don’t like doing work around the house, so I tend to procrastinate and let it slide.
Case in point is painting the living room. The house is jam packed full of stuff, so I have to move it all, and then move the furniture and curtain hardware, and then clean, patch, sand, primer coat and then finally paint. And it’s the living room, so Grandma is a more-or-less permanent fixture there – so I kinda hafta do my work on weeknights after she’s gone to bed. It’s a pain in the neck, and it takes forever like this, ’cause I’m spending as much time on set-up and clean-up as I am actually getting stuff done. I guess it’s been about three weeks so far, and I still have to hang new curtain rods and paint the trim.
It was about eighteen years ago that Dad was redoing the room for our neighbors, the Franklins. Dad, bless his soul, didn’t know a lot about house renovations, plus he had me as his assistant, so he was doubly cursed. We put up new sheetrock on the walls and ceiling, and he relocated some of the electrical outlets from the wall to the baseboards. The work was kinda rough. There were a lot of rough edges, joints between panels were rough, extra globs of spackle around here and there… And after fifteen years of exposure to kids, kids and more kids – us and the day care kids – the walls were pretty badly dinged up. I think that Mom bought the house to be close to Dad’s work after he died – and because it was so close to where we lived before, so moving wouldn’t be such a big deal. But man, this place needs lots of work…
Hopefully when this room is all done and cleaned up, things will look decent. And then I can go back to a few more months of procrastination…
