Under My Umbrella

There is a certain satisfaction that comes from doing something to benefit others. Yesterday four of us braved the rain to make the three plus mile trek through Boston for the 2008 Memory Walk. Every year our Fearless Leader, my Aunt S, gets our team pumped up to raise donations toward finding a cure and we all did pretty good this year, missing our goals by not too much. The walk itself is always a good time even though none of us are in shape and we all have blisters by the end of the day, we know exactly who we are doing it for and that alone negates any physical pain we may feel.

It was pouring rain this year, the first time that has happened since I have done the walk, but the temperatures were in the low seventies which made it bearable. We had to wait for Aunt S to complete her work registering walkers at the VIP tent so luckily we were on the tail end of the sea of dueling umbrellas.


The clear dome umbrella I carried did nothing to keep my feet dry in the lakes of water we trudged through along the route. I finally had to pretend it was 1984 and peg my pants just to keep the mud from collecting on the back of my legs. We wore our team shirts proudly; Matt was the only one not wearing multiple layers so he showed it off.

On top of the Prudential building there is an observation deck with a 360 degree view of the city. I highly recommend checking it out as it is a fantastic view for tourists and life long residents alike. Sadly there were probably not too many people taking advantage of this yesterday. Hurricane Kyle was the reason for the soggy day and it was cool to see how the bands of clouds shrouded the Pru.

The walk takes us down Storrow Drive, past the Hatch Shell and then crosses the Mass Ave Bridge to head back down the opposite side of the Charles River, ending back in Cambridge where we started. Crossing the bridge is an experience itself. There are units of measure painted on the sidewalk all the way from one end to the other. The bridge is not measured in feet per se but in Smoots. What is a Smoot one may ask? The abridged version – Oliver Smoot was a student at MIT, he was five feet, seven inches tall and in 1958 he allowed his pledge class to literally turn him end over end to acquire an accurate measurement of the bridge. The bridge is 364.4 Smoots plus one ear in length. I will let everyone do their own math on that one. Even though fifty years have passed since this was first completed, the painting of Smoot markers is maintained on the sidewalk. Here is the halfway point. I guess they were not too fond of their collegiate experience.

On the Cambridge side of the Charles River are some of the most wonderful skyline shots to be had in the city. The rain slowed by the time we made it to this point and the clouds cleared from the Pru allowing me to snap this cool shot with birds on buoys, spreading their wings presumably to dry out. To the left of this would be the Hancock followed by Beacon Hill (marked by the gold dome of the State House) and ending at Boston Harbor with the view of the financial district.

None of us thought the Sox would actually play their double header with the Yankees due to the intermittent tropical downpours but the lights went on at Fenway Park and they battled it out between the raindrops. Although we let them have the first game, the Sox ended the night on a high note of jumping around after their nail biting win. Here, the infamous Citgo sign (visible from the Mass Ave Bridge) marks the basic location of Fenway. Do not look for a gas station underneath it as it is simply a big neon billboard; a permanent fixture on the Boston skyline.

It only took us a couple hours to complete the walk with all the stops to snap photos, use the bathroom, or acquire snacks but because we started late we were among the last to arrive back. The free lunch I mentioned previously was the only down point in the day; the outfit providing said lunch piled the food onto the early walker plates (while we waited in line for literally an hour and a half, we watched them pass us with full plates). By the time we got there they had begun to run out of food. My Mom is a vegetarian and was not eating the steak (which is all that was left). I was mortified when they gave her attitude for asking for a couple extra French fries instead and then scowled at her as they literally tossed them on her plate. I asked for a small extra steak tip and was told no because there were so many other people to feed and we should have gotten there two hours prior. Simultaneously we all said we had, we were in line watching full plates of food go past us. He laughed and my stomach turned. Because we all wanted to make the day as excellent as possible, we decided not to let that little set back throw us so the four of us planned to meet at our place at six o’clock to go for dinner.

