| esquire within |

Victory tastes like dark chocolate truffle with hazelnut.

Back in December, I went to a Christmas party in Chinatown.  One of the buses stops right by our house on the way to the train station, so I figured I'd hop on around 8:45 and be fashionably late downtown.

Well, I missed that bus.  Realized I was walking out the door empty-handed, so in the time it took me to dig through the closet for a bottle of vino and get downstairs, the bus had come and gone. 

I resigned myself to waiting another 50 minutes for the next one.  Not really a big deal when you can do that in your living room.  When I went back outside and climbed the hill to another bus route, I noticed about seven tow trucks hooking up cars that seemed to be parked perfectly legally.  Fearing for the Volvo, I called the Girl -- she checked the Somerville webpage and, lo and behold, a snow emergency had been declared, effective 9:00pm, and despite a complete absence of street signage to communicate this information, parking on the even-numbered side of the street had been banned.  (There's not so much as a single "No parking during a snow emergency" sign to be found.  How you're supposed to be aware of this procedure, I have no idea.)

The Girl came down with the keys and we hopped in the car and drove around a bit, looking for a spot.  Found one about a block down, where a one-way road intersects with our street.  There wasn't a "No Parking From Here to Corner" sign posted on the last light pole, which had only a street cleaning sign attached to it, so I assumed we were good for the night.

Imagine my surprise when I dug the car out the next morning and found a blazingly orange ticket peaking out of the snow drift next to the front tire.  I picked it up, half hoping it had blown off someone else's ride -- until I saw our license plate number scrawled along the bottom.

According to the esteemed officer, we had parked within 10 feet of a fire hydrant.  A $100 violation.

@#$%^&*!

I looked around, not a fire hydrant on the street to be seen.  What the hell?  

This is about the time the GIrl came down to help dig out the car. And that's when I spotted it -- turning back, I noticed a blocky red knob up the one-way road that intersected with the street.  The Girl was rapidly dispatched to get the camera and a tape measure.

Ten feet my ass.  We were a full 23 feet and 7 inches from the nearest hydrant, which wasn't even on the street I had parked on.  I mean, I could maybe understand if we had parked, say, 11 or 12 feet away.  But 23 is very obviously to the naked eye not 10.   (I measure distances using the Girl as a unit of measurement -- at 5 feet tall, she makes guessing a tidy affair -- and we were clearly over four Girls away from the hydrant.)  So either the cop was drunk or he was just being an ass.

Or both.

We snapped a photo and filed a sharply-worded appeal online.  The grudging response from the Traffic and Regulations Office was exactly what I expected; I'm thinking about framing the administrative dismissal as my first win as a solo practicioner.

The digs.

I've been meaning to post some pictures of our new apartment, now that we're finally settled in.  Well, almost.  There's a reason you don't get to see inside the closets.

Anyway, I present to you Number Five:

 

Schizophrenic.

Three days ago, it was 70 degrees.  And here's the view from our back deck this morning:

Incongruity.

So the Christmas Tree is up and all the windows are open.  The living room smells of evergreen and I was barefoot in shorts this morning.

It’s 70 degrees.  Flipflop weather.  Just another December in – wait, New England?  What?

I appreciate this bizarreness all the more for the fact that on October 15, the day we moved into our new apartment, it was practically a blizzard outside. 

Global warming is a myth.  A myth!

Yesterday was the Girl’s last day of class, so we pulled ourselves together this morning and went to Davis Square.  Her final exams are Monday, at which point I get my wife back for about a month, and more or less stress-free for the first time in, well, maybe for the first time in memory.  I anticipate an increase in holiday baking corresponding directly with a decrease in the size of my jeans.  They always seem to shrink this time of year…

So, Davis Square.  I’m a fan of Diesel Café, despite the fact that their WiFi is $4.95 an hour, $7.95 a day or $13.95 a month.  Ridiculous.  It’s almost 2010 – you shouldn’t have to pay for wireless internet at a café!  I mean, it’s not like we’re in Wyoming, for Chrissake.  It costs them maybe $25 a month to wire the place, and I’m sure the draw of free internet would more than pay for itself with customers coming for a place to work/study/surf.  (Do we still call it surfing?  I feel like I haven’t heard anyone say that in a while – “surf the web.”  Is that too dated?  Do we just browse now?)  Anyway, I refuse to encourage this pay scheme, hence my blogging into a Word document for upload when I’m back in our balmy apartment. 

I’m also a fan of the place despite the all-too-often occupation of a Booth-for-Four by one asshole with a laptop.  Like the surly-looking broad behind me.  But I digress.

My body is feeling a little rebellious today.  I recently joined Boston Sports Club, and they threw in three personal training sessions with my monthly membership.  I’ve met with the trainer twice, and he has no qualms about kicking my ass.  Which I suppose is what makes him a good trainer.  I may opt to buy a few more sessions with him – he’s good at identifying my weaknesses, and I’ve already learned a lot about maximizing my gym time.  I fell off the wagon somewhere in October – I think it was around the time I went to Chicago for a week and the weather turned foul.  I’m lifting more but running less, which is fine, I suppose, except that latter is centering and the former is not. 

I think today might be my last chance to run comfortably outside.  I should take advantage before Boston remembers it’s, you know, WINTER.

Addendum: So perhaps I judged the above-referenced surly-looking broad too quickly, as she made a point of offering us her booth right before she left.

Even the meat heads are paying attention.

Louis Gates may be ready to "move on," but folks in Boston (at least the guys at my gym this afternoon) are still talking about the incident in Cambridge involving the Harvard professor and the police officer who mistook him for a would-be criminal entering his own home.

The black Harvard professor.  The white Cambridge police officer.

I can't help but wonder how the situation would have played out differently had the cop been black.  Would Professor Gates have reacted so viscerally?  What if Professor Gates was white?  What if they both were?  And I wonder, too, if Professor Gates had not been a Harvard professor?  Or even a professor at all?  What if he was a construction worker?  How would that have factored into this confrontational dynamic?

Tempting to focus simply on the obvious racial variables and ignore the gaping class divide between a beat cop and member of Cambridge's intellectual (and financial) elite. 

Not that I'm poo-pooing those racial variables, but still, I suspect what happened between those two men is more complex that it seems at first blush.

At the Feast of St. Joseph.

 

   

Of course we found the street party right after we'd eaten.