Category: Boston

The Boston Globe ran an article today about four finalists for the next This Old House house. There’s even an online vote (after all the pictures)—not that it will decide which house Our Heroes spend 13 weeks or more fixing up, but it will at least generate some interest in the show (which after two seasons of multimillion-dollar renovations, I suspect, is the point).

And the attention thing may be working. Currently the low-budget multifamily project in East Boston is leading, with 40.4% of the vote. I think, as much as I’d like to see the guys in Arlington Center, that it will be EaBo that wins.

Last weekend Lisa and I took the dogs and the new hybrid back to Crane Beach for a late winter stroll along the beach. We were hoping to repeat the trip today, but where last Saturday was sunny and warm, today is sunny and hovering around freezing—not ideal beach weather.

Anyway, I brought the camera and took the first decent photos I’ve taken in a few months, including documentation of Joy’s first view of a horse as well as proof that she is a hyper little thing (see thumbnail, right).

(Incidentally, relative to my gripe last night, at least the FlickrExport people have made their nifty iPhoto plugin a universal one.)

That’s an anagram for “Boston T Anagram Map.” Some ingenious soul has anagrammed almost every T stop on the Boston MBTA on this handy map. Exceptions: most of the innumerable stops on the Green Line’s B and C branches, and Harvard, which rather than the lame “Hard Var” sports the rather spiffier name of “Yale.”

Note: This somehow got stuck and never published from three weeks ago, when anagrams of subway maps were hot.

Okay, true confession time: I’ve been watching “Beauty and the Geek 2.” I’d love to say it was only because of the MIT connection (one of the male competitors, Ankur, is an MIT grad student), but honestly it’s a sweet reality show. The concept that smart-but-klutzy geeks and smooth-but-dumb beauties can actually learn from each other…  and that they can grow fond of each other… brilliant. Every geek in the world is guaranteed to become hooked on the first viewing…

Alas, Ankur was eliminated tonight. But I’ll keep watching. I’m a fan of the Woody Allen-esque Josh. I guess this means I’m now officially TV deadweight; this is the first reality show I’ve watched consistently, and it’s hard not to be hooked.

A musically eventful Sunday at Old South Church this week. Our guest group, Mastersingers USA is a men’s choral group who according to their official biography all “have some connection with Bruce McInnes,” who was assistant conductor of the men’s glee club at Yale and went on to lead groups at Amherst and University of Wisconsin. They were today about 75 strong and sang a mixed program of men’s sacred music for the prelude, then went on to do a joint work with the Old South choir, two movements from Vierne’s Mass for Two Choirs.

I had missed that men’s glee club sound. But unfortunately I also noticed something that I hadn’t realized when I was singing in the Virginia Glee Club but have since noticed listening to recordings of various men’s groups: an American all-male choir can sometimes have a thinner sound than a full choir. The ideal vocal sound for blend for a four part men’s choir is a little less rich and vibrato laden than the symphonic sound, partly I suppose because of the difficulty of blending rich men’s voices across the entire male vocal range. It may simply also have been rust; the group only tours every three years, and this is their first time on the road since 2003. It was nevertheless a pleasure to sing with them and I hope I get the opportunity again at some point in the future.

For those of us Boston area folks for whom Applephilia borders uncomfortably close to obsession, the news of the coming four-story flagship store on Boylston Street comes uncomfortably close to contributing to delinquency.

Not that I’m complaining. And not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Heck, it’s right down the street from Old South. I may have to stick around Back Bay a little longer after church services on Sunday.

Too bad the store is two years out. And hey, I would be surprised if their demolition plans don’t push it out any further.

There’s been something of a revolt on the Arlington list recently about the poor quality of service and availability of goods at the Arlington Stop ’n’ Shop, the bigger of the two full service grocery stores in town and the only one open after 9 pm. The frustrations range from inexplicably poor product selection to inexplicable unavailability of stock items (parsley, skim milk in anything smaller than gallon containers, shredded wheat cereal)—and those are just my stories; there were somewhere north of 30 individuals complaining on the list. My contention has long been that if Stop ’n’ Shop had to contend with competition like the grocery stores that we had back in the South, or in Seattle, or pretty much anywhere we have lived, they’d fold like yesterday’s news.