I had acquired ten huge tomatoes from my dad earlier in the week and was planning to make a sauce on Sunday after the walk. Dinner had not been part of the original plan but Matt and I were swinging by the grocery store on the way home to pick up a can of paste and fresh basil anyway so we added some whole wheat crusts, onion, shredded mozzarella and pepperoni to the basket so we could have a nice homemade pizza night at our place with the ladies. It went over so well there was not a single slice left.

It is no secret that I am not the most domestic of gals but the one thing I make really well is a red sauce. Since so many of my bloggy friends share their awesome recipes, I figured it would be nice to do the same. I am not including measurements as I think adding or subtracting is all to taste but this is the recipe from fresh tomatoes so please bear in mind this is definitely an all day endeavor. I personally think there is something blissfully therapeutic about stirring sauce all day; it allows me to slow down a little bit. It is especially nice to do this on a Sunday with football on in the background. Enjoy!

Red Sauce

Roughly dice and remove seeds from 8-12 large tomatoes. In a medium sauce pan bring to a slow boil uncovered. Leave on medium heat uncovered and boiling for approximately one half hour. Stir frequently bringing the liquid up from the bottom of the pan. Sprinkle salt, pepper, sugar, nutmeg, allspice and additionally desired spices on top and let sit. Chop up a whole bunch of basil and fold into the mixture. The tomatoes should still be pretty chunky but watering down somewhat. Reduce heat to a simmer and cover.

In a separate frying pan brown some garlic then add red onion and fry until the onions start to become clear. For a meat sauce, add the meat to this mixture and cook thoroughly. Add this to the sauce and stir in. Add one small can of tomato paste and stir in to thicken. Splash in a small amount of red wine (about an eighth of a cup) to balance the garlic and add flavor.

Continue boiling the mixture on simmer for two to three more hours, stirring about every fifteen minutes. Taste every half hour or so as the flavors begin to blend and add spices as desired. The longer it cooks the thicker the sauce will be. Allow to cool (covered) for about a half hour prior to eating.

Almost Time to Put Away the Flip Flops

As of three days ago, fall officially began but I did not need a calendar to remind me this year. In the past few days I have noticed that the leaves are turning in random pockets and progressively in the past couple weeks the temperatures here in the northeast have started the inevitable downward spiral.

Even though I am a summer baby who is still a firm advocate for the hotter the better, there is something comforting about the early days of fall. Perhaps it is the re-introduction of warm colors, like red, brown, orange and yellow, which provide me a stronger bond to the Earth instead of my usual Water connection. After a summer full of an almost inexplicable need to be in or around water of any sort (but primarily the ocean), there is a peaceful feeling that comes from abandoning my fins for the land. Cooler temperatures allow for light sweaters and hot bowls of chicken soup with stars and even though I am not a big proponent of exercise I love to take off for a woodsy hike or city stroll on a sunny day.

This Sunday morning me, Matt, my Mom and our Fearless Leader my Aunt S are taking part in the Alzheimer’s Association Memory Walk in support of and to honor the many family members and friends we all know who suffer with effects from this terrible disease. This is my fifth walk, sixth year collecting donations and I actually hit my goal this year which was really exciting. Sadly, the forecast for a nice sunny stroll like we have had in most years past is not looking good.

The event of course is rain or shine. The good news is they are doing a big lunch at the end for all the walkers and it is only a short walk from the Cambridgeside Galleria, past the Museum of Science, down part of Storrow Drive, over the MIT Bridge and back down the opposite side of the Charles River to end back at the Galleria. We always manage to have a terrific time walking no matter what it is like outside and this year will be no different regardless of the predicted showers. Maybe that will prompt all of us to walk a little quicker and return home a little faster just in case the Red Sox Yankees game is not rained out.

Luckily the Sox are in the Wild Card spot regardless if we beat the Evil Empire and really luckily the Yankees are all done no matter if we ever play this final series of the season or not. It just makes me happy to think that maybe now Giambi will get rid of the cat on his face that has clearly not helped them garner a spot in the playoffs. I understand that an outfield is slippery when wet but it always aggravates me that rarely ever is baseball played in the rain. Games can always be made up in off days or double headers later because they play roughly 160 games per regular season. Then October arrives and the beginning of fall brings an end to the baseball season and the beginning of football.

