Thoughts on Boston

I’m still sorting through my thoughts about this week’s events. When the bombs exploded near the finish line on Monday, I was napping. Ill with food poisoning or the stomach flu (I never figured out which), I was struck dumb by a text from Jay saying someone had bombed the Boston Marathon. His text was followed shortly after by a message from my best friend in Minnesota who said she was thinking about me.

Knowing my parents were probably at that moment watching Fox News, I called home and spoke to my mother. She immediately picked up on the strangeness of my voice, and was relieved to hear it was because I was home sick and miserable from the nausea and fever. While I was on the phone with her my phone buzzed with a text from my sister. Thinking phone service would be down, my mother had asked my sister to try and reach me instead of calling herself.

After assuring her I would be go see a doctor if my condition didn’t improve, I took to Facebook to see the reactions and confirm my friends were all okay. My office is in Cambridge, so Patriot’s Day is not a paid holiday, but many of my coworkers planned to take the day off because of school vacation week. Thankfully, most checked in right away and as far as I can tell, I don’t know any of the victims personally (though I would later learn a friend of mine was an acquaintance of Krystle Campbell).

That night and the following day were a blur. I started to feel better physically, but took an extra day at home to process the recent events and clean up the house. It felt good to be able to do something. The clutter that fills our apartment is a constant drag on my sanity–I struggle with a reoccurring urge to box up all the read books, unwatched DVDs and dusty CDs and drop them off at Goodwill just to make a little space in our home–so I felt the least I could do was wash all the sweat-soaked bedding, take out all the trash and recycling, and give the place a good scrubbing. It may have made the fur tumbleweeds go away, but I still hadn’t really faced the world outside our yard.

Wednesday and Thursday I worked. Stepping out of the Harvard Square station that first morning was strange. I passed by a few Post-It notes that said “You are loved” along my route, but other than a couple National Guardsmen stationed underground there was nothing to remind us of what had happened only two days ago. Once I sat down at my desk it was time to settle back into routine (minus the coffee since my stomach was still not functioning at 100%). Falling two days behind with deadlines looming was motivation enough to get me through the rest of my work week. I didn’t have time to think, or talk about it with any of my coworkers. We were all on our own deadlines, and we all had plenty to keep us occupied during the day.

The routine was shattered all over again on Friday when I woke to Jay’s alarm and  breaking news about a shootout on Thursday night that left one suspect dead and the ensuing manhunt for the second. Right before he hit snooze I caught the phrase “MBTA service shut down” and told him turn the radio back on so we could hear what was going on. It wasn’t a dream. They were shutting down the T until they could catch him. Despite the fact that I didn’t have to be to work for a couple more hours, we got up and turned on the TV (we have only network cable and spend most of our time watching Netflix so the TV is never actually on the stations outside airings of Community and SNL) to watch the news. It wasn’t long before my office, which was in the lockdown area, emailed to say we were closed for the day. Assuming they would catch the guy by 10am I had a cup of coffee and began to watch the story unfold. By the time all of Boston was included in the lockdown, we knew neither of us was going to work that day.

As I said, we don’t watch network TV, and we certainly don’t get our news from it. But that day our living room was filled with the voices of reporters. We watched the same clips over and over, listened to interviews with people who knew the suspects, and waited for it all to be over. By noon I was stir crazy. I now understood how people could get PTSD from watching the news. My head was full of theories, speculations, and sadness. There was a new victim, an MIT police officer from Somerville, who was ambushed by the two suspects. Former classmates talked about how bright and full of promise the younger suspect was, then reporters informed us he ran his own brother down trying to get away. It was all just too much to understand. I refreshed the live feed on Boston.com, checked and rechecked Facebook for updates, and read dozens of articles, but nothing gave me any solace. I mourned the victims, worried about the citizens of Watertown, and grieved for the families of the suspects.

I could tell from the type of bomb used that the killers were looking to maim people (were they aiming specifically for spectators or were those the easiest targets given the barriers to separate the runners, obviously I have no idea). If the idea was to kill a lot of people, I think they would have used a different device, one that focused more on a big explosion than the shrapnel that caused so much damage. Tragedies happen every day, violence is so common that it is almost commonplace, but this calculated attack on innocent bystanders is such an affront to our common decency that we become transformed by it. I saw friends crumble under the weight of this cruelty, others focused their frustration into anger and a need for vengeance. And a few like me buried themselves in information, seeking an answer to the riddle of why two young men would commit such an atrocious act.

