All posts in: boston

adventures
18 Jun 2013

fever pitch

On Sunday The Boy and I walked home from the train station feeling mutually lifeless. Drowsy. Spent. A fun-weekend-with-houseguests-and-friends hangover – happy feelings tempered by exhaustion, a looming dread related to the amount of dishes, laundry, and grocery shopping you haven’t been doing. Maybe a touch of an actual hangover?

The topic of “alright what do we have to do today” came up quickly. The dishes. The laundry. The grocery shopping.

“Will life be simpler,” he asked me, “once we move to a smaller apartment?”

I laughed, for a dozen reasons. “When we move to a smaller apartment” is also once we are married and home from our honeymoon. It is also when we no longer have to deal with our questionable landlord, when we get our annual raises, and when we will have… well, moved. Past tense.

Yes, our “smaller apartment” will have a dishwasher, it will have laundry, and we will have fewer belongings and a little more cash. But we still have to do the work to get there, and once we arrive I’m sure that the first words we utter will not be “man, life is so SIMPLE NOW!” We will probably say something like “Man, wouldn’t life be SIMPLER if I had a place to put my cat’s litter box? Or if my couch would fit in my living room?”

Less than a month until the wedding and I think “fever pitch” is the best term for where we are at. It’s like I want to have a point in time I can look out for when things will feel back to normal, but there’s really not a normal to go back to. I’m busier than I can comprehend, busy, yet again, hurtling myself into a brand new situation. Will life be simpler? Will life be better? Will I have more time to do the things I like? Will all of those good dreams come true, but then I won’t be able to make myself happy enough to enjoy any of it? It’s exhausting, it’s dreadful, it’s hard to maintain energy/hope/sanity with this lifestyle, but I must get something out of it otherwise I wouldn’t keep choosing it.

Or more accurately, we keep choosing it. I am so so thankful I have this weird other person in my life, my partner, my mate, my boy. We probably shouldn’t keep encouraging the other person that moving is a good idea, that moving into a tiny apartment is a wise choice at this juncture in our lives, that living in Boston continues to be worth the sacrifice. One of us should be mature. Logical. Etc. No luck. We are just two fools, cramming our lives full of whatever we can get and of each other. We are getting married in a month and then taking off across the ocean and coming back and moving across town and then doing the laundry, the shopping, the dishes.

Maybe we’ll have so much fun, we’ll move again next year.

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adventures
10 Jun 2013

a mighty weekend

FRIDAY

  • Invented some questionable vanilla-cornmeal cupcakes with a lime buttercream frosting after work.
  • Accidentally watched a hockey game at a friend’s place. I sure accidentally watch a lot of sports in this here romantic relationship.
  • Forgot to bring invented cupcakes with me. Of course.

SATURDAY

  • Ate a cupcake for breakfast.
  • Accidentally went to the Pride Parade.
  • Looked at three apartments
  • Left money and an application on one. Like all adventures in Boston real estate, crossing fingers it works out, but also hoping that maybe it doesn’t and we have to keep looking.
  • Made a domestic arrangement with The Boy – he would do all the laundry and buy all the groceries, I would make him a highly-detailed grocery-list and stay home and clean. It takes about 2-3 hours to do laundry, so that was a lot of cleaning. Good thing I had every single dish in the entire apartment to wash.
  • Did I mention that potential-new-apartment has a dishwasher? And free laundry in the building?
  • Made a broccoli salad. It was good, and I don’t even like broccoli salad.
  • Did a significant amount of wedding planning.
  • Watched the Season One finale of Game of Thrones.

SUNDAY

  • Made waffles. Second weekend in a row. I was fitted for my wedding dress two weeks ago and had it taken in a smidge. Watch me have to get it taken right back out in a month.
  • Made salted caramel brownies.  A month or so ago, I made this recipe three times in two days with no issue whatsoever. This time, I burned the caramel TWICE, sending noxious smoke into the apartment while The Boy taught a trumpet lesson in the front room. Ahem.
  • Ran 2.69 miles. Got really sweaty and exhausted.
  • Flat-ironed my hair into an oblivion and trucked out to the end of the orange line for a barbecue with some of The Boy’s teacher friends. Ate two meals, three desserts, and drank what appeared to be an entire bottle of wine. Natch.
  • Force-read the last 50 pages of a book before passing the heck out at 9 p.m.

boston
15 Apr 2013

my place

I had a post I wanted to write today, but I obviously can’t write it now because it’s just not happening. I live in Boston. I run. I am a person who lives in Boston and runs.