Football games are played in rain, snow, sleet, hail, driving winds, 100 degree temperatures or any other element Mother Nature can throw at non-domed stadiums and teams suck it up and play because they have to. With only seventeen weeks of regular season play there is no time for a make up game. They come at you hard and fast and leave just as quickly. Just like fall in New England.

Autumn brings my favorite nationally celebrated holiday Halloween, the perfect excuse to cuddle up on a Saturday morning with a cup of tea, and the death that brings the rebirth of spring. It is the season that is necessary for leaves to fall and blanket the Earth beneath the snow of winter when the trees, and I, hibernate. Fall is the season of change.

In honor of that change and the many others I have personally made lately, I present this brilliant piece of musical prowess to keep everyone entertained while I pack up the summer clothes and pull out the wool cable knit sweaters.

Time to change.

Maybe I will leave one pair of sandals beside the sofa, just in case we have an unexpected heat wave in October.

“You’re Always Rockin the Random Hair Colors”

On the phone the other night with my sister I told her that another crazy color has now made its way to the top of my head and in response she said word for word what I have quoted for the title. She immediately followed that up by requesting pictures which I was hesitant to commit to at first (it was such a big change I was even a little shocked) but in the end it got me thinking that she is completely right. I love to mix it up. It is only hair and eventually it will grow out and be cut off. For at least the next month this is me; I will own it and to be honest it is starting to grow on me.

There are now only about four colors my hair has never been -- pink, blue, purple and green -- and I am quite sure I will eventually get around to some of those. Not green though, that always makes me think of the early days of hair color when women would go blonde and then get in a pool. To be fair, I have also never allowed myself to go gray; that is the color I try to avoid by using all these other ones. Someday when I am old and my roots start to grow in at a 70/30 proportion I will just dye it grey and get it over with. I will go with the stunning Jamie Lee Curtis look and be the sexy older gal who rocks short, gray hair. Let me just make a point to note that I do not consider Ms. Curtis to be old, despite how those sentences appear to connect. I am only in my thirties so if I was on the same track as her I still have fifteen years of insanity before I flip to silver. Then again, maybe that would be a good time to go purple.

Over the last year or so I would spend a ridiculously long time staring at the boxes full of smiling faces and end up reaching for auburn with a sigh, wishing I had the guts to do something extreme like this again.




I mentioned that I have never gone pink but it certainly looks that way so let me explain. My hair was as short as the photo on the right but I still wanted to do something outrageous while I visited my friend D and her then husband A in North Carolina so A grabbed his little neon hair ties and D grabbed her fake hair extensions. He spent about two hours turning my tiny hair into little nubs on top of my head then placed the extensions all over the back. We went dancing that night and it was a blast. Removing all of them the next day turned me into Foxy Blonde due to the platinum afro I was left with. This color made it about a year -- the maintenance with root touch up became aggravating so eventually it went back to auburn.

Another short lived, but much more difficult to get rid of, color was when I went jet black. That was fun but harsh in contrast to auburn and I did not love it. In addition to the color, this was during a time when I was attempting to grow my hair out so there was (to me) a lot of very dark hair. After a few days of looking in the mirror at a new color I usually start to think ‘it could be alright’ but that feeling never came. Within days I was doing everything possible to try to soften it but as a painter I know that it is always easier to deepen a color than lighten it and it took a really long time to get rid of. I eventually gave in, going shorter with the cut, and pulled out the bleach to strip the black out which is what led me to sandy blonde this past summer.

