Harvard Cabin - trip photos

Photo show

I now know that...

Things I learned or would like others to learn.

• If you leave your gear downstairs and go to bed, people arriving later will simply move it out of the way to some random place. Don’t assume others will not touch or move your gear.
• Mark all gear. That includes boots and snowshoes. Asking if someone has your boot liners or trying to get feet into the size 10 plastic shells of someone else instead of your 11’s, well simply wont work.
• Bring your stuff in stuff sacks and keep them together in another bag.
• A bigger backpack than is needed is better than a backpack that is too small. Err on the large size.
• Some people I have an incredibly loud snore that only they can sleep through. Yes, the trip leaders warned me and I had ear plugs, but for some unknown reason I still did not use them.
• Some people have never tried or used their equipment before. This is understandable early in the winter hiking season or with rental equipment. If you’re in this position, how about spending an hour alone with that new gear, adjusting it, walking about outside in those rental boots instead of waiting until everyone is dressing or dressed to leave for the hike?
• People with new gear to put on or use should not ‘volunteer’ to do breakfast clear up.
• Your level of fitness is a perception before a hike and a reality during it. Make sure your perception matches reality by testing yourself honestly before demonstrating its lack in front of your fellow hikers.
• Even in rustic surroundings social graces count for a lot. So put the lid down in the composting outhouse, wash your hands or use sanitizer and sneeze into the crook of your elbow not on my plate.
• Watch out for people near your car with snowshoes strapped to their packs. They have no idea how large they are.
• Snowshoes can accidentally scratch down to bear metal on your car in 0.2 seconds.
• Don’t put backpacks with snowshoes attached into the passenger compartment of your car, if you value your paintwork.
• Don’t value your paintwork, or carpets.
• Hot water in a Nalgene bottle inside your sleeping bag is heaven.
• Put the Nalgene in an old sock or else it will burn you.
• Bringing one bottle of wine is not enough – unless of course everyone brings one.
• Wear waterproof shells or pants that shed snow. Even when cold, snow melts when it comes into contact and soaks through.
• The same goes for hands. They may be warm enough not to wear gloves or shells, but only until you slip and put one or both hands into a snow drift.
• Don’t expect to hike fast. A lot of time will be spent adjusting gear by people who have not used it before. The same people are likely to have minor problems like shin bang, blisters or other gear problems and general discomfort.
• People like to define themselves and you by the job they do or by where you work. It’s a reasonable conversation starter, but not the best. Try to find a new approach, unless you’re the President (of the USA).
• Listening is as valuable as talking.
• Stopping or turning to talk on the trail is not good for the five or six people walking behind you.
• If a stop is called by the leader for 2 or 10 minutes the keep it to 2 or 10 minutes. Avoid roll on. For example hiker ‘A’ stops for a layer adjustment, ‘B’ adjust layers and goes for a pee, ‘C’ adjust layers and has a drink and eats some food whilst ‘B’ pees and then decides – heh, I need a pee too. ‘D’, ‘E’ and ‘F’ stripped off ready to go in 2 minutes and stand around for 10 minutes getting cold. Empathy and awareness please people.
• Smile – this is fun, this is the outdoors, this is winter hiking in groups.

Winter wonder land

That extreme cold numbs the brain and slows down response time was not an excuse we could use. Well, not yet. Especially after a comfortable and cozy drive to New Hampshire and Harvard Cabin for the winter hiking program “debug the gear”, weekend in December.
The propane tank is leaking. The propane tank is empty. The circuit breaker is sticking or not sticking. For more than 30 minutes - as one of the early arrivals at Harvard Cabin on a Friday evening in December when the external thermometer read 19F and the one inside the cabin read 10F – five others and I attempted to master lighting the massive heater.
The fact that the cooker in the kitchen wouldn’t light either re-enforced the no gas theory and brought fresh concerns. Yes, we could layer up, keep moving or simply go to bed in zero degree bags we were instructed to bring. Mine was only rated to 15F, but that wasn’t the problem on my mind. Cooking food and melting snow for water, now that was a problem, although we wouldn’t starve – not with a brewpub 10 minutes down the road.
The heater instructions were long, but straightforward. All except the initial one that told of operating a switch above the breaker box. Now my definition of a breaker box is also straightforward. It is a box with breakers inside. There was no switch above it and so no switch was switched, making the execution of the next seven or eight steps meaningless.
Folks, the switch is IN the breaker box – above a bank of breakers. It is in itself a breaker and looks like the master switch of a normal breaker box.
I can’t remember who made the discovery, but I know I went to the cooker one more time, turned the knob, smelled gas and lit it. I went through similar steps with the heater and we were all set for the weekend.

