Starbucks - The Surrogate Office

Today I went to Starbucks.

I will confess that I am more of a Dunkins girl, but my Evil Twin had called me urgently telling me that something crazy was going on at the Starbucks over on Storrow Drive.

A little corporate craziness was afoot and I had to check it out for myself.

I usually associate Starbucks with oversized couchy chairs, big mugs, Missed Connections, and Macs. Not at all so at this particular Starbucks!

This is the Starbucks where people who've been downsized go to "work" when they can't tell their spouse that they are technically no longer actually employed.

I couldn't stop staring. There were deals being made on the sidewalk out front, folks with complicated looking blueteeth contraptions clapped to their ears, job interviews being conducted in comfy chairs, lots of keyboard keys being poked at urgently....

It was weird - it was like being in an office. An office with a really comprehensive cafeteria!

PS: The Starboobies are a gift. Who doesn't love a little subtle ta-ta graffti?

It appeals to my sense of adventure.

There is a hole in the ground over by Copley Place would appear to drop you straight into New York City.


If only it were that easy.
I would definitely go more often.

Parking with the Spirit

Last week my Evil Twin and I were in her car and she was about to park on Comm Ave.

Blinker is on, car is in reverse so presumably the little white lights in the rear are on, and there's no traffic so she begins to reverse into the space. I will also put it out there that both my sister and I are city girls and KNOW how to parallel park without hesitation, yo!

Suddenly a bonehead from Connecticut come bombing up the road and comes to a screeching halt behind her - well maybe not screeching because Connecticut cars don't screech, they politely come to a stop and offer you a Bremner Wafer before asking you to move.

Anyway this knucklehead rolls down the passenger side window and screams:

"WHAT IN THE CHRIST ARE YOU DOING??!?!?!"

Huh?

Reverse lights on, blinker on, backing up, angling the car toward the curb...... hmmmm......

"HAIL MARY WE ARE PARKING THE F*CKING CAR!!!!"

Brockton ROX!

Ok I will be the first to admit that until about two weeks ago I was like "Brockton? Blegh!"

Brockton has this kind of grody reputation that is only half deserved. Parts of it are sort of grody, but other parts are actually pretty cool and funky.

And I am irrationally biased against the word "Brockton" which is often pronounced "Brawk-tin". Ugh. "Brawk-tin Rawks" Gah.

My Evil Twin's friend Andy manages the Brockton Rox.

A few weeks back he invited us to a Patriots Charity Softball match hosted by Kevin Faulk and not only did we get to shake hands with the likes of Laurence Maroney (friendly!), Rosevelt Colvin (charming), Ben Watson (shy!), and Ellis Hobbs (party boy!) but we also got to meet the militia who fire the muskets for the home game touchdowns - very exciting!

Since we had a great time at that event, saw that Campanelli Stadium was an actual stadium and not some dusty concrete sun trap, and were basically treated really well by staff that actually seems to enjoy what they do, we figured why the heck not go to the Brockton Rox home opener.

Well for one thing the game was on a Friday night at 7pm.

Ok, it's the Friday night of Memorial Day weekend and for one thing traffic was AWFUL and matters were not helped when Evil Twin said "this traffic's not so bad" just before we came around the bend into bumper to bumper traffic about 3 miles up from the Braintree split. If yer from heah, you know exactly what I am talking about. If not, well there are no words to adequately express that kind of frustration.

So instead of trying to get down to Brockton via 93 to 95 to 24 to 123, we cut through Weymouth and took 18 to 123. Sounded simple enough huh.

And we were making ok time until an unfortunate left turn was further compounded by a erroneous right and we ended up in the sh*ttiest part of Brockton.

So we stopped at a crappy little gas station, which smelled alarmingly overpoweringly like gasoline, and where the attendant gave my boobs directions and where PeanutButterJellAmy bought a banana to further confound the attendant.