When I heard that Hannaford had opened a store in (relatively) nearby Waltham, I was ecstatic. The Hannafords that I had visited in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee were large, well-lit, well stocked stores that ran the product gamut from organic produce to cornflakes. I had high hopes that this would be our new store of choice.

Sadly, my hopes were dashed. Hannaford had taken over an existing store, and the corporate dark color paint and wood, so well suited for large open buildings, made the small interior space seem cramped and low. The meat counters looked good, but there was no tuna at the fish counter, and the produce, while plentiful, left something to be desired in freshness and eye appeal. The rest of the store just felt cramped and low, and the checkout staff were too busy with their own conversations to actually make eye contact with us.

Ironically, I may have found an answer in the other Arlington store, Foodmaster aka Johnny’s, which though smaller and less convenient seems friendlier and better stocked. But I’ll have to continue to hope that a real grocery chain will come along and beat the stuffing out of Stop ’n’ Shop, because it appears on first glance that Hannaford won’t be the one to do it.

It was a cold and rainy night in Somerville, but inside the East Coast Grill it was hot as hell. Hell Night was underway. Eight of us were there to brave the heat of the most amazing hot cuisine in the world. Cuisine where dishes with habañeros are mild by comparison, and heat is expressed in Bombs. Cuisine where appetizers have names like “Weapons of Ass Destruction,” accompanied by drinks like The Cold Fusion Martini and The Hurler From Hell. And then there was the Pasta From Hell: the raison d’être and original dish of Hell Night, a dish so vilely full of peppers that it was reputed to cause uncontrollable vomiting, or worse, in those who were at the same table where it was consumed.

The eight of us—Charlie, Niall, Tennessee Lee, Greg, Bill, Julian, Andrew, and me—crowded around the bar, blue ribbon winning beverages in hand, waiting for our table. We compared preparatory strategies: several of us had premedicated with Pepcid, others grasped eagerly as rolls of Rolaids were passed. Around us there was an excited buzz. A server walked past in red hospital scrubs and a face mask. There was a stocky black man with an LCD belt buckle flashing the word “HOT” and a sweatshirt embroidered with red peppers.

We finally got a seat, in a room lit by dim red light bulbs, and ordered a round of appetizers. One Hurler, one martini, both five bombs; a plate of thermonuclear hot wings (six bombs, described on the menu as “Weapons of Ass Destruction”), a plate of Hell Fries, an order of littleneck clams with habañero peppers, four bombs apiece. And an order of Pasta From Hell, one of only two items on the menu with an eight bomb rating

Others around the table had been working on Tennessee Lee all week. “You have to order it, Lee. The honor of the State of Tennessee is at stake.” It was agreed that he would eat it and that we would all get a taste; Andrew refused Lee’s generous offer of a 60-40 split.

That settled, Lee shot the Hurler (a raw oyster floating in homemade pepper vodka) and blinked. “That’s pretty hot,” he said. I tasted the martini, and unbidden a description from the 2004 Hell Night floated through my mind: “Julian drank the martini and got very quiet for the rest of the night…” It was in fact the nastiest beverage I had ever drunk, far worse than the Hurler. I carefully replaced the martini on the table, ate a few littlenecks and some Hell Fries, and nibbled a jalapeno pickled with habañeros and Scotch Bonnets—probably the least hot food I ate all night.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noted Andrew returning the second hot wing he had taken uneaten to the common plate. A wing bone sat on his plate, and sweat was starting from his sideburns and under his eyes. He reached for the ketchup, poured about a cup of it on his plate, and started eating it with a spoon. I’m not normally a ketchup man, but I took the bottle and put a little on my plate as well. It was the only food on the table that had no hot peppers.