Since Jay and I live in Somerville, we were not under the “stay indoors” order so we grabbed lunch at one of the restaurants open in our neighborhood. Then we went for a walk. When we got home we were immediately engulfed in the news again, but it wasn’t long before I suggested we go back outside to escape the talking heads. That second walk in the cold, windy rain steeled me for a few more hours. When they finally opened the T at 6pm, I suggested we walk to Cambridge. We ended up having a burger at Bukowski’s Tavern in Inman Square, and it was during our second beer that the place erupted in applause as they announced the capture of the second suspect.

We walked back to Harvard Square, which was almost a ghost town given that it was 9pm on a Friday and the suspect was no longer on the loose. I have never been so happy to see the Red Line train round the corner to enter the station. At home we listed to Governor Patrick thank the citizens of Boston and law enforcement officers before going to bed exhausted and drained by the whole ordeal.

Saturday greeted us with gray skies and the knowledge that the scary part was over. Now it was time for speculation and finger-pointing. People argued over the waiving of his Miranda rights, the ability of officials to shut down an entire city and its transit system to catch a criminal, and whether the FBI failed in preventing the attack in the first place. We have plenty of time to pick apart every detail of the investigation, but Saturday felt like a good day for healing so we grabbed our cameras and headed into the city.

We visited some of my favorite places, the Os Gemeos mural on the Greenway, the Common (where, forgetting it was 4/20, I was surprised to find a crowd of people smoking weed on a hill), and the Public Garden before making our way to the memorial on Boylston Street. Not surprising, a crowd was gathered between the barriers. Therapy dogs roamed among us, and we were encouraged by others to accept their “free hugs.”

It will be a long time before many of our questions are answered, and I don’t feel a need to share my opinion on the case until more facts are in. But what I saw yesterday was a community, working together to bandage each other’s wounds, wounds that will never fully heal, but will someday turn into scars to serve as a reminder of our ability to recover and face a new day.

A Well-Deserved Vacation: Treasure Hunting in MN

As I mentioned in my previous post, the reward for spending the past month working on my firm’s website was that my boyfriend and I could finally take a trip back to Minnesota to see family and friends. It had been two years since our last visit and we were both a bit antsy to spend some time in the Midwest. What resulted was a crazy week that added 1,300 miles to his father’s car and an adventure that took us to Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Cloud, Albert Lea and Winona, Minnesota; La Crosse, Wisconsin; and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The timing of the trip was planned so we could get through summer and I wouldn’t have to miss work while the office was in the midst of preparing for the Jubilee celebration, but it was also scheduled so I could take three of my friends to see “Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship” and the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices (also known as the Museum of Quackery) conveniently located right next to the exhibit at the Minnesota Museum of Science.

I am unashamed of my nerdiness, which has become more pronounced since my move to Boston, but sometimes it is shocking how far I will go to see the weird things that interest me — like arranging flights to coincide with the final weekend of a traveling exhibit. The subject of “Real Pirates” is the Whydah, a former slave ship that was captured by “Black Sam” Bellamy and became a pirate ship. It sank off near Cape Cod in 1717, and the shipwreck was discovered in 1984 by explorer Barry Clifford. I’d been wanting to see this exhibit since I first heard about the Whydah a few years ago, so when I learned it was leaving Minnesota on Labor Day, I contacted the group of friends I planned to see and warned them I would be subjecting them to pirates (thankfully, none complained).

The second reason for our trip to the museum was to see Bob McCoy’s collection of quack medical devices. I have a lot of strange obsessions that came out of my decade-long goth phase: abandoned buildings, carnivals and freak shows, tiny objects, and anything related to mental illness or death, but I also love to read about the strange things people used to spend money on, such as the bizarre miracle cures on display at the museum.

I don’t like to think of myself as susceptible to trickery, but I’ve seen many smart people seduced by “medicine” designed to cure all their aches and pains. It is a practice that has gone one for centuries, with hucksters selling ineffective, and sometimes deadly, medicines to unsuspecting citizens. The most shocking to see was the Revigator, which provided people with radium-laced drinking water, but I was surprised by the idea of people buying the prostate warmer or wearing a helmet used for phrenology readings.

