31

31 is less of a no big deal event than 22 - because it least then, you're 22.

I took myself for some shopping and a massage. I think I'm going to be a massage therapist.

Dinner with the family was very good; good food, lotsa laffs, fun times.

I'm still here, just ramping down the weekly posts, as note previously.

Have a good one!

Books & Boston in The Globe

The Globe highlights 29 books that are set in the various neighborhoods of Greater Boston. A highlight:


WEST ROXBURY
8. “The Blithedale Romance”by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852)
“And, by-the-by, we were favored with many visits at Blithedale [Brook Farm], especially from people who sympathized with our theories. …In their view, we were as poetical as Arcadians, besides being as practical as the hardest-fisted husbandmen in Massachusetts.”

For the rest of the list (and it's quite a fun little read), go to:

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/07/05/literary_boston_neighborhoods/

Behind the Scenes at Samuel Adams Brewery

Good ol' Tigh, my Stonecoast Spouse, my Grad School BFF, was in Boston before heading up to the summer residency (the first one I'm not going to since 2007...sad...) Since he used to work at the brewery, and now works for their sales department in CA, we hit up the Boston Beer Company brewery down the street from me in neighboring neighborhood Jamaica Plain for a visit. It was fun! Here, a pictoral blog:

barley - where (part of) it all begins

Casks - keg barrels

Thassa lotta beyah

Tigh, telling the story of his first day at work

Hanging out in the tap room

Me, wearing Tigh's old cover alls, with owner and founder Jim Kock in the background

Tigh and Bridget hitting the taps

Even though I'm not drinking much these days, I popped a bunch of Tums, drank a lot of water and braved the belly's storm. There's no other way, if one is at the brewery, to get around it. For Tigh it's old hat but for me, it's like Grown Up Disney Land!

We went back today so he could say good bye to everyone. I met Dean & Bob from the commercials. As noted on Facebook, I have a crush on both of them - Bob's head is rub-a-licious and Dean's eyes match the color of their Boston Lager.

Cape Cod for the 4th

Ali cia had a huge group of people (20 in total) down the Cape this weekend. It was tons o fun and the best was that the sun came up and stayed up for our vacation weekend. How nice!

Fun things to do:

• bocce - we were doing well the first three tosses then it all fell apart
• grillin' and cookin' - I liek the kitchen there a lot
• making sand castles - esp. since there's a kid nearby and I don't look nearly as silly as if I were alone
• lobsters and steamers - lobster was super sweet and tasty
• ladder ball - a game anyone can play. I love it. I'm obsessed.
• spectatoring for sporting events - Sox finally pulled out a win, Wimbeldon mens was loo-oo-oong (I'm starting to like tennis since Rene is so into it...I think I'd like to try it and be very bad at it) and the hotdog eating contest
• camp fire - there's a fire pit now and we all sat around it at night and had fun playing Would You Rather; I'm also partial to Marry Chuck or F*ck.
• and, of course, my favorite: swimming in the ocean - great waves on Saturday

Of course, none of this would be half as fun if it weren't for the company. I have good friends. And they have cute children. T was down with DTC and she's such a cutie pie. Very expressive face and says "Mumma!" and "Hi!" clear as day. So fun. I srsly can't wait until I'm old enough to have one. Hahahahahaha. Ugh.

To wait out traffic, I hit up the Cape Cod bookstores. I wrote about that over at the poetry blog, so if you feel like seeing my latest acquirements, check it out.

Cilantro - if you don't like it, you're deformed

Summer time brings out the salsa for a lot of folks - lovely, cilantro filled salsa. For instance, Mom and I went to Margarita's yesterday (there's one in Weymouth now but it feels so very different from the one in Orono where I saw Howie Day play on St Patrick's Day in 1999) and their tasty salsa reminded me of this fun little diversionary story about cilantro I once heard on NPR.

Apparently, there are people out there who loathe the taste of cilantro. To them, it is like eating poison, or soap. The reporter on the story hypothesized that this was because the cilantro haters had some kind of gene that we non cilantro haters didn't have. Turned out it was the opposite: cilantro haters are missing a sensory of a scent and the lack of this abilty to smell this scent is considered a deficiency! Ha!

Full story here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98695984

This Week in WTF - Mow the Lawn

We had family dinner tonight at Mom's. Greg told us about a commercial that was quite eyebrow raising:



Ah, yeah. Tulips on the mound... Wow.

This Week in WTF - Gainesville Mayor Arrested for Nudity

Hooray for Wonkette for providing this link:

http://old.accessnorthga.com/banners/officialdocuments/Musselwhite.incrept.pdf

This is the best police report in the history of the world. Former Gainesville Georgia Mayor Mark Musselwhite was arrested for nudity. He was drunk and camping. Oh my giddy gumdrops. As I noted in my comments on the Wonkette, this makes me wanna go camping in Georgia real real bad.