After close to two years of bouncing between brown and auburn then finally on to (hold me back) sandy, reddish blonde I had enough of my boring head so while picking up body wash the other day I spent literally thirty seconds in the aisle of happy boxes; just long enough to scan for something wild. I thought it might present a little deeper but no; it looks as if Strawberry Shortcake is my sister. Think fire truck, the heart on “I ♥ NY” shirts, lights on an ambulance, stop signs. Yeah. On the plus side she dresses really cute -- she knows how to rock a hat and pink patent leather Mary Janes with a jean skirt and a hoodie so I suppose there could be worse characters to resemble. She is adorable and apparently a really good person, not to mention “spunky” which I certainly have going for me. Hmmm, I actually have that entire outfit.

Yesterday while touring the Boston Harbor Islands (which I will expand on at some point) Matt snapped a couple photos of me that I am willing to share.

Holding up our fine city.

Let me out of here!

This wall was at least four feet thick.

I took the one of the two of us together. Matt looks exactly the same as he did four years ago.

Easier

Eight years ago I was a single girl living in a studio apartment and taking care of everything myself for the first time in my life. Prior to that I had roommates, family members and boyfriends who helped (or sometimes did not) with bills and such but I had never lived somewhere all on my own. I was dating and meeting all kinds of people as well as working for a healthcare facility in their Information Technology Department, spending time with family and friends and generally trying to figure out who I was in my late twenties. Life was pretty good.

A year before, true to form in my inability to maintain a career in one industry, I was laid off from a mortgage company along with a few friends. Some of those friends went to work for other companies while others of us continued to look for something that we would be happy with doing. One of the people from our former company went to work at a fairly big name and while there, met a guy who had recently moved to the area that she was sure would be perfect for another friend of ours who sometimes considered herself single. I agreed to take a ride up at lunchtime one afternoon so they could meet because, really, what else was I doing?

We called fix-up-friend at her desk and decided to meet out on the smoking patio. Our soon to be fixed up friend was not a smoker but the rest of us were so it seemed like a logical choice. They came out together and he shook both of our hands with a smile as he introduced himself. He was medium height, I guessed 5’-8”, really thin with brown hair and brown eyes and he had a bounce in his step. I liked him immediately; we instantly clicked and did not stop talking in the probable ten minutes we were there. At the time I was in a flailing relationship that was capping off well over ten years of monogamy and he was to be set up with my friend so I did not think much of it.

Fast forward a few months - they had gone on a couple dates but did not click and I had finally become the independent, single girl I was dying to be but did not know how badly I needed until it happened. We all landed jobs in or out of the same industry and most of us kept in touch. So when he asked me out I had to say “Well, you dated my friend, there are rules about that kind of thing.” He seemed to accept it and we stayed friends while she and I gradually lost touch as the calendar turned over to Y2K and he moved back to his home state of New York.

During the new millennium year he and I would occasionally visit each other for full weekends and chat on the phone to keep each other up to date on our latest obsessions or job changes. We never ran out of things to talk about and spent countless hours smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in New York diners or Boston restaurants. It was nice to know someone who lived in New York, someone that could show me around the city and I thoroughly enjoyed his company but felt it was too long a distance to make anything work.

That holiday season was very busy and I neglected to get in touch with my friend to wish him a merry Christmas. I finally sent him an email in January of the following year and felt terrible until I received his reply which detailed that he was now living in Ohio and oops, sorry he forgot to let me know he had moved. I was floored! We had seen each other for a fun Boston weekend in November and two months later he was living in the Midwest. We spent many hours on the phone over the next few weeks discussing all the reasons why he was tired of New York and had to move, as well as how he had begun putting a lot of stock into who was really important in his life.

Strangely, something happened that spring and we began to get closer although we were living further apart geographically. Our conversations turned from surface based to depth and in May of that year we both nervously decided it was worth giving a relationship a shot even though he was in Columbus and I was in Boston. During this same time period, his brother in law was buying a new car and donated his old, red, GEO two-seater as a gift but said he had to pick it up to acquire it.

