{"id":3938,"date":"2007-07-14T08:33:24","date_gmt":"2007-07-14T15:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2007\/07\/14\/3938.html"},"modified":"2007-07-14T08:33:24","modified_gmt":"2007-07-14T15:33:24","slug":"a-few-more-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2007\/07\/14\/a-few-more-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"A few more notes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I neglected to say in my previous Boston entry: many thanks for the hospitality, to all who put me up in Boston and environs. Much appreciated as always.<\/p>\n

The drive back to Boston from Vermont went well. I mostly listened to NPR, including a local talk show discussing farmer's markets; the expert they had on said that the one in Madison is the best of the farmer's markets they've studied, by a variety of measures.<\/p>\n

Wednesday evening I had dinner with David H at Diesel Cafe<\/a> in Davis Square. (Warning: their website is Flash-heavy and slow to load.) Later, we wandered over to get ice cream, but discovered that Davis Square was totally packed at around 8 or 9 p.m. on a weeknight. Wacky. Anyway, turns out that Ben & Jerry's chocolate low-fat frozen yogurt tastes pretty much like ice cream to my uneducated palate, rather to my surprise. I ended up walking back to Michael's rather than waiting a long time for a bus; it's only a mile and a half, which didn't seem so bad in theory, but I wasn't reckoning on the heat. Note to self: in the future, go back to visiting Boston in October when the weather is nicer. (Except for weddings, of course.)<\/p>\n

Thursday I met Kate for lunch at Chef Orient<\/a> in Framingham, an unusual restaurant where you can either sit on the Japanese side or the Chinese side, but you can order from either menu on either side.<\/p>\n

Then I returned the rented car to Enterprise, and got a ride from them back to Michael's; the guy who was giving people rides home was new to the area, but Google Maps on the iPhone let me navigate back successfully. Whew.<\/p>\n

Thursday evening I had dinner with David VS at the new Porter Square branch of Addis Red Sea, an Ethiopian restaurant. Pretty tasty. The injera that they serve by default is a non-fermented wheat-based version that I didn't like quite as much as traditional fermented tef-based injera; turns out (though we didn't know this) that (according to a review<\/a>) you can request the traditional version.<\/p>\n

Friday morning, Michael and I got lunch and then he took me to the airport. The flight to Chicago was smooth and on time. I took the Blue Line to Mary Anne and Kevin's, where I got to hold and feed baby Kavya for a while; then M and I came over to the con for the opening party. I wrote most of this entry Friday night in my room at the con; the party was fine, but I was tired and a little mopey and needed to do some long-delayed editing, so I left early.<\/p>\n

Boston visit summary: really great, as always, to see everyone. I wish it were easier--a bunch of people who are important to me have ended up there over the years, but I can't live there. I wouldn't be able to cope with the weather or the culture or the traffic, but mostly the weather. And, y'know, I don't see my California friends nearly often enough, so I don't see any reason to think I'd be more likely to see Boston friends if I were living there. But it ends up meaning that when I do visit, I try to see friends in a dozen households (spread from Vermont to Connecticut) over a week or two, which means I don't get enough time with anyone and I miss seeing some people entirely. And I'm not very good at keeping up with people when I'm not out there.<\/p>\n

It's also a little complicated by the number of my friends (both in Boston and elsewhere) who have kids now. All the kids I know are great, and I enjoy playing (and, as they get older, talking) with all of them; but it means that sometimes I get little or no grownup time with old friends. (Often, I get to chat with friends after their kids have gone to bed--but by that time, the grownups are often exhausted and needing to go to sleep themselves.) This isn't a complaint against kids; kids are great, and plenty rewarding, and fun. But I do sometimes miss the long one-on-one conversations I used to have with various friends. But life is full of tradeoffs; there are plenty of other things that keep such conversations from happening, even with friends who don't have kids, including my own laziness.<\/p>\n

Anyway. My mood's also being influenced by getting a note from an uncle on Friday morning (which I didn't see 'til Friday afternoon) indicating that Grandma is unlikely to last more than a few more days. Part of me wants to get on a plane and go say goodbye in person; part of me doesn't. I don't have coherent enough thoughts about that to write about it.<\/p>\n

And I think part of what's going on is just exhaustion. I was tired already when I reached Boston, and I've been running around more or less nonstop ever since, with not enough sleep. I'm surprisingly coherent, given all that, but I really need to try to get more sleep, and more rest, this week. If I don't fly out to WA to see Grandma, then the week looks like it'll mostly consist of holding Kavya and\/or helping M & K with household tasks, plus trying to catch up on all the magazine stuff I haven't been doing. So that should probably be manageable.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I neglected to say in my previous Boston entry: many thanks for the hospitality, to all who put me up…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-updates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}