Rare update
Sitting in the office with no work - and I mean legitimately no work, not that there could be work if only I would apply myself more - so I am going to catch up this LJ with recent events. Quickly, before the headache from squinting at the screen with just one contact lens on sets in! (Will be picking up a new pair of glasses on my way home from work today. Thick black plastic-framed hipster glasses, very exciting!)
First thing is that I was out of town last weekend - Portland/Portsmouth/Boston/NYC. In Portland (the one in Maine) on Friday my mother and I did the arts district in the morning, port district in the afternoon. We had lunch at a pub where we were the only women - sort of funny, the "commercial street pub" sign outside was right next to one that said "no drinking at any time" - getting into the spirit of the place we drank beer, and my mother told me about the summer she'd worked as a waitress at a Maine resort in the seventies. (What am I going to be able to tell my hypothetical children?!)
Art district: really decent work at the Maine College of Art - acronym MECA - plastic flamingos dressed up in regional costumes. Also a nice antique fabric gallery across the street whose minder, who was about 25 and very friendly, said he'd gone to NYU and hadn't liked it because everyone was off doing their own thing, "like in high school" (which made me wonder what kind of high school he'd gone to). Port district: lots of lobster-flavored souvenirs and some old houses with plaques on 'em, including one called "Victoria House" that had Greek doric columns, Victorian woodwork around the doors and windows, Moorish geometric patterns along one roof, Chinese-style eaves along the other, and even a tower with one of those round nautical windows. All executed in brownstone. It was Special. *g*
...that paragraph could have been accomplished much more easily with pictures! Oh well.
Dinner in Portsmouth, which turns out to be a really trendy, upscale place. (Who knew?) We went to three breweries in a row that each had a 45 minute wait, then finally scored at an older, smaller one where the staff said the wait was only 15 minutes...though this turned out to also be 45 minutes. XD; Proof that you shouldn't always settle for the first decent, easy thing?
Did Boston Saturday. Met up with my cousin and her boyfriend, who have an apartment in Cambridge halfway between Harvard and MIT. Was nice to ditch the parents! We walked around Harvard Square, had lunch in a cafe where the waitress snootily informed us that they didn't serve those kinds of sodas (ie, Diet Coke - I suppose they had Italian sodas). Very good food though. Walked down to the Charles river, the weather was gorgeous, the people were wearing a variety of things - unlike New Yorkers, Bostonians don't tend to follow a style code. Boyfriend pointed out the building where he has a day job creating spreadsheets calculating the economic advantages of green technologies, on those rare days when his advisor is actually around to advise him. Discussed, with cousin, the way that office work trains you to approach every problem with "I can put that in a spreadsheet for you".
Then tea in a coffee house where my cousin had work up (she paints), then MIT where we saw the building that might collapse. A bit dizzying, actually, to behold. According to cousin's bf the more architecturally complicated, the higher the costs of repairs. And the roof leaks, also. *g* Proceeded to browse at the MIT bookstore where every book is a ground-breaking study with good cover design - just skimming the titles made me feel smarter.
Caught a train at 4:30 to NYC so I'd be back in time for Glasvegas, who were...not very good, actually. XD; Sort of boring? When your aesthetic ideal is a Phil Spectre-esque Wall of Sound, you'd better have the sound production to back it up, and they just didn't. Closed with what felt like the the entire audience singing along to this song, though, so that was a highlight. If I ever go to see this band again, I am definitely standing front and center - I'm not letting myself be taken aside after two drinks by a 40 year-old Morrissey fan who offers to buy me a third. (Seriously, what was I thinking? Though this did answer the question, who likes Glasvegas? As dude was way up on his British indie rock canon as determined by weekly British music magazines.) (Another nice thing about the show is that the audience was actually pretty mixed - old folk, young folk, black folk, white folk, Asian folk. Even some South Asian folk, who I have never before seen at an indie show.)
First thing is that I was out of town last weekend - Portland/Portsmouth/Boston/NYC. In Portland (the one in Maine) on Friday my mother and I did the arts district in the morning, port district in the afternoon. We had lunch at a pub where we were the only women - sort of funny, the "commercial street pub" sign outside was right next to one that said "no drinking at any time" - getting into the spirit of the place we drank beer, and my mother told me about the summer she'd worked as a waitress at a Maine resort in the seventies. (What am I going to be able to tell my hypothetical children?!)
Art district: really decent work at the Maine College of Art - acronym MECA - plastic flamingos dressed up in regional costumes. Also a nice antique fabric gallery across the street whose minder, who was about 25 and very friendly, said he'd gone to NYU and hadn't liked it because everyone was off doing their own thing, "like in high school" (which made me wonder what kind of high school he'd gone to). Port district: lots of lobster-flavored souvenirs and some old houses with plaques on 'em, including one called "Victoria House" that had Greek doric columns, Victorian woodwork around the doors and windows, Moorish geometric patterns along one roof, Chinese-style eaves along the other, and even a tower with one of those round nautical windows. All executed in brownstone. It was Special. *g*
...that paragraph could have been accomplished much more easily with pictures! Oh well.
Dinner in Portsmouth, which turns out to be a really trendy, upscale place. (Who knew?) We went to three breweries in a row that each had a 45 minute wait, then finally scored at an older, smaller one where the staff said the wait was only 15 minutes...though this turned out to also be 45 minutes. XD; Proof that you shouldn't always settle for the first decent, easy thing?
Did Boston Saturday. Met up with my cousin and her boyfriend, who have an apartment in Cambridge halfway between Harvard and MIT. Was nice to ditch the parents! We walked around Harvard Square, had lunch in a cafe where the waitress snootily informed us that they didn't serve those kinds of sodas (ie, Diet Coke - I suppose they had Italian sodas). Very good food though. Walked down to the Charles river, the weather was gorgeous, the people were wearing a variety of things - unlike New Yorkers, Bostonians don't tend to follow a style code. Boyfriend pointed out the building where he has a day job creating spreadsheets calculating the economic advantages of green technologies, on those rare days when his advisor is actually around to advise him. Discussed, with cousin, the way that office work trains you to approach every problem with "I can put that in a spreadsheet for you".
Then tea in a coffee house where my cousin had work up (she paints), then MIT where we saw the building that might collapse. A bit dizzying, actually, to behold. According to cousin's bf the more architecturally complicated, the higher the costs of repairs. And the roof leaks, also. *g* Proceeded to browse at the MIT bookstore where every book is a ground-breaking study with good cover design - just skimming the titles made me feel smarter.
Caught a train at 4:30 to NYC so I'd be back in time for Glasvegas, who were...not very good, actually. XD; Sort of boring? When your aesthetic ideal is a Phil Spectre-esque Wall of Sound, you'd better have the sound production to back it up, and they just didn't. Closed with what felt like the the entire audience singing along to this song, though, so that was a highlight. If I ever go to see this band again, I am definitely standing front and center - I'm not letting myself be taken aside after two drinks by a 40 year-old Morrissey fan who offers to buy me a third. (Seriously, what was I thinking? Though this did answer the question, who likes Glasvegas? As dude was way up on his British indie rock canon as determined by weekly British music magazines.) (Another nice thing about the show is that the audience was actually pretty mixed - old folk, young folk, black folk, white folk, Asian folk. Even some South Asian folk, who I have never before seen at an indie show.)