Getting out the immigrant vote

According to a report in today’s Boston Globe, applications for citizenship in Boston are up 71 percent from a year ago.

Increased fees, up from $400 to $675, concern that immigrants legally in the country may get caught up in changes to the law affecting those here illegally and a desire to vote in the 2008 elections are cited as part of a perfect storm.

An unstated concern may be that the Patriot’s Act of 2001 denies habeas corpus to legal resident aliens.

The net result is increased processing time up from the seven months currently quoted to an unspecified duration.

Even before the fee increase, announced in February 2007 and put in place in July the same year, I waited more than eight months for an interview. Add another month’s wait for the oath ceremony and the lead-time was at least nine months, and that was before the number of work visas that the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services also process increased by 800,000 this year.

That’s not the end of the story, either.

Without an alien registration card, more commonly know as a green card, it is impossible to travel outside the country unless you have a passport. During the swearing in ceremony, immigration officials exchange the green card for a naturalization certificate. To obtain a passport the original certificate has to be sent in for processing.

The wait time for a passport recently was as high as three months, unless additional payment was made for expediting. The increased wait time was due to changes that require a passport for travel between the US to Canada or Mexico, instead of other government issued ID.

Speaking of ID, not only is the wait time long, but during that time, the now naturalized citizen retains no evidence that they are a citizen or have any right to be in the country or is able to travel, say for a family emergency, outside of the country. Habeas what my newly minted Patriotic friend?

So is the current 12 months too long to wait for the privilege of being a fully documented US citizen?

Of course not.

But don’t forget that the majority of immigrants wait at least five years from when they receive a green card and may wait longer than the 14 months I did for my green card, whilst in my case, here on a three-year work visa.

It’s an arduous, expensive, time consuming and often confusing process. So if you’re newly arrived, legally that is, you should start getting to know the candidates and planning to vote in the presidential election.

The one that’s due up in 2016, that is.

Winter perils in the making.

Tripping up the steps of 5 Joy Street, headquarters of the Appalachian Mountain Club was not the ideal way to begin a five-week training program on Winter Hiking.

Maybe it was the strain of ambling up Beacon Hill from Boston Common, but that’s what I did.

Fortunately, two pairs of hands instinctively reached out from the top of the steps and I found myself pulled to safety from the top and pushed to safety from the bottom by my wife, who stood a step or two below me. The hands from above belonged to two of the course instructors, who later also introduced themselves as trip leaders for our winter hikes. I wondered as I brushed off my embarrassment if this wasn’t just the first of many times when helping hands would be required.

The Hiking and Backpacking Committee, H&B for short, of the Boston Chapter of the AMC runs this course annually, or has for the past six years. During this time they have developed a half-inch thick tome of knowledge, artfully titled ‘An Introduction to Winter Hiking’ - just in case the uninitiated thought that this was all there was to it.

Checking-in I collected my nametag and found myself a minor celebrity. Not only was my badge number 1, which meant I was the first to register and pay for the course, but I also shared the same family name with two of the instructors. We are not related, at least as far as I know, but within a few minutes of the start of the formal part of the evening, it felt as if I had joined a rather large family of similarly minded people.

Formal is too strong a word for events as they unfolded. It’s hard to be formal when someone stands barefooted in front of an audience in his underwear and explains the theory of heat management – which can be over-simplified as layers good, perspiration and cotton clothing bad. Not just bad, but very bad, bad to the point of forbidden.

The same goes for anything other than two-layer footwear; the sort that has removable liners is the only type of footwear allowed on AMC led winter hikes. Hard plastic mountaineering boots (similar to their downhill ski cousins) seemed to be the boot of choice for the majority of leaders in attendance, although at least one person favored the old stand-by Sorrel boot.

I don’t want to give the impression that these hardened devotees of winter solitude came dressed in expensive duds, although one person did sport a Arc’teryx® backpack that I know comes with a $549 price tag. Pants, stuff sacks and backpacks sported their fair share of duct tape patches, a simple remedy I suspect for a brush with unguarded crampons and ice axes or unavoidable tree limbs.