The next day, my friends and I headed to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival to wander around and drink some mead. I love the Ren Fest in Minnesota so much. King Richard’s Faire in Massachusetts is fun, but it is much smaller in scale and lacks the enthusiasm found in the Midwest. This year, the festival featured Mermaid Cove as well as its usual cast of characters: Twig the Fairy, the Wizard, and the Faun. We ate soup out of bread bowls, bought new mugs to hold our mead, and met up with a friend and his two young boys. By the time we were ready to leave, some of us had baked in the sun while others were worn out by the hours of walking, but we had frozen oranges and an air conditioned car to look forward to during the drive back.

On Monday, my boyfriend grabbed me for lunch with his parents and sister before we headed off to Sioux Falls to see my family. After a barbecue at my sister’s house surrounded by nieces and nephews and breakfast the next morning with my parents we returned to Minneapolis to stay with his brother and try the famous Juicy Lucy.

Continuing the pirate theme, we also had drinks at the News Room, which featured this amazing bar.

The next morning we drove to St. Cloud to have lunch with his other brother before driving south to Winona, where I went to college and where he and I first met. We hung out with a few friends from college and the next day met up with a friend in La Crosse for lunch and a walk around the Riverside International Friendship Garden. Coincidentally, my friend would that night be playing a pirate in the Community Theatre’s performance of “The Pirates of Penzance.” Sadly, we couldn’t stay for the show.

The venue for the show shares a space with The Cavalier, my favorite martini bar, which features the most beautiful curvy bar and serves the Nutty Jitters, an espresso martini with hazelnut liqueur.

From there it was back to the Cities for the last two nights of our trip. The first night we spent playing with an adorable black bunny and watching my friend work on his glass art, and the next morning my boyfriend and I split up again so I could spend some time walking around an old swing bridge with my friends and he could hang out with his brother for the afternoon.

That night we all regathered to celebrate our last night with tiki drinks at Psycho Suzi’s Motor Lounge, where I had the only drink appropriate for the trip, the One-Eyed Willy, which was served in a pirate mug.

My boyfriend and I each had two drinks. I had the Virgin Sacrifice (green mug) and the One-Eyed Willy. He drank a Crummy Scoundrel (a cocktail with no coconut served in a coconut cup) and the Miserable Bastard (the sad looking fellow in front). We took the One-Eyed Willy and the Miserable Bastard cups home as souvenirs.

The next morning, my boyfriend and I woke up in his brother’s quiet apartment (he was already at work and his girlfriend and roommates were still asleep). We needed coffee desperately so I pulled out my smart phone (purchased right before this trip to make the traveling go smoother) and located the nearest coffee shop, a mile away but close to the Mississippi River.

That walk for coffee and back to his brother’s place was the best way for us to end our trip. We were walking through a city we had known most of our lives, but had never really explored. It was the magical big city my parents and I visited from time to time when I was little, and it was the place my boyfriend briefly called home. Of course, during college we’d both visited the Cities on occasion, but it was usually for a specific purpose and never with the intent of walking around and getting to know any of the neighborhoods.

It was the same with Winona, a place I lived for five years and he for seven. As students we didn’t treat it as a destination, just a stopping point. As a result I have few photos but hundreds of memories of the place. Now, eight years since we packed all of our belongings (including two very unhappy cats) and headed for the East Coast, we were forced to realize the town has moved on without us.

Some of our favorite stores, restaurants, and landmarks are gone (including the Julius C. Wilkie featured on this sign), and new buildings are popping up all over town. Although we made a point to drive around the campus and note the new buildings erected since we were there in 2010, we had fewer places we wanted to stop, aside from the Acoustic Cafe, which served my favorite sandwich and satisfied my craving for a coffee shop with live music (for some reason whenever I pictured living on my own, it always included spending time at a coffee place that featured musicians like the place I saw on the TV show Friends).

You can also tell we are in the Midwest because people are drinking Mountain Dew.

Only a handful of friends remain in Winona, most have moved to nearby towns (like La Crosse or Rochester) while others have gone to Minneapolis / St. Paul or Chicago, and a few have spread out further, sprinkled along the West Coast (mainly San Francisco and Portland) or not far from us on the East Coast (in New York or Washington). Still, it was refreshing to spend time with people I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. I loved seeing my friends all grown up, hearing them talk about their lives, meeting their spouses and children, spending time in their homes.

Years ago my boyfriend lived above Pieces of the Past, but it was before someone painted that mural over the window.

Despite all the friends and family we fit into that eight-day vacation, there were many we were unable to see. Thanks to Facebook and the occasional email or text message, I usually know about the big events in my friends’ lives and I always have a way to reach out. It makes me sad to think about how much we miss because we moved away, but knowing that we can always have a few days every couple years to reconnect in person makes the distance we are from each other almost tolerable once again.