The LED belt buckle man, now identified as Doctor Pepper (backstory in an article in the Patriot Ledger)*, approached the table, waiver form in hand. Lee signed the waiver after much blustering from both sides, and the Pasta arrived. Lee took a big forkful, twirled it, and forked it into his mouth. Doctor Pepper said, “Oh, man! Ain’t seen nobody take a big first bite like that!” Lee took another bite. He said, “Where I come from…” and paused, then downed his water in a gulp. As Doctor Pepper cackled behind him, he gasped for breath and said “You know, I can see how people would vomit from this.”

The plate went around the table. Each of us took a piece of the pasta. I consumed a noodle about two inches long and started frantically eating ice. It was without a doubt the hottest food that had ever been in my mouth. I wasn’t brave enough to eat the sausage. For that matter, no one was. Shortly there was no pasta left on the plate, mostly due to Lee’s valiant efforts, but much of the sausage remained untouched.

Entrées arrived, to our collective relief. I passed a dish of cole slaw—with no peppers—over to Tennessee Lee. “You might want some of this,” I said. He took several forkfuls in gratitude. My Korean spicy noodles with shrimp and scallops (rating: 4 bombs) were a mild, refreshing, civilized delight to my brutalized palate. I can only imagine how Lee felt about his five-bomb skirt steak.

A feeling of dreamy satisfaction settled over me as the endorphins kicked in. By the end of the night, one thing was clear: Hell Night would always be a stag event for us because none of our wives or girlfriends would ever be so stupid as to bring this on themselves.

* Update 2022-06-16: That Patriot Ledger article goes to a dead link. There is a more recent interview with Doctor Pepper in the Boston Globe from 2017.

The Boston Geek Dinner that Dave organized last night at the CambridgeSide Galleria is probably the only blog meetup in recent memory to get covered by ZDNet. I wasn’t there—and haven’t been able to make any blog related gatherings, such as the Berkman Thursdays—because they all insist on Thursday night as the meeting datetime of choice. Which, when we’re not kicking off a BSO concert series, is the night I have choir rehearsal. There just aren’t enough days.

I didn’t post about this at the time because of time constraints, but December 9—the last time I was in the office prior to a week on the west coast—was one of the most incredibly miserable days I have ever spent in an automobile. I had a morning rehearsal at Symphony Hall to which I drove in light snow. By the time the rehearsal was over the snow had changed to mostly rain, and I figured I was off the hook for weather for the rest of the day.

Hah.

I drove to my office in Framingham, and even driving cautiously it took me only about 40 minutes. I did a conference call and a couple hours of work; during the call, I realized that the snow was getting heavier. I made a judgment call that I needed to get out at 3 if I wanted to make it back to Symphony Hall for my 7 pm concert call.

As it turns out, I was only seven minutes off.

In the two and a half hours I had been at the office, I got something like a foot of snow on my car. It took me 40 minutes, with two people including my VP of Sales pushing, to get out of our office parking lot, thanks to no snowplow and a steep exit onto the street. It took another 45 minutes to get onto the Mass Pike, less than two miles from my office. The Pike was okay, but thanks to a jackknifed truck on Rt 128 North it took me until 10 past 6 to get to our house in Arlington. To sum up: 45 minutes from Boston to Framingham, three hours from Framingham to Arlington.

Fortunately after that it only took me 55 minutes to get back to Symphony Hall, where I missed my call time by about 7 minutes—fortunately to no lasting ill effect. But the lesson was learned: on days that it will be snowing and I have to be somewhere at the end of the day, just work from home. It is entirely possible to overwhelm the snow infrastructure of Massachusetts: it just takes a little more snow than it takes to perform a comparable feat in, say, Virginia.

We got about three inches of snow today–here in Arlington, which didn’t get some of the heavy snow that other Boston area towns got on Thanksgiving, that counts as the first snow of the season. The going was treacherous first thing this morning on my way to Old South; I seem always to need a reminder to avoid some of the narrow, one-way, downhill streets in my neighborhood during snow, as they are rarely plowed first thing in the morning. Today I had to put myself in a controlled skid toward the one patch of dry pavement between me and Park Street; fortunately, all went well and I was able to continue on my way.