Perhaps the main advantage of attending the course, which works out at a meager $9 per week - apart from the obvious one of limiting the chances of ending up as a statistic in the New Hampshire Fish and Game annals of bad things that happen to others – is the opportunity to sign-up for those illusive winter trips I said I would do last year.

These are the ones I read about in AMC Outdoors or the Charles River Mud newsletter a week before they happen, or more usually a week or two afterwards.

Imagine that. Planning your winter hikes, secure in the knowledge that your destination hut or lodge is not booked up, that you will be in the company of like-minded or at least as insane people and led by an experienced hiker who has not only lived to tell the tale, but is willing to share the experience with a novice.

Roll on winter – at least until next week's session

Dying City - dying to leave

To my profound relief, the Lyric Stage performance of Dying City ran only 90 minutes, and without an intermission.

I say that not because of poor writing, direction or acting.

The story of twin brothers (both played by actor Chris Thorn), one a gay actor, the other a marine Lieutenant, who dies under dubious circumstance in Iraq, is set in the Manhattan apartment of the dead soldier's wife (Jennifer Blood).

The dialogue sparked, raged and sobbed with emotion as the story of their last night together unscrambled in the form of flashback action and current reality a year after his death.

Such was the concentration and pace of revelation of humiliation, abandonment and of a marriage gone sour, that at the end of the performance, I like the rest of the audience, sat in stunned silence, scarcely even breathing let alone applauding until the lights came up revealing the two actors smiling facings and bowing gestures.

Some saw the performances as histrionic or over the top. However, this is what happens – perhaps over a longer period, but it happens nonetheless.

The question is do we want to bear witness and to invade the privacy of a family with issues (even if fictional), in the name of entertainment. For those that have experienced such emotions, it is perhaps a timely reminder of past decisions. For those that have not – perhaps it may serve as a warning not to take such decisions lightly.

Not for the first time in the Lyric's cozy 'in the round' seating and intimate atmosphere did I give thanks for sitting further back than in the first three rows. Seated any closer, I would have been compelled to reach out a comforting arm and wrap it around Jennifer Blood's shoulder or to kick Chris Thorn's backside as due payment for his total lack of sensitivity.

This was theater for grown-ups. Sometimes it's better to be a kid.

Ottawa daze

So with the parade over it was time to be 'Not An Englishman in Boston' but a 'AEIO'. That's right – an Englishman in Ottawa – at least for a few days.

Ottawa is a city that just draws me in with its museums, galleries, the Ottawa River, Rideau Canal, Gothic buildings and a regular schedule of events that range from jazz and blues festivals to the Wine and Food show.

The latter provided the impetus for a five-day break. That and expiring Air Canada miles and an overdue opportunity to catch up with good friends made before and during our time living there from 1998 to 2000.

Of course, I noticed the flailing US dollar purchased less and the unmistakable look of satisfaction on d' Canadians' friendly faces as we talked about where it had all gone wrong (or right depending on which side of the border you hang your woolly hat).

I spent almost an entire day in the newly minted Canadian War Museum – where amongst other things I learned with satisfaction that people from 1766 called patriots in the US are described less politely as 'The American Rebels' in Canada.

Indeed much of the early infrastructure, at least after General Wolf defeated a somewhat overzealous Montcalm to win Canada from the French, was established to defend a Canada loyal to the English crown from American infiltration.

Still the wine and food show presented a great opportunity to drink to the Americas and bring into the fold a few Commonwealth countries such as Australia and New Zealand aswell as some EU partners such as France and Germany. Curiously, save the smallest table imaginable, Italy was absent from the party.

The National Gallery of Canada, fresh with a photo exhibit 'Snap Judgment' featuring the brighter side of life in the continent of Africa (at least for the most part) presented an opportunity to replace the all pervasive images of disease, famine, warlords and genocide that are the 'photostock' trade of journalists and image makers. In addition, all of the images came from talented and in many cases self-taught, up-and-coming African photographers.

My own images of Ottawa can be found on Flickr at by clicking here.

I spent a wonderful afternoon on Halloween in the Earl of Sussex Pub, just people watching/listening. Everything changes, the whole dynamics of personal interaction, when at least one of the people is hiding behind a costume mask. Sadly, I was not one of them and could only marvel at the bravery of some souls.

Road show

It was only right that I should show up to the Red Sox parade. Dashing off an article for this week’s paper on some not very interesting local politics, I dumped the car at Lincoln Station and took a commuter train packed to the gunnels with kids and young adults skipping school or work. Not for the last time that day did I feel old.

