Moving about.

I've had my own domain for quite a while, but I really don't use it for anything except blogging, so I'm getting rid of it. As such, I'm moving my blog to a free hosting service, blogspot. If you're reading this, you've already found the new address. Be sure to update bookmarks and such.

Frogs, On Ice

The last "real" day of our vacation was our attempt at relaxing and taking it all in. Officially, we were off for one more day, but the next day would be spent traveling so it doesn't hardly count as real vacation. It's not even a work day so we couldn't take solace in the fact that we were skipping out of being in the office. So, anyway, this was our final day in Boston.

I love staying at B&B's. If you can find a good B&B, I think they're far better than a hotel. Personally, I like the B&B's where you can sit down with the other guests at a big table and chat over breakfast (warm, if possible). We didn't get warm breakfasts at this place, but we always had plenty of fresh food for breakfast and the conversation with the other guests was great. I've already mentioned some of the other guests we bumped into - Bruno the art dealer and Russel and John, the gay couple. This morning we ran into an entirely new cast. One couple had just gotten engaged the night before, which was exciting, but they kept to themselves and vanished shortly after we arrived. The other couple, however, we chatted with for some time - Mia and Gene. Mia was an artist from New York while Gene was a programmer from LA. The two met at a kayaking expedition in Mexico and had been together ever since - they've now been married for two years.





We struck up a conversation quickly and I found out just what Gene did when he said that he was excited to see the "History of Video Games" exhibit that was in town. Turns out, he runs a programming company that makes video games for mobile phones. So, naturally, the two of us talked shop for a little while about what we each do. Obviously, we're both programmers, but we're on entirely different ends of the spectrum. They were a load of fun to talk to. I doubt I'll ever see them again, but I did get Gene's e-mail address, so who knows?

Nonetheless, it's like I said - you never know who you might bump into at a B&B.

After breakfast, we took a walk to Boston Commons to see if we could take a trolley ride about the city. We did eventually find the office we were looking for - apparently, there are multiple trolley rides available in the town. However, when it came time to wait for the trolley to arrive, we were left waiting in the cold with no idea how long it'd be for one to arrive. We're very impatient people so, after just a few minutes, we wandered off through Boston Commons to see what came of the Frog Pond, where we had seen the zamboni a couple days earlier. We found this:





It was the first weekend the rink was open for skating and there were plenty of folks there to take it in, including these two yahoos.






Naturally, we got ourselves some horrible rented skates and got onto the ice - quite literally, we followed the zamboni off the ice and were treated to fresh ice in Boston Commons. Gorgeous. While Liz remains partial to the lightning show at the Science Museum, skating in the Commons may have been my favorite part of the entire vacation. I love being on the ice.

We skated for the better part of an hour before deciding we'd best be off to see what else we could for the day. So we made our way back to the trolley stop just in time to see our trolley pull away. We waited. We went to Starbucks. We waited some more. Finally, the trolley came.

The tour was fine, but we didn't really see much more of the city than we already had and the seats were so close together that my knees ended up with bruises on 'em. We took the trolley all the way around town and hopped off near Quincy Market, where we intended to get some lunch.

The quaint market we had been to a few days prior had completely transformed. The place was swarming with people. Until this time, I don't think I ever really realized just how many people live in Boston. Wednesday, Thursday, and even Friday, had been pretty calm and, while there were always people around, you never had to focus keenly on navigating waves of people. This day was completely different. We found some horrible food to eat for lunch (Liz had a couple corn dogs and I had hot dogs smothered with melted cheese) and got the heck out of there as fast as we could. Our next stop? Fenway. I wanted a picture of the Green Monster before we had to leave town.

We hopped onto the most crowded subway we'd been on all weekend and suffered through it until we reached our stop. A couple blocks away and we were at the park.





Unfortunately, that's as close as we'd come to the Green Monster of Fenway. We got there only to find out that they'd completely sold out for tours on the day and, as this was our last day is Boston, we weren't going to have another chance to see the stadium. It was disappointing, but we consoled ourselves with a walk through a beautiful Boston neighborhood and back to our B&B (and right past a Rachel Ray book signing which we didn't stop for as the wife noted "I've had enough of people." Boston is a busy place on Saturdays, I can assure you.)

We proceeded to nap away the afternoon while watching bad movies on cable. It was a good way to rest the legs and relax after a few long days.

