Last Weekend
On Saturday, I went to Providence to see pididdle. We had Chipotle. We went to the Providence Zoo... there were several varieties of cute animal. It makes the third zoo in New England I've been to, which may actually outnumber the number of zoos I've been to elsewhere combined. I like zoos just fine, but somehow, never got to them as a child. Then we saw Juno; I believe, after some reflection, that this will make it onto my list of movies everyone ought to see. From the very beginning, the movie made it clear that it was going to speak a language that was the platonic ideal of the witty teen, or something thereabouts. There was also a trip to Coldstone in Seekonk, which had a candy store open right next door. I had just been telling pididdle about how I always wanted Runts, but could never find them in sufficient quantity to be worthwhile, so we went in, and I bought a pound of Runts and a pound of milk chocolate covered cookie dough. The runts were actually disappointing. I remember runts as banana, cherry, strawberry, orange, and lime. Of those, only the banana was yucky. I vaguely remember the years where watermelon replaced lime... not good, but still leaving me with three great flavors. Now, they've added a second yucky yellow fruit (pineapple), which is bad, but they also replaced the old cherry flavor with mango, which is even worse! So, really, only the orange and strawberry flavors are any good in the current runt mix.
On Sunday, I walked up to Cleveland Circle to try out the new Chipotle there, thus again getting me to having tried all of the Chipotle in this state. (Oddly, I don't think construction on this one started until well after the Harvard Square location, which still hasn't opened.) Their location is laid out in a much better way than the Davis Square location. Given its position along the Green Line (no more than a hundred yards away from the Reservoir station, and literally beside the Cleveland Circle station), I expect it will become my standard Chipotle when I'm traveling to MIT on Fridays.
It's position also encourages me to start walking to Fenway for movies again, as that's only another couple of miles past it. I did so on Sunday. I was disappointed by how few of the movies I wanted to see from this Oscar season were still there... Meet the Spartans and Hannah Montana seem to have driven the rest away. I ended up watching There Will Be Blood. It was an odd movie. It definitely felt like a movie that knew it wanted to be different... a good portion of the first chunk of the movie has no dialog. Daniel Day-Lewis was impressive. As a character study, it was impressive, but as a movie, it did not really move me. It also had what I found to be a strange, jarring soundtrack.
I realized the other day that I'd been here for a year now. It doesn't feel like a year. In hindsight, it doesn't feel that it's been a terribly productive year... monitarily, I paid off anythingleft's debt, but almost all of the rest of my excess funding got sunk into repair work to my townhouse, rather than paying down the mortgage (though I did manage one or two principle-only payments). My social circle has not widened enough, and the majority of the people I have met have been in Cambridge and Somerville, which is just far enough away to feel inconvenient to visit on a lark. Whenever I ponder the idea of relocating to Cambridge myself, I am reminded that I'd then have to commute to/from work every day way farther than my current easy mile-ish. But perhaps if I do decide to put down roots around here at some point, I'll love up there to do it.