Happy birthday, Stephen! It's cold and rainy out, a good day for celebrating indoors. This is the kind of weather I was born into about a quarter of a century ago, or so my mother tells me: a foggy and damp December morning, the kind of weather I still love. It does chill you to the bone, though. Brrr. I'm glad we've got bellies full of birthday cookies and birthday risotto to keep us warm.We went out for brunch to celebrate (nothing says birthday like a stack of pancakes!), then saw the Drawn to Detail exhibit at DeCordova. The museum has a huge staircase flooded with natural light, and it was cozy to watch the sleet and rain run down the windows while we looked at the delicate works on paper. There were some prints, an animation project, and many intricate drawings, some so large and detailed that they made our heads spin.
I've made substantial progress in my November book, but I won't finish it tonight. I've got too much work to do before tomorrow. I'm procrastinating, as usual, but for an unusual reason: one of my assignments is to write a self-reflection essay based on a presentation I gave, which means that I need to watch and re-watch a video of myself and scrutinize my performance. You know how hearing your own voice on the answering machine can make you cringe and ask, "Do I really sound like that?" This is like that, but longer and in greater detail, and I'm being graded on my critique.
So let's talk about something else for a minute, until I absolutely have to go finish my work. How about Thanksgiving travel? I've spent a lot of time in the car over the past week (7 hours round-trip to my parents' house + 6 hours to visit my grandparents) and here are the lessons I learned:
1. Driving on the Tuesday before and the Saturday after Thanksgiving is much easier than on the Wednesday before and the Sunday after, but the Mass Pike is always crazy east of I-84.
2. The content on NPR is better on weekdays than weekends, unless you're really into opera.
3. E-Z Pass is worth its weight in gold, even if it has a silly name (actually, I think mine's a Fast Lane, since I bought it in Massachusetts).
4. If you want to travel by train between Boston and Albany on a holiday weekend, reserve early.
I wanted to take the train to New York state, but it sold out really early. I may try again at Christmas. I love the idea of traveling across the state in a comfy train car, reading and not worried about traffic or road conditions. My mom suggested the bus as an alternative, but it doesn't hold the same appeal for me. My vision of the bus = crowded, sitting in traffic, watching a movie picked out by the bus company, whereas train travel = smooth, sitting by the window, plenty of leg room, quiet, snacks. Maybe I'll take a train ride next weekend, just for the fun of it. Go to the end of the commuter line and look around, see what we find; public transportation as the doorway to adventure.