And that tiny bit of Boston you saw looping on your news stations all day? That the bit of Boston where I work, where I walk, where I take phone pictures while I’m waiting to cross the street. That is my place. I was there yesterday, on my day off. We tried to out-walk a slow-bus down Mass Ave and walked the neighborhood from end to end. We caught the magnolias blooming on Commonwealth.

I wasn’t there today. I won’t be there tomorrow. But I might be there on Wednesday.

I just don’t know what to do with all this. I don’t have anything inspiring or profound or touching or useful to share; I just couldn’t say anything, but I couldn’t say nothing. So sad. So, so sad.

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books
25 Mar 2013

home is where the rodents live

Me: This is getting ridiculous…

Him: I know. I had trouble crafting an adequate text message to [name of the Slum Lord to whom we sign away our rent money redacted]. How can you say, in a text message, that there hasn’t been a problem the whole time we’ve lived here, it’s just that for the last two weeks it’s been like, a freaking mouse circus in here.

Me: Um. You mean mouse circus like the upstairs neighbor from Coraline?

Him: Of COURSE! That is EXACTLY what I mean!

 

I’m just going to let y’all pretend like the mice in my apartment are as creepily hypnotizing as Mr. Bobo’s. Yes, yes, my place is just full of adorably jumping mice! It’s extra adorable when Peach catches them in her little mouth and carries them over to me to put on a little private jumping dance. Just darling. Pest control will be here on Tuesday; I will be so sorry to see them go.

 

books
15 Feb 2013

look out, jackson-town

Tomorrow, I leave for Jackson.

Isn’t it fun when there is a song that describes exactly what you are about to do with your life? Ask me about the time my sister and I took a train to Chicago and played Sufjan Stevens on our speakers, for the benefit of all of our fellow passengers. Actually, you don’t have to ask because that was pretty much it.

Speaking of my sister, my sister called me last night and said, “I wanted to tell you about this book I can’t put down. It’s called Seraphina.”

Speaking of my other sister, she is going to pick me up from the airport tomorrow!

Speaking of my other-other sister, there is probably nothing I love more than looking at her Tumblr.

I miss them. I missed Thanksgiving and Christmas and I haven’t been home since July. I’m going to read some books on the plane. I’m going to pretend like I’m not making a thousand wedding decisions that are currently wiring my jaw shut, or traveling by air, or that my trip isn’t desperately short, or that I’m leaving Peach here with minimal human interaction, or that I didn’t buy my sister a birthday gift yet, or that my review is not done, or that we didn’t do laundry because of the storm so I will be arriving in Michigan slightly smelly and throwing my suitcase directly into the wash.

None of that. Happy trip fun times! Sisters! Mommy! Daddy! Corgis! Vacation days! Plane books! I’m thinking Aristotle, Dante, and Brene Brown.

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books
11 Feb 2013

blizzard of ’13

I moved to Boston in late 2009. Since then, some kind of apocalypse has been slowly afoot.

In just over three years, we have seen and survived…

  • An earthquake
  • Some tornadoes
  • Hurricane Irene
  • Hurricane Sandy
  • A flu epidemic
  • A blizzard that has a name but I can’t express to you how much I hate that naming non-Hurricane storms is like a thing now

Snow doesn’t scare me. I’m from Michigan. Snow just irritates me. I respond to this irritation by ignoring it completely, like a kid who’s acting up.

Work closed for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which is just ridiculously unheard of and should have been a tip-off that this snow would not be ignored.

I sent The Boy to the store for weekend provisions, but didn’t bother to give him a list, assuming that by Sunday we would be back to our regularly scheduled grocery shopping. He came back with 50 Types of Carbs, of course, so we ate through two bags of pita chips and a loaf of bread while the snow fell and fell and fell and fell…

Somebody in this apartment was a rockstar and went out yesterday for protein and vegetables and dish-washing liquid, and also shoveled the steps and the sidewalk so I didn’t have to wade through 2 ft of irritating snow trying to get to work this morning.

