Day 60: Commencement

Lesson learned today: sleeping through alarms and phone calls due to karaoke-induced exhaustion and therefore arriving three hours late to your MIT graduation does not mean you cannot walk. It did, for me, mean that people were worried, but also that I got to stand in the shade with friends for 60 minutes rather than sit in the beating hot sun with people I barely knew for three hours and then slip into the line to walk across the stage to receive my diploma.


It was a beautiful day until about 3pm, well after graduation was finished.  Commencement at MIT is held in Killian Court, the lawn in front of the dome on Memorial Drive, on the Charles River.  Absolute perfection for a graduation ceremony in which everyone, undergrads included, gets to walk, so there is a lot of watching and waiting.

After graduation, I did a brief stroll around campus with the friends who came (E., T., and two of my roomies), which was lovely and resulted in many pictures.  Then to BCS, for a brief reception, and back home for some rest. Z. cooked one of my favorites, mac and cheese, for dinner, which was great, and then we all met up with some folks from my choir for the monthly karaoke sesh at Charles Playhouse.  Great end to a somewhat stressful day.

Cheers to MIT for being organized enough to remember to call the name of the girl who overslept by about three hours.

Day 57: The 'Snake

Tuesdays are serious days this summer.  In addition to Calliope (choir), which has always been on Tuesdays, the Straw Dogs softball games are also on Tuesdays this summer, meaning that I dash from the Fresh Pond area down to MIT around 4:30 and don't get home until 10p at the earliest, after Calliope.  Today was the first of such days, so I suppose I shouldn't be speaking in generics quite yet. However, I have a fairly certain feeling that getting home at 10pm on Tuesdays is not going to be the norm, due to the presence of a nice little place we like to affectionately call the 'Snake (the Rattlesnake, located on Boylston St. in Back Bay; pic above taken around the corner on Newbury St.).

It's just around the block from where the choir practices (at Emmanuel Episcopalian, a really pretty church which is beautiful on the inside... the kind of place I used to fantasize about as a kid who wished she went to boarding school; yes, weird).  And it's got some tasty stuff.  D., who just joined the choir after I pestered for a while, was fairly disgusted by my zest for the macaroni and cheese, which, in addition to being basically the antithesis of all things vegan, includes (along! with bacon) Taza chocolate.  Sound gross?  Maybe, but I find it almost as delicious as the peanut butter burgers at both Bukowski's.

Yay softball!  Yay choir!  And yay for adding more chocolate and peanut butter to the world. :-/?

Day 7: Atwood's

I love the fact that that in Cambridge, conversations often start like this:
Him (or her): Want to get dinner?
Me: Sure, where should we go?
Him: I'unno.
Me: How about we walk to [insert area of Cambridge here, e.g. "Inman"] and find a place?
Him: Sure.

And end like this:
Me: So Inman has a ton of places... what about...
Him: [Insert name of really awesome place, such as Atwood's]
Me: Perfect!

Atwood's is a place right at the end of Inman that I didn't find out about until I moved from Columbia St. to Plymouth. It was, for awhile, the closest bar to my house (until Lord Hobo arrived and ruined us with laziness by being so close). The best thing about Atwood's is that, apart from having delicious brisket, veggie mac and cheese, and a damn fine grilled cheese + soup combo, on nearly any given week night there is free live music. Last night was bluegrass circle night, which in theory means anyone can come and jam. However, unlike the Cantab (more on that in another post), which has a *serious* open bluegrass circle on Tuesdays, there were only about five guys at Atwood's last night, sitting in a small circle around a bar stool upon which were placed their five beers, and they seemed to be a little bit organized.

Anyhow, it was the perfect location for sitting at the bar and chatting for several hours on a Monday night after work. Cheers to Atwood's.