We’re getting a snow-day tradition going here, waffles and bacon. (Mmm, pork!) Actually it’s been the Day o’Pork here, as with Lisa off on business tonight I have been freely indulging in some things she won’t eat, to wit, pork chops and risotto, the latter made with some pancetta and a little prosciutto. Pork trifecta. Mmm. Porkilicious.

To my Boston area readers, as well as anyone interested in relocating: our firm is hiring, just in time for the holiday season. Positions include a senior software QA position, customer support engineer, and a direct field sales position.

At iET Solutions, we, like Gartner, are bullish about the future of the IT Service Management market. We have some exciting new products hitting the market and are making a commitment to grow the company. Now is a good time to check us out.

If you are interested in any of the positions, feel free to contact me with your resume or contact our HR group directly.

In the spirit of making a list, and checking it twice:

1. Verify my concert schedule for the Pops and the Symphony (schedule available online, for those who wish to attend concerts or stalk me). Check.
2. Note conflicts with my church choir, and apologize meekly to my director. Check.
3. Coordinate with three other couples, including one from San Francisco, to identify date that they want to attend Pops concert. Check.
4. Purchase tickets. Ignore scream of protest from credit card, which is already freaking out over the final expenditures for our bathroom remodels. Check.
5. Speaking of bathroom remodels, spend two hours sanding, tacking, patching, and priming exposed plaster in every room downstairs. Except for the living room, where the radiator patch is hidden by the sofa, because hey, it’s hidden and it’s too much of a pain to move the sofa. Check.
6. Try to call Wilson Farms to reserve a Thanksgiving turkey, and remember too late that they’re closed on Tuesdays. Check.
7. Wonder where we’re going to stow all the crap that’s currently in the library room in the basement, which will become a guest bedroom for at least part of the Thanksgiving holiday, starting on Thursday night. Check.
8. Notice that the contractor still hasn’t gotten the correct grab bars to install in the new downstairs shower, which are needed by my in-laws—who also arrive Thursday. Ask contractor about them, and watch him sheepishly disappear. Check.
9. Drop dogs off at doggie grooming spa so that something can be done about faint lingering odor. Check.
10. Actually plan Thanksgiving menu. Not yet.
11. Finish painting. Not yet.
12. Remove tools, drop cloths, tubes of caulk, tubs of spackle, and cans of paint from their current positions on all horizontal surfaces on first floor. Not yet.
13. Identify activities for houseful of five adults and one visiting teenager (and two Bichon-Americans) so we don’t all go nuts. Not yet.
14. Realize that the room in which the visiting teenager will be staying on Friday and Saturday will be filled with construction detritus and shifted crap from all the other rooms in the house until at least Friday afternoon. Check.
15. Design this year’s Christmas card—what do you mean, Christmas card? Are you KIDDING me?. Um, not yet…

Ah yes the holidays. Our favorite part of the year.

Boston.com: Home in Lexington explodes, sparking evacuation. And folks, when they say “explodes,” they mean it, judging from the before and after pictures. The gas company—our gas company, Keyspan—says the system “overpressurized.” I say, huh? How can that happen? And I say, urgh. Maybe we moved to gas too hastily.

I figured that since most of the leaves in our neighborhood were still firmly in place, we were safe from winter weather a while longer. No such luck. As I was leaving my barber’s shop in Arlington Heights, there were honest-to-goodness flakes of snow. Small, still, but getting bigger. By the time I picked up a few light fixtures that had come in at Wolfer’s in Waltham, the flakes were pretty big, and they stayed that way all afternoon. I think we got close to an inch, though it only accumulated on the grass and a few parked cars.

One of my neighbors on the Arlington List got some great photos of the storm, which he dubbed “Hall-snow-een.”