Somebody else in this apartment stayed entirely sedentary for the long weekend and therefore did an impressive amount of reading.

So what’s next, nature? Any volcanoes in New Hampshire that might erupt? A tsunami? Acid rain? If I move, will a black cloud of disaster follow me to my new location?

adventures
14 Jan 2013

input/output

In accordance with my self-imposed More Documenting credo, I have been filling three little notebooks with The Things That I Do. The red notebook is for books (because one list isn’t enough), the pink notebook is for meals (because I am in a perpetual state of Meal Planning Angst, unable to remember a single dish that I am capable of cooking).

But the blue notebook is filling up the fastest. The blue notebook is for TV shows, movies, and podcasts. And it’s telling a pretty ridiculous tale.

In the past two weeks, I have ingested:

  • 9 episodes of Breaking Bad
  • 7 episodes of Arrested Development
  • 5 random episodes of other TV shows
  • 3 feature films
  • 3 Netflix documentaries
  • 3-5 podcasts A DAY

In fourteen days. FOURTEEN DAYS!

Don’t worry, I have tidy excuses for all of it. And I am a consummate multi-tasker – the only inputs that are single-tasked are movies and Breaking Bad, the rest are coupled with more productive work. But FOURTEEN DAYS?!? Really??

I think that I started this little blue notebook not only because I wanted to keep track of my listenings and watchings, but also so I can earn some kind of metaphorical gold star for all the media I ingest. Credit for being culturally informed. But instead, I am feeling a little sheepish, like perhaps I am not able to sit in a quiet room, or worse, my brain is being filled up faster than I can process.

So I will limit my aural intake, because I am a person who likes limits. I will make up an arbitrary rule to help me achieve this because I am a person who responds strongly to arbitrary rules.

From here on out, podcasts are for Outside of the House and audiobooks are for Inside of the House. And the walking in between is for thinking.

Not for stewing, not for planning, not for obsessing, not for worrying. Just thinking, while I walk, stopping only to contemplate a nice view.

 

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boston
27 Dec 2012

Christmas 2012

This is the only picture I have from this Christmas; apparently my camera decided to eat them all. No matter, this picture is more than adequate to capture the spirit of the day. We hung around in our PJs. We dressed ourselves in our new Christmas finery as we unpacked (see: a purple scarf from my Smallest Sister). My parents sent us his and hers electric blankets which are divine. Peach, as you might note, agrees. I introduced The Boy to the American classic that is A Christmas Story. Let’s not talk about how in the world one can live nearly 28 years without seeing this film.

Our first Christmas without our families. Our first Christmas together. What with an unexpected midweek trip to the Midwest and all, I didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to sit around and scheme about what could make this holiday special.

So I went with old standby, the obvious choice for memorializing any occasion: making a shit ton of food. Far too much food for two people to ingest in a reasonable amount of time. After multiple trips to many different grocery stores, I prepared the following menu:

Christmas Eve

  • Appetizers
    • Fancy brie and sharp cheddar with toasty white bread
    • A cheesy frozen appetizer from Trader Joe’s
  • Dinner
    • Marinated sirloin. Cooked in the broiler despite every internet site insisting that in order for sirloin to be edible it simply MUST be grilled. It came out fine, guys.
    • Brussels sprouts with bacon
    • Mashed red potatoes with roasted garlic
  • Dessert

Christmas Morning

  • Tackett family traditional sour cream coffee cake
  • Tackett family traditional sausage gravy
  • Biscuits from the NYTimes (first batch came out flat, second came out poofy! A Christmas Miracle!)

Christmas Dinner

All this talk of tradition, which ones you will bring together, which new traditions will you create. This is strange for us, in particular, because The Boy is the youngest of two – most of his childhood traditions in his home have long been abandoned in favor of sleeping in until 1 pm and opening presents whenever. And me? Well, I don’t love traditions as much as require them. I hoard them. Some I likely urged upon my family as a youngster – or more likely, cried my eyes out when that tradition did not appear in subsequent years and then whatever it was would reappear the next year. Lately my sisters and I have turned traditions into sport. For example, as I was Skyping home on Christmas morning, I was informed by my sisters that they had begun a new annual holiday tradition of singing Christmas carols in the style of Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln. I have no idea what this means, but there you have it.