Police were out in force, some in riot gear, others regulation issue sun glasses. Others pacified dogs, eager to get in on the action. The crowd boisterous and vocal lobbed whatever they could find and officers would tolerate back and forth. If you needed toilet paper at one of the port potties then too bad. That was among the first missiles to decorate the roadway.

But it was a fun day, the parade passed quickly, but not quietly, and an iron grip descended on the crowd as it wrapped up. North Station was a zoo as massed ranks of weary travelers tried to unravel the station announcements and weave between dazed and tired fellow members of the Nation to reach the right platform.

It was a good day to claim allegiance to the home town team.

Thank you Red Sox

I really appreciate the Red Sox response to my last post. Thanks to everyone, life can get back to normal.

I can shift the pile of Globe sports reports that has been growing taller in their "lucky place" on the dining room chair since the turnaround win in Cleveland.

I no longer have the responsibility of watching games through to the end "just in case" because they lost game 2 and 3 to Cleveland when I retired early on those nights .

It was a great year and I actually got to see a game way back in April on supposedly "unlucky Friday 13th".
Boston beat the LA Angels 8:1 that night - the very team they swept in the AL Series later in September.

Lucky for them I was there to start things rolling.

Wearing down the fan

Red Sox and Fox, you are running me ragged.

Game start times in late evening, extended innings and nail-biting finishes are giving me a serious case of nervous exhaustion.

Soccer cup competitions, with extra-time and penalty shootout formula are tense, but quickly over in comparison.

In baseball, every pitch is a potential disaster or delight, for hour after hour. No wonder everybody in the ballpark drinks or eats to distraction or spits whatever they spit (and that seems to vary as much as each game).

Perhaps it’s that I don’t understand the nuance of the sport, that it’s OK to throw a ball instead of a strike to certain hitters, or to hit a sacrifice and be out. But I see the same tensions ebbing and flowing on the faces of thousands of fans, players and coaching staff. Commentators and journalists refer to it as ‘the changing momentum’ and boy is it fickle.

Even with the Sox sitting on a commanding lead, I still expect them to blow it in late innings, and I’ve only lived here for the past for seven years, perhaps the most successful since their early years.

I cannot imagine how lifelong fans deal with each experience building on the past, like grains of sand in a sandcastle that is inevitably washed away as the tide turns.

So please stop it. Go Denver and win two more jut like 2004 in St Louis. Please, I need to feel better than this and so do the rest of Boston and the grandiose Red Sox Nation.

More required than a passenger bill of rights

Boston City Councilors are seeking to create a taxi passenger bill of rights along the lines of providing a safe, functioning and clean cab, with no music playing in the cab or cabbies chatting on cell phones while driving. In their response, according to an article in the Globe, cab drivers want a bill of rights for themselves; no drunk and vomiting passengers, no more than four passengers per cab ride and no abuse of the driver by passengers.

What I want is to pay via a fairs fare system, not take my life in my hands when I (rarely) take a cab and a driver who knows where he or (rarely) she is going.

I can say in all honesty, that I have never ever had a good or even satisfactory cab ride in Boston. Compared to the black cabs in London or even the yellow cabs in New York, Boston’s thinly disguised white coated cabs and their drivers are more like opportunists in clapped-out, cast-off cruisers. That seems to go for the suburbs too, based on my recent experience.

Journeys over 12 miles are charged at a flat, non-metered rate. A cab from Logan Airport to a town like Lincoln, 18.4 miles away, costs a flat rate $46.80, plus an airport charge of $2.25, plus tunnel tolls of $4.50, say $53.75 in all. Flat rate fares are charged at $2.60 per mile, metered fares are charged at $2.40 per mile plus a starting meter charge of 2.25. Either way the base fare, excluding tolls and airport fees, is between $46 and $47.

When I took a cab from Alewife T station to Lincoln--a distance of 9.6 miles--I assumed the same rules would apply. Not so – at least according to the driver and the dispatcher he had me talk to on his cell phone.

I should have been clued in by the fact the driver disappeared for a few minutes when we got in his sweltering cab and left us sitting there while he talked to the driver behind him. I should have known when he did not start the meter that we were in for a flat rate and as it turned out a flat out ride.

We had been traveling from Ireland to Boston via Dublin and Heathrow, including layovers, for the better part of 18 hours and were understandably tired. We took the Silver Line to South Station and then the Red Line to Alewife Station. The cost for the 40-minute subway-ride was $1.75 and it was around 9:30pm when we dragged ourselves to the taxi rank.