To see more photos from our trip, check out my Flickr page, where I have pictures from the Science Museum, Renaissance Festival, and the rest of our Midwest adventure.

What I did this summer

As you may have noticed, I’ve been absent from this site for a while. It was not due to a lack of interesting moments to share, but because I’d been working steadily on some big projects for work that took up a great deal of my focus for the past three months. I still traveled, went to festivals, took thousands of photos, and had a blast this summer, but all my downtime was focused on preparing for the launch of our office’s new website and preparing for the firm’s most important anniversary party (and the first big one I’ve been part of)…the Jubilee.

While I worked with a team of people who contributed greatly to the success of the party and web launch (specifically, a team of professionals who actually programmed the site and an administrative assistant who planned the entire party, allowing me to focus solely on managing the invitation list and distribution of the actual invites), the website became my obsession during the month of August. I lived and breathed that site, writing and editing project and bio text, collecting and tagging news articles, gathering and cropping photos from our collection of project images to populate the site, and arranging it all to create something that looked mostly complete to an outsider visiting our site (only I and the older staff knew how much was left out because I ran out of time).

It was a labor of love and I really enjoyed the experience of redoing the content of the website, but it drained me both mentally and physically. Even though it was a task that required hundreds of hours to make it what it needed to be, it was also combined with my regular job of proposal submissions and marketing so my job became extremely stressful. The website was all I talked about, my wrists ached from hours spent on the computer during the evenings and on weekends, and some nights I laid awake thinking about the unbelievable amount of work that was still ahead. However, time keeps moving forward and the date of the party and the soft launch finally arrived, forcing me to leave the site incomplete, an inevitability that I’d accepted from the beginning but which still drove me crazy.

A couple days before the party I had a stylist re-dye, trim and style my hair and wax my brows (my first time experiencing that sensation) to make sure I looked presentable for the founders and clients we’d invited. When Thursday afternoon finally arrived, I logged off the admin side of the website, put on my favorite dress and a short pair of heals (also banished from my wardrobe long ago because of my weak ankles) and tried to put on a bit of makeup, which failed miserably as I am wildly inexperienced in the selection and application of foundation so I had to wash it off in the office bathroom.

The party was terrific. After a bit of rushing around at the beginning to make sure everyone received a nametag, we were all able to enjoy ourselves. For me it was like coming out of seclusion; it took a while for me to relax and begin to make small talk with people (in my marketing role, I am on duty whenever clients are around) — I also could not really talk about the new site because its full and final launch hasn’t been announced, but a few already visited it and commented on how much they liked it.

When the party started to wind down and my boyfriend and I got into my friend’s car to go home, I finally felt some of the tension in my shoulders begin to release. We were going to spend the next hour packing and getting the apartment ready so we could spend the following week in Minnesota visiting family and friends (my present to myself for getting through all the work I had to do this summer).

My boyfriend and I just got back last night, so I’m going to go through a few photos and post soon about that trip and some of the other notable events from the last few months.

A Bit of Asylum

I live in an area that is overflowing with history. Nearly everywhere I turn, there is a plaque or marker alerting me to a story behind a certain building or neighborhood. I always knew I would end up on the East Coast, where the past mingles with the present in the most astonishing ways. Take for example the park in Davis Square, not far from where I live. It features an installation Clifford Selbert consisting of seven poles representing the seven hills of Somerville: Spring, Winter, Central, Clarendon, Cobble Hill, Mount Benedict (aka Ploughed/Plowed Hill) and Mount Pisgah (Prospect Hill). One of my favorites features a Bulfinch-designed building (long ago demolished) I would discover was once the original home to McLean Hospital before it moved to Belmont.

When I moved to Boston, I knew I would not be living far from McLean Hospital, where favorite writers of my youth: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Susannah Kayson (to be honest, I actually disliked her book but loved the movie version of “Girl, Interrupted”) spent some time recovering from depression. There is something strange about me, my love of books and authors, obsession with the effects and treatment of mental illness, and regular bouts of depression, that drew me to a city where I could be sent to McLean if I ever had a breakdown. Now I realize the likelihood of ever checking into McLean (not something to particularly strive for) is unlikely, given the prohibitive cost of an overnight stay and changes in treatment styles, but I also knew the romantic idea the asylum I’d built in my mind as a teen was a far cry from the reality of true, lock-yourself-in-a-ward mental illness (my college years also exposed me to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Prozac Nation”).