I chose to bring to the table the Traditional Tackett Family Christmas Breakfast, and bought him a Traditional Tackett Extremely Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle for us to enjoy. He enforced his own family’s tradition of attending a motion picture in the evening. I forced upon him my own traditional love of musical theater and bought tickets for Les Mis without consultation.

As for new traditions, I decided that my life does not allow nearly enough opportunities for mimosa-drinking, so we cracked open a bottle before noon. Merry Christmas, indeed.

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adventures
20 Nov 2012

NY, NY

Getting from Boston to New York City is obscenely easy. It is also affordable. Of course, staying in New York City is the opposite of affordable, so we never want to go. However, we bit the bullet a few weekends ago and spent a night in Manhattan.

I wish that I had a ton of pictures to share with you, but The Boy is the designated picture-taker when we travel, and it seems that he did not tend to his duties during this particular trip. This is not a complaint, because when we travel, I am the designated worrier, arguer, stare-vacantly-into-the-abyss-out-of-stress-er, and am generally a nuisance. I do enjoy traveling, but only about six months after I return from a trip.

New York is especially bad, I think – I can handle the noise and the chaos and getting around town, but there is something about that city that just puts me on edge. There is nowhere to sit down, nowhere to relax for just a minute, nowhere where you aren’t aware that you are in NEW YORK. Argh.

My shoulders retracted themselves from my ears for about one hour over the course of the weekend, but I was three cocktails into dinner.

Moral of the story: be more drunk.

Anyway, since The Boy is opposed to planning ahead of time, and I am the Queen of Planning Ahead of Time, grumpy old me got to set the day’s agenda.

So we took a tour of the NYPL’s Schwarzman Building, bought a couple paperbacks at Books of Wonder, and spent an hour or so at the Strand. Naturally.

For The Boy, I made a jazz brunch reservation, and he bought a Wynton Marsalis t-shirt from a vendor on the High Line.

For exhausted, grumpy old me, we paid 10 bucks to hop on an earlier bus home.

 

 Otherwise, a nice weekend.

boston
19 Nov 2012

2012: week forty-five

November 11 – November 17

I am about done with this mood. The only thing I ever want to do is read pop-psychology and write in my orange notebook and feel feeeeelings. I am annoying myself.

Can we talk about how there are only six weeks left in 2012? What a year, guys. Some days I think back to January, February, March etc and I feel triumphant. Some days I feel chewed up and spit out.

One thing that doesn’t suck – Thanksgiving! I appreciate this holiday more and more as I grow older, probably because I have also become a better cook. A holiday devoted to food is one thing… a holiday devoted to cooking? Divine.

This is my second Thanksgiving away from family, sadly, since I am currently lacking these things called “vacation days,” and if the library is open the day after Thanksgiving then you better believe that I need to be there! We are heading out to East Boston to dine with friends and their family, which is really a good way to do Thanksgiving – to be the culinary “guest star.” You can devote your attention to a single dish, putting in the flourishes the host wouldn’t have time for and buying those weird ingredients. Also, you take the train home and your kitchen is waiting for you, clean.

My household will be providing a pumpkin pie, some brussels sprouts, and some kind of corn bread casserole as concocted by The Boy himself. I think the chosen recipe calls for green chiles and at least two types of cheese. I made my pie crust today.

Maybe Thanksgiving will perk me up, and if it doesn’t, I will have another chance – the following Thursday I have been invited to an event called “Thanksgiving 2!” Maybe I can squeeze in an extra Christmas before actual Christmas? Just shove a major holiday into every week, keeping your spirits buoyed with delicious food, drinks, and general cheer all year long?

2013?

 

Reading:

  • So much nonfiction.
  • I am also reading a book about a boy who survives a tornado and finds out he is a sylph. I rarely subject myself to such “paranormal romance,” and I’m trying not to roll my eyes too much. Also, I can’t spell sylph. Also, I am 150 pages in and am not quite sure what a slyph is.

Watching:

  • A little Breaking Bad.
  • A little How I Met Your Mother.

Listening To:

  • Shovels & Rope – O’ Be Joyful
  • Anya Marina – Slow and Steady Seduction
  • Tom Waits – Small Change
  • Oh, and podcasts. It has been a very long time, but I am now almost caught up with You Had To Be There, and SO EXCITED that Sara and Nikki are going to have an MTV show!!!!