Best line: "[I] ASKED HIM IF HE'D DO THAT AT WALMART HE SAID NO HE WOULDN'T."

Nothing You Can Do But Dance Dance Dance

When the report was still just a hospitalization, I posted a blog entry saying I hoped it wasn't true, but, tragically, it is. Michael Jackson is dead.

This is so strange to think about. I don't really believe it yet. And yes, he was a really wacked out person, but I loved his music. It's funny how music can move you so much, even though it comes from someone who perpetrated some very morally questionable behavior. But my, does it move me.

I remember when I was 5 and 6 years old, how much I worshipped Michael Jackson. That's when I knew I wanted to be an artist of some kind. He inspired my imagination and my creativity. I had a red jacket and a white glove and I would play my Thriller tape on my purple plastic tape player stereo and dance and sing for hours on end. My Thriller tape actually broke because I wore it out.


Later, in college, my recreation of Beat It, from lying on the couch, to looking over kitchen counters, to breaking up a pretend dance-y knife fight, was quite the party trick. At weddings, I grab a gentleman's coat and pretend to be Michael, with the tiles lighting up under my feet (so I like to think). And when I taught middle school and high school, I kept the end-of-class Friday chaos under control by having Dance Party Friday for the last five minutes of class, if everyone was good for the first 75 minutes, and then showing off my Michael Jackson moves. Nothing endears you to a group of high school kids like the willingness to be a total and utter dork in order to keep them from bouncing off the walls. And they loved it, so they've said.



Last night, to commemorate this artist whose work meant so much to me, I stayed up listening to his songs and other 80 pop dance tunes (thanks to the "Thriller" station on Pandora.com radio) and dancing the night away into the evening. I hadn't had so much fun in ages.

So, yeah. Yeah, he was definitely a freak. But, my oh my, was he a musician, was he a genius, the likes of which we won't being seeing anytime soon, I don't think. and I'm sorry to see such talent and inspiration go. I hope his troubled soul is at rest.

Don't take things for granted

My friend from high school, Pete, (admittedly more than my friend for senior year - my high school boyfriend, my prom date, my Lollapalooza mate and a whole bunch of other Very Significant Things) who has lived out West for quite a while now has come to live back in Weymouth at least for the summer. He and I got together and did some Old School things, like take the train to the Other Side Cafe on Newbury St and walk the street to the Public Garden (which looks SO PRETTY right now) and then Boston Common, through Downtown Crossing to the train, where we parted ways.

It was a nice little night and along the way, I found a post-it, attached to a large ceramic replication of a leather cowboy boot outside a cowboy boutique called Rick Walker's. I had spotted another post-it note before that stuck on a chained up bicycle so I stopped for the second one. Guess what? It was a good thing I did, because I found it was a part of something called The Note Project. My note said, "Don't take things for granted," and I reposted it on a fancy modern parking meter, pictured above.

The day after Michael Jackson's passing, this is a prescient note to find. I think, though, that I'm doing well with following its advice. Case in point: Pete and I. We hadn't talked from 1997-2004 and then one day in Cape Cod, I ran into his mom and brother, gave them my number to give to Pete and we've been talking again ever since. So, there you go!

NOOOOOO - I know he's WEIRD but I can't be without my MJ

I know he's a big giant freak, but the world can't be without Michael Jackson yet! He has to be okay! Ahhhh!!! I mean, c'mon, Thriller. What's better than Thriller? Nothing. No album is better than Thriller, as far as being Important to the World-at-Large.

http://cbs5.com/national/michael.jackson.hospitalized.2.1059770.html

I hope this is a publicity stunt to promote the new tour or something........please please please...

Going Weekly

I think I'm shifting from a mostly daily to a mostly weekly blog and not holding fast to any rules on posting. I'm going to concentrate on other things. But I'm still posting to all the other blogs in the meantime, so check those out.

http://neophytepoetics.blogspot.com/ (very sporadic entries)

http://dreamingbridgedesigns.blogspot.com/ (just made a whole bunch of new necklaces, too)

http://my-mediterranean-diet.blogspot.com/ (this I'm sticking to posting daily entries)

And if you just miss me, here's the collection of link for my "web presence" as of today...

http://dreamingbridge.blogspot.com/

Enjoy, all five people who read this blog!

Cute Little House

Mom and I are always remarking on "cute little houses" that we see while driving around town. She's looking to downsize.




Here's one in Winthrop, ME, which is a nice little town. A cute little white house with black shudders. I'd put a purple door on it, too.



There's a purple house with white and yellow trim on VFW Pkwy that I see on my way to work. It is always so adorable.

Obsessed with cute little houses....