In May he flew out to Boston to pick up the car and although I was not originally intending to make the journey with him, I spontaneously decided to do so since it was the long weekend. In the week leading up to his arrival I spent time selecting some of my favorite music and recording it onto cassette tapes so he would have something entertaining for the drive. Mixed tapes are truly a lost art form. The two of us drove through 950 miles of rain and thunderstorms listening to the cassette tapes, seeing the country and acting like idiots at gas stations all over the northeast. We were falling in love.

Shortly after that he moved back to the Boston area and acquired an apartment in Somerville that he barely stayed in because he was always at my house. Life was fun and times were breezy. Then the country experienced the terror of September 11 and it made us both harshly put into perspective what truly mattered in our lives. We realized in those few weeks after the tragedy that for years we had been pseudo-dating, wondered what we were waiting for, and officially moved into a place together.

That fall we took a road trip to Cold Spring, NY, a quaint town full of adorable antique shops and a view of the Hudson River to drop jaw over. We had been a couple times prior and loved to explore all of the little treasures the town had to offer. I spent some time in one shop picking out a John Wayne pocket knife for my Grandfather for Christmas and then we were off to The Hudson House for the most delicious brunch, complete with homemade strawberry butter and warm popovers.

While in Cold Spring he had purchased a simple diamond ring and in November he presented it to me on one knee asking me to marry him. The next ten months were a whirlwind of hall selection, flower arranging, dress fittings and invitation sending. There were so many times we both wanted to give up and just fly off to Las Vegas to get married in a pink Cadillac by some Asian Elvis with fake mutton chops but we stuck it out and the day arrived. Six years has flown by in the blink of an eye.

Happy anniversary Matt.

The Effort, The Voice, The Missing Pieces

Like Aerial in The Little Mermaid, I feel as if my voice has been literally pulled out of me. All of my words are seeming to fall short or are far to convoluted to complete a train of thought that anyone can follow other than me. In times like this I tend to turn inward, review myself and eventually everything comes spewing out in a matter of a couple days but it has been far longer and I can not wrap my head around anything because everything is up in the air and out of place.

Life will never be the fantasy world I want it to be because I am not the only one living it; true I am the only one living mine but with seven billion-ish people on the planet that is quite an array of outside influence in my choose-your-own-adventure story to make things turn in ways I never considered. This is not a scripted movie. At least I hope its not. Never in my life have I lived with regret and I do not intend to begin doing so now. I have to persevere and contemplate but make my choice for myself without looking forward or back. I can only do what is right for me and I can only live in the moment right now. Changing the details of the past or mapping out every aspect of the future is impossible.

My life is in flux in many ways right now and although it is all connected it makes me feel as if every wire has been pulled out of my personal circuit board and left exposed to create sparks separately. Individually they are basically harmless but blend all the sparks together and that will create a level of voltage that I have never quite faced before. Instead of dwelling in the drama that comes along with life’s currents I have made a conscious decision to cap off the ends of those wires and shove them back inside my brain as I throw the switch to kill the power.

At this moment I am going to shake it off completely, continue to load up on analogy but relate to nothing other than my own heart and mind. I will not speak of it anymore because I need to figure it out without the billions who live for themselves telling me how to live for me. Moments of fun seem far gone and I want to get them back.

In the spirit of that, here is a story to break the tension and perhaps help my mind relax back into its old comfortable place of goofiness. This is created completely from the 41 words on our Scrabble board and fifteen additional words so the story flows. Where I have added words they will be underlined. Enjoy!

Delay icy exit, or dote as chefs amp the crew with a dowel. Find the ream in a bin. Tug it down dazed, jot XI in ink on the keg. He gave no rune? Oy. The fib is flat as a rug or bib. Even a trio of grazers get whiny in the attic. Los squalos, la puma.

Squalos is not actually a word but I am sure we used it as if it were something in Spanish before acquiring a dictionary. Does any of it make sense? Not really but then that is what I feel for the world right now, this just brings me back to a simpler time and makes me feel like maybe there is still a fun loving and loved person trapped inside. Like a New York bagel; crunchy outside, all squishy and warm on the inside.