Still, when I first moved here, I had visions of the day I would at least be able to step on its grounds and see the buildings that housed these famous writers who touched me during my darkest moments in adolescence. I assumed there would be giant brass plates announcing the famous residents of the facility, similar to those found on the exterior of the Chelsea Hotel. They would feature lines from “The Bell Jar” or quotes from one of Robert Lowell’s poems. Who knows, maybe there is some acknowledgement inside the Administration Building, but I highly doubt it given the hospital’s record of discretion about its inhabitants. It also dawned on me when I moved here that this was a working hospital and it would be inappropriate to visit the asylum as a tourist. As a result, it took me seven years to finally make the journey.

It happened in November of 2011. I had been wanting to go so we just hopped on a bus to Belmont and wandered up the hill. There we found a sprawling campus with brick buildings organized according to the “cottage plan,” with tree-lined paths and landscaping designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. I could immediately see how this place would be considered restful and why it became an exclusive retreat for the upper class after Massachusetts built asylums in Worcester and Danvers to handle the more dangerous patients and wards of the state.

We immediately veered right to see the chapel named after Samuel Eliot, a trustee of Massachusetts General Hospital for 32 years who dedicated his spare time to promoting the  “literary and artistic development” of the community. Funded by an anonymous lady who wanted to pay tribute to a generous man who dedicated his life to enriching the lives of others (he was also a Trustee of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, Massachusetts School for Feeble-Minded Youth, Boston Asylum and Farm School for Boys on Thompson Island, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Boston Athenaeum), the church is now mostly abandoned and forgotten.

As we ventured further into the grounds, we also passed the Appleton House (named for William Appleton, a trader and major donor in the 19th century who created “a special fund in the 1830s to help defray treatment costs of ‘desireable’ patients for whom the initial $2.50-a-week cost was too steep“), which looked to be still in use.

However, once we entered the more overgrown portion of McLean we saw the old residence halls, now left empty and unloved. Whatever memories haunt this hospital are surely found in these old wards. I felt such sadness to see them wasting away, with broken windows, holes in their rooves, and overgrown porches. These places surely hold a lot of meaning to the former patients still living or their families who remember visiting loved ones in those old halls. Higginson House shown below was named after the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Henry Lee Higginson, who famously said in a Harvard fundraising letter, “Educate, and save ourselves and our families and our money from mobs!“

In this building with crooked columns and boarded-up windows the “crazy ladies of Codman” used to stage elaborate tea parties for the younger residents and Joan Baez played a concert or two for the patients in the 60s.

We continued around the perimeter until we reached the Bowditch House, a former men’s ward that once housed poet Robert Lowell and mathematician John Forbes Nash and is now a facility for young women recovering from eating disorders. As we’d reached the more active part of the hospital, the sheer pleasure of seeing this place was replaced with general guilt as I became more cautious about where and what I photographed. I didn’t want so snap a photo of a patient or visiting family member, just the beautiful buildings I’d heard so much about.

Still, it wasn’t surprising that about this time a security guard came out to tell us we weren’t allowed to take pictures here. We apologized and put away our cameras before slinking back to the path that would take us back to the station. It was disheartening to leave when I had so many questions I wanted to ask and more grounds to explore (when we first entered I saw South Belknap where Sylvia Plath and Susannah Kaysen stayed but neglected to photograph it since I planned to catch it on my way back), but he was certainly right to ask us to stop photographing the buildings.

I share these images today because I’m reading “Gracefully Insane” by Alex Beam and it reminded me what an eye-opening experience it was for me to see McLean Hospital in person, especially now that I have more knowledge about its history than I did when we were there. Reading this book and looking at how popular these photos are on my Flickr page made me realize there are probably others who’ve also wanted to visit or former residents and staff who just can’t come back. I hope these photos give a sense of closure to those who need to see McLean Hospital, a very important facility that has touched countless lives, so we can allow the current residents to have the privacy and special care they deserve.

I’m Back…Sorta

You may have noticed, I’ve been gone from this site for quite a while.

First, the nerdy truth. I intentionally stopped the daily posts in May so I could focus my attention on putting together a travel itinerary (planning, writing, and graphic layout) that would guide my boyfriend and I during our trip to Italy, which is where we went the following week. Just as we were beginning to recover from that amazing vacation (and start sorting through almost 2,000 photos, a project that is still incomplete), we had to clean the apartment (and I mean take unwanted stuff to Goodwill and put up a new bookshelf) because my mother–who had NEVER before seen the ocean or my home on the East Coast–was coming to town.