Later in the evening, we got ourselves up and dressed and went off to a tiny little place for dinner called Metropolis Cafe. The place was absolutely amazing. I doubt it seats more than 50 people and it's jammed, all the time. I'm glad we had the woman at the B&B make us a reservation. It was certainly more upscale than most places we'd eat, but the food was absolutely fabulous. Liz had some sort of risotto with steak while I had pork tenderloin with caramelized pears. Quite possibly the perfect end to a great vacation.

So now our vacation is over. I'm sitting back at home on the couch wrapping things up on my laptop. Work beckons in about 8 hours and I still need to get to bed. Some others were trying to keep me company, but didn't fare as well.





This was one of our favorite vacations - it was just about perfect. The B&B we stayed at was exquisite. The food was outstanding (even the cheese covered hot dogs weren't too bad). The city is gorgeous with all the red brick. Plus, I got to go ice skating. Perhaps someday, we'll go back.

By the way, I didn't post every picture we took while we were out there, but I've uploaded a good number of them to flickr. You can find 'em here.

Warning, Your Pants May Explode

A long day finds me wrapping things up while snuggled into bed around 12 AM. My wife is sound asleep beside me, despite the incessant clicking of me on my laptop.

Breakfast was nice, as usual - everyone gathered around a single table. We met Russel's partner, John, who also seems to be a good guy. The art dealers seem to be multiplying because every time I run into one of them, there are more alongside. They certainly seem to think we should run off and visit every art museum in the countryside, but they obviously don't understand us uncultured Midwestern folk.

Rather, what did we do, we hopped a train (actually two trains) to take a ride out to Salem to hear about the brutal deaths of the Salem Witch Hunts. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as it would turn out), we just barely missed our train to Salem and had to wait two hours for the next to leave. Rather than sit in a train station for two hours, we pulled out our trusty "I'm a tourist, now leave me alone" map and looked to see what was nearby. The closest attraction, aside from the eye and ear clinic, was the Science Museum. Being a couple total geeks, we happily made our way over there.

We tooled around for a bit and it wasn't long until we spotted this:





That's the world's largest Van de Graaff machine, constructed by Van de Graaf himself years ago. For anyone that doesn't know what one of these things does, it generates large amounts of negative charge on the huge domes on the top which, naturally, look for ways to get the heck away from one another. In this case, the charge is so large that the machine actually creates lightning. They were planning a show for 7 PM so we opted to come back.

We hopped the train to Salem and made our way through a quaint community with tiny streets to the Witch Museum. The tour was short and, while interesting, we didn't really learn a whole lot more than we already knew. Nonetheless, we had a good time. A quick stop at a local diner for lunch and we were back on a train to Boston.

This time, we kept cruising southward to take a stop at the Sam Adams Brewery.





The tour is free and it's essentially a huge Sam Adams ad. But, in their defense, they give you three glasses of beer to sample and it's some pretty good stuff. I felt bad that my pregnant wife couldn't join me in sampling some of their brews. I might have tooled around the gift shop for a bit, but we were running short of time if we were going to make it to the lightning show. So back to the subway we went.

Oh, did I mention lightning?






The presenter really put on a great show and Liz and I even hung around for a while afterwards to discuss some things (being the ginormous geeks that we are). He was awesome to talk with - one of those times that you get to talk to someone that's really passionate about what they're talking about and no matter how much or little you know about the subject matter, they just pull you into it. So we talked some about magnetic fields, tesla coils, and the like - all the stuff that I had to learn once in college and now never use, even if it is cool.

Of all the things I learned, quite possibly the coolest was the "Skin Effect".





If you look closely at that picture, you'll see that the presenter is standing in an elevated "birdcage" which is made of metal and being struck by lightning. If you look even closer, you'll see that he's actually reaching out and touching that bars of that cage. Yet he remains perfectly safe. Apparently, the skin effect is such that the electrical charge will only follow the "outside" of the cage and won't cross to the inside and harm him. It seems bizarre, but it also seems to work. Lightning struck the cage many times and never did I see him burst into flames.

After wandering around for a bit longer, we took off to find some food. Just a word of warning, Friday night is not a good time to cruise downtown Boston looking for someplace to eat. We didn't get a table until 10 PM and that was at the Cheesecake Factory. The food was overpriced and wasn't particularly good, but it was food (or so they told us).

Finally, we made our way back to our B&B and out of the cold. Now, I can put the finishing touches on this post and curl up with my lovely wife.

Night, all.

Birds on the Ground

Day number two found us wandering about the city far more than we did the day before. We started off with breakfast, which we shared with Russel, the gay HIV activist from North Carolina, and Bruno, the French art dealer from Connecticut. You know, I wish I could say I'm creative enough to have made that up on my own, but I'm just not. They certainly seem like nice guys, though.

