Day 71: Iggy's Breads of the World

Happy birthday to my beautiful mother! :) To celebrate her birthday (surely this was the reason and not because I think freshly-baked baguettes are delicious), I headed to the very tasty Iggy's Breads of the World with a co-worker for lunch today to pick up fresh sandwich and some java goodness.  One consequence of the recent move of our "unit" to Building 19 is that we are just enough closer to Iggy's to have finally realized it was there, just around the corner from our new building, in a weird wasteland of old warehouses.

BBN is located in a sort of no-man's land in the strip-mall-suburbia area near Fresh Pond, at the other end of Cambridge from my normal stomping grounds, which actually makes getting anywhere for lunch rather difficult.  To get to the Trader Joe's by foot is not terrible but involves crossing some annoying streets -- and forget going to the Whole Foods across Alewife Brook Parkway.  Driving such a short distance seems silly, but might be an alternative if it weren't even more painful due to an excruciating left turn onto Concord Ave. followed by two rotaries from hell.

The discovery of Iggy's for us meant not only access to unlimited breads and coffee, but accessible access!  Er, access that didn't require entering into a mind-fog of navigating Cambridge traffic.

This evening involved enough of that, as I was reminded of the reasons I both love and hate biking in Cambridge in the summer when I bike to and fro for Calliope.  Pros: beautiful evenings solo rides are heavenly; not taking the T is always a plus; not driving a car is always a *big* plus.  Cons: hot, somewhat sweaty late-afternoon rides are not conducive to vocal warm-ups; Boston traffic is still terrifying on a bike (though somewhat more exciting to navigate, somehow); I always forget just how annoying I find the Longfellow Bridge to go up and down (I know, lame of me).  Opted for the "Harvard" Bridge on the way back, as it's much flatter, and repeated last week's veggie burger foray at Miracle of Science because that was a delicious idea.

Day 62: Johnny Foodmasters

After all of this weekend's festivities, today was primarily spent in Building 19 (i.e., at my desk at work).  But as the end of the evening drew nearer, I got very excited, for the season finale of Mad Men was approaching!  And what's more, one of the hosts had just received a deep fryer as a birthday gift (because whose dream birthday gift is *not* a deep fryer?) along with about 2 gallons of peanut oil and accompany potatoes, so we were to have Mad Men french fries.

I typically come from work when I watch tv at this location on Sunday evenings, and I'm right by Trader Joe's here in Fresh Pond, so I typically ask what can I bring?  The answer today was that more gravy was imperative.  After work I traipsed over to TJ's, and searched in vain for the item of the day.  Finally, I succumbed to asking a sales associate, and was looked at incredulously and told, "Gravy is a seasonal item."

.

?!

Yeah, right.  Maybe in, like, Canada.  Anyway, the next step was obviously Johnny Foodmaster's, the neighborhood-feeling Somervillain grocery store near the Mad Men / potato-ey fiesta, where there were plenty of terrible-for-you packets of the stuff.  Of course by the time we got there, the french fry maker herself had already eaten too many gravy fries for anymore, but there's always next time.

Day 53: Building 19

Today was The Moving Day.  All of the annotators from the Speech and Language department at BBN were moved to Building 19.  I was later told that apparently "Building 19" has cultural significance, and a quick google search confirmed that there is a chain of stores called Building 19 with the slogan "Good Stuff Cheap."  It's kind of funny and a fairly accurate description of the annotators.  They say that any change in the workplace is good for productivity (no matter what the change is) -- but I'm not totally sure about that.

Let me describe the BBN version of Building 19.  First of all, it's a warehouse--it's where shipping and delivery at BBN resides, and trucks come in to the room next door to drop things off throughout the day.  (At some point, when the fumes were bothering someone, I checked it out with a co-worker, and we were told by a guy in that department that "I sneeze once in the morning but then you get used to the fumes" and that "sometimes we turn a fan on if it gets too bad".)

Anyhow.  Our particular corner of the world in Building 19 is kind of cool.  It actually looks like the room would make an amazing bar (kind of reminds me of the pizza place in Davis that is converted from a warehouse).  There are huge, brightly-painted pipes and scaffolding above us (the ceiling is probably about 16-20 feet -- I'm not great at such estimations!), and rows of medium-sized "cubicles" -- really just desks with dividers between them.  Above the desks are fairly low-hanging rows of fluorescent lights, but the room is so big that the lighting is not actually very depressing.  The girls formerly living in 3/123 (ah, that beautiful building, with offices right next to the library and cafeteria...) snagged the first row, right by the door, with frosted glass panes letting in light (but no peeking!).

They also say that groups of people, even strangers, become closer when they have to go through a hardship -- and probably this almost counts.  So we spent part of the day trying to make the space look nicer by hanging up posters that M. (our supervisor) had scavenged and hanging up some hooks that she'd nagged us for coats/bags/hats/etc.  It's a pretty sweet work environment, if you ask me -- even came with fancy bathrooms (close by, just for us, *and* they have a decent-looking shower and lockers) and a mini-kitchen (full fridge, hot/cold water device of some sort, coffee maker, sink, microwave).

After work, I had a good-but-not-so-cheap dinner with Z. at the Druid, where a friend from my class at MIT met up with us.  We headed down the street to Courtside -- which was the deadest I have EVER seen it -- and then sprinted back to Central to catch a song or two to dance to.  Back to Building 19 tomorrow!