It’s time for my yearly National Opinion Survey, apparently. Last year, I took one on paper and then actually got a visit from a pollster, who sat with me in my hallway showing me magazines, asking if I ever read them. This time it looks like it’s a bit simpler; last week I received a […]

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Once a year, I step back in time to the days when I taught 8 year-olds, and I pay a visit to Aimee’s class to tell them about the Iditarod. Even before I started co-teaching at the school in Connecticut where I worked for three years out of college, the second grade classes there studied […]

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Today was the first birthday of my niece-to-be, and much of the family celebrated together at Mark and Katie’s place in Medway. Her brother Jack was sick (and still learning the “cover your mouth” trick, so we’ll all be sick soon enough) but was still a lot of fun to hang out with. He can […]

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The white Christmas I was hoping for yesterday seems to have come a day late; it’s currently flurrying in all directions outside the window. Aimee and I enjoyed our first Christmas Eve/Morning celebration together, with some new traditions that I hope will last – pad thai and a movie – and some that I hope […]

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A busy day in both Boston and Cambridge ended with a great evening spent with Tim and Mari, as we enjoyed the “exotically hip atmosphere” at Pho Republique (and it’s ‘fuh,’ not ‘foh,’ by the way…) in their new ‘hood, the South End. We couldn’t make their wedding last month, but we got the scoop, […]

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Talk about the wind being taken out of the sails… I came to work this morning to find that now eight months after losing our boss, the one man we’d pegged our hopes on to take his place has taken a job at another institution. Kudos to him; he’s a smart, eminently qualified guy who […]

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I completed a trifecta of renewals this week: a new passport, a new driver’s license at the CambridgeSide Galleria Mall RMV, and a new title for my car. The passport had traveled with me to Reykjavik, London, St. Petersburg, Ljubljana, Dubrovnik, and Prague, among other places, but it was finally time to say goodbye to […]

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Sunday was a busy Boston day, which began with a morning run from Aimee’s place to mine and back, in order to get the tickets for the day’s events that I had left at home. It didn’t take any longer to run than it does to drive on a bad traffic day, and the streets […]

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Aimee and I spent some quality time with TiVo this weekend, clearing off a bunch of things I’d asked her to record while she recovered from her stomach bug. I started off with Hatari!, the movie that would never end (but finally did, 2:45 later). We watched three episodes of the second season of “The […]

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My eighth Thanksgiving in the last ten years with George in the Poconos. All the elements were there: the extended family, the bad movies, the lazing around and sleeping in. The two guys not in a band:

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A nice little site featuring Ticketstubs and the stories behind them. I wonder what Roberta from Cinemania would do with that concept.

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So we saw a Honda repair show called the “Civic Center” today outside Barre, MA. Add that to our own Hondar House here in Cambridge, and you start to wonder if Honda mechanics have a certain gift for naming their shops….

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