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February 28th, 2005
09:37 pm - Another trip to Boston
In February, I've managed to travel to Boston and back without posting to LiveJournal once. All is well and while I regard this absence as a mistake, it's been for happy reasons of excessive leisure occupation. If you're a completist who wants to see everything I've written, or if you're just really bored, you might tolerate my reviews of the Hilton London Islington hotel, the Holiday Inn London Kensington hotel, my outbound flight with Virgin from London Heathrow to NY/NJ Newark and my return flight from Boston to London Heathrow.
Two highly enjoyable weeks with Meg have passed all too quickly. We spent Valentine's Day and its neighbours in New York City; I thoroughly enjoyed going to see the musical Rent, visiting an excellent Southern (American) restaurant and meeting up with  amuzulo and an off-LJ friend. Meg kindly made me two mix CDs of love songs (I understand a few of you deserve thanks here!) and bought us each a copy of a "questions to ask your partner" book as a Valentine's Day present.
The time in Boston was spent visiting a couple of museums and seeing dancingrain, ari_o, gwendolyngrace and mark356 - separately. I saw the middle two of those at Border Cafe near Harvard within 42 hours of each other, had the same server each time and, second time, she remembered that I had been there with someone else! The veggie dishes aren't fantastic, but the people who had meat dishes enjoyed theirs.
As for museums, the Mary Baker Eddy library was surprisingly good; a lavish biography about the founder of the Christian Science movement and a particularly wonderful illuminated spherical glass room depicting a map of the world. The image has the traditional orientation of the compass points, so it's "inside out" - if you were to view the Earth's surface from its centre, you'd see the "backs" of the countries. Gorgeous acoustics, though. If you have no truck for her religious tendencies, you may still enjoy the relatively nondenominational appeals for people to investigate their own faith and this alternative biography of Eddy. The MIT Museum has an excellent collection of holograms, entertaining films about robotics research and exhibits about the university and some of its famous inventors.
Other than that, the time was spent doing much of the same sort of things that couples living together tend to do: cleaning, shopping, making food, watching TV and videos, playing games... I discovered that I have slightly more of a taste for seafood than I thought I did, liking both crab cakes and grilled scallops; in return, Meg is becoming an increasing Indian fan, and we both recommend the Bhindi Bazaar restaurant near the Hynes/ICA green-line stop. I have also discovered a taste for rice pudding; both times I have had it in the US, it has been cold and sweet, whereas the dish we were served at school was hot and loathesome. Perhaps it's just that I don't really like hot milk, and I may not have been objecting to the rice in the rice pudding so much as the hot milk.
Game-wise, we have continued our ongoing battles at Rummikub (nods at Rummikub fan glissando) at which Meg is clearly better than me and Gin Rummy (at which I clearly improved over the holiday) and Meg has discovered a taste for poker. So far we've only been playing Heads-Up, mostly Texas Hold 'Em, and watching poker on TV. (The US poker shows aren't as good as UK Late Night Poker, simply because they try to pack too much into too little time. Accordingly, there are way too many hands shown with eliminations and too little time for subtlety.) I would tell you about the excellent slow-play she made - three jacks were on the board; she had the fourth and I pushed in with a full house - but on reflection that's at least as much a result of me playing like a prat than anything else.
We were silly and loving and playful and happy and everything you would like to be; things are going better than ever between us and we're both sad that we have to part when we both want to be together. However, I have to go and start making more money so I can afford to go again; work starts again at 6:30am tomorrow. Next trip booked already and I can barely wait!
Some other links for you, largely because I've really been out of interesting ideas recently:- My ISP, BT Broadband, are going to raise my speed from an only-just-broadband 0.5 Mb/s to a streamingtastic 2 Mb/s at some point in the foreseeable future at no extra cost. Hurrah, but I tend to lose far more time due to latency than to downloading large files, and I'm not sure how the latency problem can be solved. I also note that new customers get 2 Mb/s now and existing ones will have the speed boost rolled out to them over time, the direct opposite of Jeremy Clarkson's BT advert decrying the generic new-customer-wooing version of the practice. Still, I'm happy to pay the current rate for ½Mb/s, so this is a happy bonus.
- Really enjoyed reading 1up's Essential 50 video games. A little uneven occasionally, prone to deliberate obscurism in one or two places and a few claims of "First" which should be "First major". For a game fan, I've played remarkably few video games; this is as good as a book in HTML form.
- daweaver's other blog
 thesnowinsummer entertainingly points to Salon outs cartoon characters. Slashtacular! - The Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer attempt to be the first to fly solo non-stop around the world will start about an hour or so after I post this and we can all follow its progress online. Exciting - and good luck, Steve!
Current Mood:  happy
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There's a really good organic cold rice pudding on the market right now that I think is either Sainsbury's or Waitrose (poncy Southern supermarkets, I know). I think it's called Rachel's, or Rachel's Dairy, or something like that. It comes in little pots like yoghurt. Anyway. It's good, and to thank you for the food recs from you and Meg over the past weeks, I'll happily recommend it. ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/63488894/719755) | | From: | jumbach |
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| Date: | February 28th, 2005 02:52 pm (UTC) |
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For several years back in the early 90's, I was a subscriber to the Christian Science Monitor. Not because I'm CS, mind you, but because the newspaper was very interesting, had a good handle on international affairs, and fascinating human interest stories. I dropped it in 96 or so just because I had my hands full with other things, and never got around to re-subscribing. They still try, though, and I'm still on their marketing list.
Alas, the paper gets thinner and thinner and thinner, and I know one of these days, it will disappear altogether.
Nice to hear you had a good time in Boston with Meg! Bhindi Bazaar, hmm this is something I'll have to check out in the future.
I'm wondering, did you see anything at the MIT Museum that had to do with the Turing Test? (Such as computer programs that ended up in there after being tested) Border Cafe has a very very good veggie empanada. I only ever get it because it is so good, why try anything else? |
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