Then the cab took us for a ride.

Loading our bags ourselves, we found that there was hardly room in the trunk for our two modest size suitcases (they weighed less than 42lbs each – thanks to judicious packing and the weight restrictions imposed on the Heathrow to Dublin leg of the flight).

We could not see out of the cab windows, any of them, because they were so steamed up. More to the point nor could the driver, except through a fuzzy patch the size of a laptop screen.

When we reached the ramp at the Lexington line, we were all plunged into a blackness that the cab’s single working headlight could not penetrate. The driver did not slow down from the maximum permitted speed of 65mph, or perhaps that was just how fast the straining engine could go. The driver’s solution was simplicity itself. He straddled the lane marker, even when three lanes became two and he followed it unerringly, despite the attempts of other vehicles to persuade him to pull over.

In fairness, he did get us home or at least to the top of the drive where he stopped on a our unlit narrow, but busy two-way road, 3 feet from the curb - without hazard indicators flashing.

I waited for the driver to tell me the fare, clutching a twenty and a ten, perhaps more in hope than any real expectation. I was definitely unprepared when he said the fare was $56.

I protested and asked to look at the book of fares. After five minutes of rummaging, he came up empty. I asked for the dispatch telephone number. That’s when I made my second mistake.

He dialed a number and spoke in a language I did not understand and then handed me his phone. I should have dialed the number on my phone.

The dispatcher, or someone who said he was the dispatcher, told me that the fare to Lincoln from Alewife is $56. I paid. It had been a long day.

Did I get the cab drivers name, cab plate, registration or telephone number? No, as I mentioned it had been a long day, now going on 20 hours of travel and foolishly, I was keener to get off the pitch-black road and indoors after 17 days away.

Did I get wise to the cab industry in Boston? Most certainly.

I will never get in cab without checking that its lights work, the driver has a medallion with his picture on it and I know the price he is going to charge.

These are your rights and mine; everything else is just a load of bill.

How much is enough for us?

Should we measure the value we have in our lives by the amount about which we have to complain?

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal recently.

For example, at the regatta on Saturday, an articulate, and to all outward appearances, well-fed and adequately clothed black man clutching a bundle of newspapers approached the crowds lining the riverbanks.

“Ladies and gentleman. Ladies and gentleman. Can I have your attention for just a moment? Can you help the homeless today? Can you spare a dollar to purchase a newspaper from me to help the homeless?”

Of course, I bought the $1 newspaper, called Spare Change, as did five or six people from the all-Caucasian crowd around me. The seller went on his way smiling and calling out the same line to garner attention from the next pod of spectators.

Inside the thin paper were articles on the laws affecting homeless people, editorials and advertising copy. There was also a warning to check the seller wore a blue badge. As with most things, these days there are several scams as this report in the Globe from last year indicates.

I have to admit I did not look for an ID - not for a dollar purchase/donation. Perhaps that says something about the relative value of a dollar to me as the buyer and to the seller, whether homeless or not.

On the inside back cover, a list of organizations indicated that it was possible to obtain hot food three times a day, various food supplies and somewhere to stay overnight. I don’t know the quality or general availability of such hospitality and in truth hope never to have to test it out of need.

Food, shelter and an opportunity to earn a small wage appeared to hold a greater value to that individual than seems apparent for those given to complaining about their boss or the traffic conditions on the journey to work. Throw into that mix their angst over rising mortgage repayments, shrinking house values and the stock market volatility. Take a break from that as you sip an overpriced Starbucks' latte and ponder whether the Red Sox have the right (highly paid) players to win the World Series and the difference is glaring.

One of my former bosses, consoling me after he told me that I would not get a pay rise that year because of conditions in the industry, said that I should actually thank him.

“It’s a well known fact,” he said, “that people live 10% beyond their salaries. I just saved you money.”

Perhaps he was right.

Head of the Charles Regatta and others.

There has definitely been a theme of trying new things this year, although you will be forgiven for not knowing that due to the paucity of posts.

I plan to rectify the posting situation by resurrecting this blog and in the immortal words of Highlander, “There can be only one”, so this blog is it.

Strictly speaking I should remain the blog “An English/American in Boston” since I became a citizen last May, but it does not have the same ring to it.