After breakfast, we just took off walking towards Boston Commons. Boston is really a very interesting city - the sidewalks are always bustling with people and so much brick that the city takes on an entirely different color palette - there's far more red in the city than I've ever seen.

Boston Commons is gorgeous, and it's full of over-fed, chubby little squirrels and pudgy pigeons.





I wish I could say it was a first for me, but I did see a Zamboni outside today, for only the second time in my life. We strolled past the frog pond today, which the Boston rec department floods every year in November for ice skating. It's not nearly cold enough to freeze, but the pond is equipped with refrigeration units below the surface to keep things icy. Nonetheless, I think today was a bit of a losing battle as we wandered around in the rain all day. We'll see, but I'd like to get back and skate sometime this weekend before we head home.

I'd love to say I have lots of pictures from today but, as always seems to be the case, the battery in our camera died by about 10 this morning, so I only got a few pics, but I did get this one at Boston Commons that I'm rather fond of.





We eventually made our way to Quincy Market where we were hoping we'd find something akin to Pike's Place Market in Seattle. We were a bit disappointed as this market is essentially an overgrown outdoor shopping mall. On the bright side, we were able to duck out of the cold and the rain and have a couple cups of hot New England clam chowder for lunch.

From Quincy Market, we hopped onto a ferry and cruised over to the Charlestown naval yard to tour the USS Constitution, better known as "Old Ironsides" from the War of 1812. The tour was certainly interesting and we got to see just what the 400+ sailors had to deal with while at war while on one of the U.S.'s original war frigates. The conditions were certainly not pretty, but it gives one great respect for what those guys did. There was a far more modern battleship sitting nearby that would have been awesome to tour but, alas, it was not to be.

After the tour of that ship, we hopped the ferry back to where we started and wandered through the New England aquarium, which sits right on the waterfront. The aquarium was interesting, but there was nothing particularly overwhelming about this aquarium when compared to any other. They had a large penguin exhibit, which was a lot of fun to watch and a huge coral reef area which included plenty of fish, including barracudas, sharks, and some rather gargantuan sea turtles. They were doing a lot of feeding and such, though, so that was quite interesting.

Finally, we hopped a subway train back to the B&B where we quickly found out that Barry Bonds had been indited for purgery. We proceeded to fall asleep for the next hour or so and, when we eventually came to, the folks on ESPN were still talking about the exact same thing. So, rather than listening to them go on and on, we went out for dinner, which consisted of burgers and beer at a nearby bar, where we could watch the Bruins game on TV.

Tomorrow, I think we're headed off to Salem to see the museums and then maybe off to the Sam Adams brewery for a tour. Hopefully, I'll be able to take a few more pictures along the way.

The Clouds from Above

Day number one of our Boston Vacation started like pretty much any other vacation - lots of sitting around in airports, eating bad food (today's was bacon, egg, and cheese on bagels at O'Hare), and waiting for luggage. On the up side, I never really get tired of looking down at the ground for a few thousand feet in the air - and clouds look great from above.

We arrive at our B&B around 3 PM. It's a comfy place and, after a day's worth of traveling, Liz was happy to try out the bed.





The B&B is in a classic New England brownstone (I'll try to get a picture tomorrow). I'll judge breakfast in the morning, but the staff is very pleasant and our room is spacious. The piano in the parlor is horribly our of tune, but the staff made fresh mini-brownie muffins, which Liz appreciated (she appreciated them twice, actually). Also, the view from the rooftop is really quite impressive. The skyline isn't Chicago, but it's still picture-worthy.





After a nap in our room, we went out for a walk about the town. We went towards the biggest building we could find and found ourselves in a shopping mall. The building was really very interesting but, aside from a new knitting magazine for Liz, neither of us really felt like spending our first night in Boston wandering about a mall. So we walked for a little bit and then decided to head to a nearby restaurant that one of the women at the B&B recommended, Giacomo's.

Giacomo's is a little family owned place and really quite nice. The service was excellent and the food was even better. I had penne with shrimp and chicken in some sort of pesto sauce and Liz had butternut squash ravioli which was delicious. The place was a little loud due to the fact that the kitchen is open to the dining room, but it was still a great place to have dinner.





So now we're back at the B&B trying to relax and get ready for tomorrow. What's up for tomorrow? I have no idea. A walk downtown and perhaps a stop at a local pub for some clam chowder. Only time will tell.