A Walk in the Cemetery

Who wouldn't want to celebrate their anniversary in a graveyard? Stephen and I took a walk around Mt. Auburn cemetery for ours this year. This was one of the items on my list of things to do after handing in my thesis. I had heard that it's picturesque and that many famous people are buried there (I've since learned that Buckminster Fuller is among them--I wish I'd sought out his headstone), but had never visited before.

It's amazing to me that this peaceful oasis exists in the midst of a (relatively) bustling city. The cemetery was so quiet and lush that it was startling to hear traffic whizzing by when we walked near the fence on Mt. Auburn Street.

We walked up Washington Tower and admired the view of Boston's skyline from the top, with the Charles River below. Boston is not a tall city; the John Hancock Tower, that blue one on the left, is the tallest building in all of New England, but just the 46th tallest in the US, and 162nd in the world. Yet it towers over the rest of the city, except for the Prudential Center, the grayish one on the right, which is about 40 feet shorter. I like the relative shortness of the city, though. It feels manageable to me, as someone with small-town roots. I wouldn't want to be surrounded by skyscrapers.

From the top of the tower, we spied what looked like a cathedral nearby, so we climbed down and went searching for it. It turned out to be a chapel near the entrance gate--somehow I'd missed it on the way in. The architecture was very grand for such a small building, like it was built at half of its intended size.

Since we were nearby, we stopped at Sofra for lunch. I had the bread hummus again, and managed to get a picture this time.

For dessert, I had a morning bun with orange blossom glaze, which was not at all what I was expecting it to be. I thought it would be muffin-like, but instead it was a syrupy clump of small pieces of sweet pastry, somewhat akin to monkey bread.

And delicious.

Where Have I Been?

I had good intentions of posting about Turkey as soon as we returned to the States, but then the reality of trying to finish up grad school hit and I basically sat here, at my desk, drinking strong black tea and staring at my computer screen, for the seven-week dash to the finish line. This culminated in a four-day flurry of activity at the beginning of May, when I ran two of our biggest events of the year at work, presented the results of my Masters project, and handed in a 45-page group paper for another class. Then I had a week to transform the 21-page draft of my thesis into an 88-page final product, which I turned in on Monday. I've spent so much time sitting at this desk over the past weeks, often in the wee hours of the morning, typing and shuffling papers and making checklists. That's Iggy on the right--he loves to be in the middle of whatever is going on around the apartment, even if that means squeezing himself into a slightly-too-small corner of the desk and knocking all of my papers on the floor. I actually like the company, except when he starts attacking the mouse. When I get bored, I put paper clips on the edge of the desk for him to bat around.

So I handed in my thesis on Monday, turned in the final report to my "client" on Thursday, and now I'm done with school. When Stephen and I went out Pizzeria Posto to celebrate my last day of class, he kept saying, "You have your life back!" (We were also celebrating a milestone for him--after three years working as a student teacher, intern teacher, assistant teacher, and a program assistant, he found out two weeks ago that he finally got his dream job, a full-time position teaching a combined 1st/2nd grade class in a progressive public school, which he'll start in September.) I have a huge list of things that I want to do now that my evenings and weekends are unspoken for--all of which I'd like to tell you about, but Iggy just jumped on the desk and fell asleep with his head on my arm, so I'm typing one-handed, and it's taking forever. So I'll have to get back to you. I am determined to get those Turkey pictures posted.