Ok, I have ignored the Head of the Charles Regatta for the seven plus years I have lived in the Commonwealth. Not for me I thought – all those Ivy League types, the rowing community – men in caps and blazers that fit them thirty years ago parading with waspy-waist women in summer dresses, hospitality tents with cucumber sandwiches and white wine, jazz bands, pretentious awards and phony accents. No thanks, not for me sir.

Oh dear, it turns out that I was getting confused with the Henley on Thames Regatta, which I attended on one occasion to receive an award for design innovation – but that’s another story.

The Head of the Charles Regatta was real people having fun, pumped up with live rock and reggae music, lots of free stuff and blessed with glorious fall weather. Wave after wave of rowers, buff, synchronized, almost majestic, swept seemingly effortlessly up the river.

Being amongst fit people of all ages, doing what they enjoy is uplifting to the human spirit. It appeared so exhilarating I almost wanted to take up the sport, but I’ll probably settle for the stationary rowing machine at the gym. There’s less chance of capsizing that way.

Peabody and more

Today was an opportunity to get out and explore Salem, MA. More infamous for its much heralded and now commercialized witch trials, Salem is home to two institutions worth visiting. The first is the Peabody Essex Museum, recently renovated and expanded it bills itself as a cultural art museum. The emphasis is on maritime and Asian art, which seems and odd combination at first, but since Salem was once the premiere port in the New World, many artifacts from the Orient found their way to America via Salem.
The museum boasts a fine collection of maritime art, photos and china. Native American art from east to west coast and down to New Mexico is part of the permanent collection as are works from China, India and Japan.
We went to see the exhibition of contemporary furniture "Inspired by China" and fell in love with several pieces. Not in the sense of the need to possess, but rather the desire to make similar pieces. A pipe dream, maybe, but the simplicity of design and artistry of the work, coupled with its sensuous texture, created a "what are you smoking" moment? We both love working with wood and have about 60 mature oak and maple trees on the lot, so judicious cutting and replanting with younger more vigorous oxygenating trees could maintain our existing carbon dioxide neutral state and provide materials for crafting. We just need a three (or four) season workshop.
A bonus was the art exhibit from M.F. Husain, India’s most famous living artist and his epic work "The Mahabharata".

The photograph is of Cornell "Sugarfoot" Coley performing traditional drumming and dance works from West Africa, Cuba and Brazil, to the delight of children and adults.

The second best discovery is Boston Beer Works. Terrific, brewed on the premises selection of Extra Special Bitter (aka British bitter), hoppy India Pale ale and cask conditioned (yes wooden casks) strong ale. Food is great pub fare with flare (stir fried vegetables with ginger on jasmine pilaf rice) and the fish part of the fish and chips is real fresh haddock, white and flaky, not the usual soggy frozen gray mush served up by other pubs. The size of the portions is excellent without being obscene - two large pieces of fish, which provides plenty for a hungry one, or two on a budget. Quibble - why don't they teach bar staff to fill the glass. Imagine being served a 12 ounce glass, with a half inch of nothing above and inch of foam. Needless to say it was sent back for topping off.

Did I mention we are brewing our own beer at home these days ?

First Night - first time

A strange thing happened on the way to New Years Day 2007- we stayed in Massachusetts.
After 6 years of living 12 miles north-west of Boston, we actually spent New Years Eve in downtown Boston. But why was this the first time and just where were we in previous years?

With help from digital photo records, it turns out it was with family in Peoria, IL on two occasions (2002/2005); hiking the Yorkshire Moors, England (2004); sightseeing in Washington DC (2003) and with friends in the Adirondacks NY (2001) and Banff, Canada (2000). No wonder we felt at a loss for something to do this year.
A quick peruse of the Globe gave us the kernel of a plan. 2007 First Night - Boston, a series of events started thirty-one years ago to celebrate local artists and neighborhood organizations. Performances in forty locations consisted of short films (mostly good – some very good), music (classical guitar - standing room only and in one case with dire acoustics ­­– barber shop chorus in a shopping mall), comedy, puppetry, parades, ice sculptures (melting) and of course fireworks. Free admission to some museums, the aquarium and all events with a $15 button was great value, beaten only by free travel on the T (subway) after 8pm.
Trouble was that by 10:30pm we were so tired, cold and full after dinner at an Italian restaurant all we really wanted was to go home, stretch out in the warm, watch a movie, and drink champagne.

And that's exactly what we did.

Happy New Year and best wishes for a great and successful 2007