Unsolicited Advice

The beginning of cherry blossom season in Boston. Many varieties of cherry have flowers that conveniently color-coordinate with common allergy medications. (Not pictured: Sunshine.) It took me an embarrassingly long time to connect the dots in re: cherry trees. I was aware that cherry wood was a popular option for New England furniture, and that American cherry trees did in fact produce the fruit that you eat. But being as the Japanese make a very big deal of sakura petals and New Englanders don't, I was unaware that all varieties of cherry bloom copiously in early spring, even the North American ones, until I got up one morning a few years ago and noticed that it had snowed flowers while I wasn't looking. The drifts accumulate through early-mid May. Cherry trees must grow well out here and need little maintenance, as they seem to be the default choice for things like road medians and sidewalk planters. Weeping willows also bloom during 'mud season', as the l...

So, everybody else enjoying Snownarok 2015? Jazmin and I were pretty well trapped in our apartment for about 36 hours. We met up Monday evening before the snow really got going and enacted our Joint Household Emergency Preparedness Plan, which consisted of plugging all of our favorite widgets in now, in case the power went out later, and then wandering around the Stop & Shop for half an hour, looking for foods we felt would pair well with a regional weather emergency. I'm pretty used to this, from my days as an undergrad. My alma mater is in a ski town that has a population of 50k when school is in session, dropping to 30k in the off season. Municipal services are a bit of a joke, and Arizona has little regard for human life. Hand to God, my favorite part of weather panics in Boston is that they shut down the T, which means the city is closed for business by default. 'We could technically still run the subway,' is the thinking, 'but if we do that, some idiot will ...

I spent six whole hours of my life in Lowell this past weekend. Unless you have some sort of fetish for former industrial mill towns, I don't recommend you ever do this. It's a collection of old, rusted-out hulks being slowly overtaken by a collection of slightly-less-old hulks that haven't quite completely rusted out yet, broken up by a brief section of town that is being restored by a bunch of hipsters to a condition where it appears to be in the process of rusting out, but isn't. I understand there are people who enjoy this, in the same strictly-intellectual way I understand that there are people who enjoy living in the Sonoran desert. I am very much a city mouse, so mainly what it looks like to me is civilization giving up in its senescence, settling into a grayed-out state of minimal survival while it waits to eventually die. The signs on the Commuter Rail fascinate me. They don't quite match the newer signs on the T. The typeface is subtly different than the...