cellio | social butterfly

While I was in Boston I got to see a few people. :-)

Friday I had lunch with my former associate rabbi, who moved to Newton in June for a new position. He said he and his family are settling in well. He hopes they didn't buy a home in the greater Boston area at just the wrong time. :-)

Saturday night after Shabbat I met 530nm330hz (who was kind enough to drive me around), mabfan, gnomi, and sethg_prime for ice cream and conversation in Brookline. (Yes, it was about 40 degrees out and JP Lick's was packed. Bostonians are perhaps a little weird, but in that regard I'm weird along with them. I don't eat a lot of ice cream, but weather isn't a big factor when I do.) I enjoyed seeing mabfan and gnomi again (it's been several years) and meeting the others. I think all of them offered to help with the job connections if Dani and I ever want to move up there. :-)

There was also a bookstore visit; this should surprise no one. What surprised me is that they have a large independent bookstore that didn't get driven out of business when Barnes and Noble moved in a block away. I had to be very restrained in my book shopping due to luggage capacity.

Aphorism sighting (on a card of sorts): "Children are a blessing. You never know when you might need blood or a kidney."

Sunday I met magid, which was delightful. She took me to Israel Books (which has more than books, though it does have many many books too). I again lamented my lack of luggage space. I'll know better next time. I picked up a Craig Taubman CD and, in an admission of failure, a new talit bag. The current one, which originally belonged to Dani's grandfather, has been having structural problems for a while. I've tried to repair it (and will probably try again), because it's family history, but at least now I'll stop carrying it around and subjecting it to more stresses.

After that we went to Rubin's for lunch. I've heard a lot of good things about this place; it was also nice that this was one of four or five kosher restaurants we could have gone to in the area and, according to magid, most of them are good. Rubin's was surprisingly crowded; we thought we were well past the lunch rush.

From there we went to the home of browngirl, tigerbright, and teddywolf, where a small MASSFILC gathering was in progress. It was, again, nice to meet and be able to spend time with people I know only via the internet. I'd actually met tigerbright at a filk con; I can't remember if I'd met teddywolf. I know I had not previously met browngirl, who is every bit as warm and friendly in person as she is online.

There were three or four other filkers there; we were introduced but I've now forgotten names. They were having a low-key filk circle, which naturally they invited me into. Judging by the huge volumes of food I saw being prepared, I hope they got more people as it got closer to dinner time. :-)

browngirl and tigerbright revised my (spotty) understanding of MBTA navigation, and off I went to my hosts for the evening, chaiya and hakamadare. I was taken by surprise when, after one stop, the red-line train stopped and we were all evicted; at first I thought there was an emergency of some sort, but when I saw several signs about "red line shuttle buses" (onto which we were shepherded, to be taken to another stop where we could return to the subway), I concluded that this was premeditated. Would it have been so hard to post a notice about this at the entry to the T station? I didn't care all that much except for the sardine rendition in the shuttle bus, but it certainly added significant time to the trip, which could have been a problem for some of my fellow sardines.

I arrived at the house to find a flurry of activity. When chaiya said she was cooking dinner, she under-stated the case. She and hakamadare cooked a feast for about 15 people, and it was all very yummy! I had some new culinary experiences, too. We had (I'm sure I'm going to forget some things) devilled eggs, fruit, spicy pickles, kale cooked with garlic (I've never eaten kale as a main ingredient before), carrots with ginger that were really gingery, carrots with cranberries and probably other stuff, green salad, squash soup, and nifty squash "boats" (what kind of squash was that? oblong, not round) baked with goat cheese and tomato sauce. They still had half a large box of squash sitting in the kitchen untouched, so they must have hit the squash jackpot. :-)

Great food is nice enough, but the big goal (and instigation) was the people: chaiya and hakamadare, of course, and: jducoeur, msmemory, siderea, tn3270, metahacker, galaneia, ian_gunn, baron_steffan, Elspeth, and a housemate named Mike (I think). The conversation was, as you might imagine, fabulous, ranging from SCA philosophy to religion to grad school to the upcoming election to corporate overlords and programming to... gee, I don't even remember what all else. (Ooh, wait, remembered one: someone talked about a response to NaNoWriNo, "national write-your-thesis month", to much laughter.) Around 10 or 10:30 people reluctantly admitted to it being a weeknight and started leaving. This was a great ending to my trip to Boston, and I can't thank hakamadare and chaiya enough for making it happen and everyone else for coming and making a fun evening.

magid the tzaddik drove out to pick me up way too early in the morning to take me to the airport, so we could chat more and I wouldn't have to navigate transit while bleary-eyed or pay a cab.

Check-in at Logan was annoying. First, the USAir web site had refused to cough up a boarding pass, forcing me to interact with a human at the airport. That's not Logan's fault; what probably is their fault is that I was shunted from line to line because no one could give me a straight answer about where to go. In the end it only took about half an hour to get my boarding pass and get through security (where TSA confiscated something I had wanted to hang onto, grumble -- should have seen it coming). Half an hour isn't unreasonable; I expected worse. But it was an annoying half-hour in a way that the hour I expected of waiting in orderly, well-understood lines would not have been. Oh well.

I'll write more about the earlier parts of the trip later, not necessarily in either chronological or reverse-chronological order. :-)

Monica

social butterfly

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