Amidst all that, my boyfriend and I celebrated our 10-year anniversary, I turned 31 (with a surprise trip from my boyfriend to a Bed & Breakfast in Portland, ME), one of our best friends in Boston moved away, the corpse flower at Franklin Park Zoo finally bloomed, Pride Fest took over the city and showered us with beads, we visited World’s End during one last hurrah on the commuter rail, and just this last week the Tall Ships came to town for the 4th of July festivities. Needless to say, it’s been a whirlwind month and a half, which made me realize how hard it would be to keep up the pace I was trying to maintain on this blog. Because, despite my best efforts, the posts were becoming extremely forced, and my inspiration only ever seemed to come on the weekend when I had time to roam.

Keep in mind, I still have a full-time job that I love, and it keeps me working long hours sometimes. One of the joys of doing what I do is that I spend the majority of my time reading or writing. It actually gives me joy to spend a couple hours hacking away at a piece of writing, trying to uncover the a bit of treasure underneath. The real gems are few and far between in this kind of writing, but even the driest text on the dullest subject has the ability to surprise me. And I’m fascinated by what I do.

My problem is that, right now, finding the time to give my work a proper editing job is a luxury I can only vaguely remember. While I can always get the 2nd proofread in, the hack and slash that gave me pure pleasure is only a distant memory. These were moments when I would strike out entire sections and rewrite them in a way that gave the text variety and readability. I’ve been unusually stressed over the last couple months, and taking two weeks away from the office hit me in a way I never expected. The little things I used to have time for built up while I struggled to get ahead of my deadlines and the emails that flooded my inbox. Unable to bring my head above water to do even the most simple tasks over the last few weeks has left me feeling overwhelmed and useless at the end of the day.

At the same time, our house still needs to be maintained, the cats fed, chores done, bills paid. I have my own self-directed responsibilities, like organizing and tagging my photos and plowing through the pile of unread books that taunts me every time I look at it (my biggest accomplishment on that front is that I finally finished Paradiso, officially completing The Divine Comedy). And then there are the distractions: the occasional TV show, Facebook, and mindless articles, websites, and computer games that are supposed to occupy me for few minutes but instead steal hours of my free time.

It’s so easy to come up with excuses as to why I haven’t been writing, but in all honesty I missed it every day. I yearned to record my thoughts, reflect on the memories, and share my experiences with anyone who cared to read about them. It took a while, but I finally realized the reason I was so wound up, the reason even the job I loved was making me dread getting up in the morning, is that I was letting parts of my life, both good and bad, prevent me from doing something that truly gives me peace.

There was no stress in Italy, because I was distracted by my camera and the plethora of new things to see and do. I felt no guilt, because I didn’t have access to my computer, and my boyfriend and I were there to celebrate our first decade together while touring some of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen. However, after I came home, the weight of all those unwritten days filled me with remorse. I started assigning myself tasks that needed to be completed before I could log back on–namely, captioning and editing all the photos from the last seven days abroad. This was an insurmountable task given the upcoming arrival of family (and the emotion baggage that brings up), which, combined with the overload at work, left me in a catatonic state when my fingers hit the keyboard.

Yet here I am. Once I realized that my stress started because I denied myself time to write for my own sanity, the words started coming out and the pressure began to go away. I have a lot of stories to tell from the last few weeks. I won’t promise to record them every day, because I just can’t do that, but I will put them out soon. And you can be sure, I’ll be creating new ones along the way.

Photo-A-Day Project: Day 133 / Tea Party and Ginger Ale

We went to South Station today to check out the activities for National Train Day, only to discover that it was terribly underwhelming and limited to a handful of tables with pamphlets and photos, a model train set, and tours of the station and an Acela train. We ended up skipping all of it and went back outside to wander around. First we walked along the HarborWalk near the Fort Point Channel to see the progress of the Tea Party Museum, which will open this summer. We then noticed that the Northern Avenue Bridge was open, the first time I’d ever seen the bridge rotate, so we hustled over to watch it turn.

As we continued along the Greenway, we stumbled upon the Ginger Ale, an annual event where students from the Great Meadows Morris and Sword perform traditional English morris and rapper sword dances.

Because we had several errands to run, we continued walking to Government Center, past some of the most beautiful buildings in the city, so we could catch the train to Cambridge.

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Photo-A-Day Project: Day 132 / Ivy League

I love how overtaken this wall is by green.