Then just as we thought we were on the right road, the road was suddenly closed by the fire department because suddenly something was on fire...

Just when we were deciding to head back to Boston, or to anywhere else but Brockton, we magically stumbled across Campanelli Stadium.

Why press on you ask? Just to give you an idea of why this is worth it:

Parking - $5
Tickets behind homeplate - $12
Concessions - ~$15 per person, we were hungry.

And the game was actually exciting - there was a heckler behind me who kept me in stitches, bases were just barely stolen, a couple of thrilling slides into home, a sequined Neil Diamond impersonator to lead the crowd through Sweet Caroline at the seventh inning and fireworks after the game.

I would definitely go again.

And if you get a chance you should too. At the most you are going to be out like $20. And if you don't drive, there is public transportation down from Boston and back.

Go Rox!

The OTHER dimension

Sometimes when I am looking for something that I could have sworn was right there one minute ago, I am convinced it's been sucked into that OTHER dimension.


Turns out it's been getting sucked in to a GIANT RING OF MATTER.





Yeah, sometimes thinking about the universe and how big it is and how big two clusters have to be to crush together to create a GIANT RING OF MATTER blows my frickin' pea-brain.

Something is wrong in the universe.

Today the westbound lanes of the Mass Turnpike were jammers while the people in the eastbound lanes just sailed by. Basically is was busier heading OUT of the city instead of IN.

What the f*ck is THAT all about???? On a Monday morning???

This trend is also occurring in traffic heading north into Boston on 93 at 5pm.

It used to be that traffic coming IN to the city during the morning rush hour was the b*tch, as was the traffice heading OUT. Now it's all reversed.

I blame global warming.

Wait a minute! Where's me jumpah?

There is a nightclub a few block from where I live that has been closed for a little while now.

The owner is currently trying to sell it and transfer the liquor license. There was meeting to talk to the neighbors about this plan and some neighbors are for it, others against it - almost everyone though thought the new owner was a bit shifty.

I know that there are many reasons for and against having a night club in a primarily residential neighborhood - everyone has an opinion.

Personally, I don't care but last night a female patron from the other neighborhood nightclub (we've got two plus a "gentleman's" club) squatted and peed on the sidewalk.

Two things about that: GROSS! and GREAT! that she managed sh*tfaced to pee on the ground. I can't do that - stone cold sober and I would STILL piss on my ankle.

Seasonal Disorder

Ok so realistically it's only May 11th.

But the recent spell of fine weather means that everything has bloomed and gone green. Well mostly everything - somethings are still branchy, which then makes them look dead.

And they really aren't dead, it is just still kind of early in the season, and they are just taking their sweet time.

Which reminds me that spring and fall aren't so much seasons as kerfuffles that winter and summer go through to get here.

Seriously.

Stuff you never remember in time....

So after some yoohoo banged up the Shampagne Super Nova I had to rent a car. Because quite frankly I am not going to take two buses for over an hour just to get to work in the morning.

I went to the local Enterprise car rental agency and got the cheapest car they had. But because I don't carry collision on my own car, I had to make sure I had it for the rental.

So I bought it the extra insurance. Boy am I stupid.

Turns out I already have it with the credit card I used to pay for the freakin' car.

And of course the woman at Enterprise was like "well that's not our problem and there is NOTHING we can do about it now".

Ugh.

Next time it's anyone BUT Enterprise.

Lost and Found

This is the first season that I have actually followed the show Lost on a regular basis.

And I have to say that I kind of find it addictively maddening.

People can't seem to figure out if these characters are in purgatory, in heaven, in another dimesion, or on Fantasy island (I can just see Ricardo Montalban stepping out of the jungle cooing about the fabulousness of real Corinthian leather....)

And really I cannot see where this story line is going - I have this mental image of a bunch of flipped out writers, typing away madly in some Hollywood office, hoping to figure it out themselves before the network cancels the show and forces them to end the series by claiming it was all a dream, or in the imagination of an autistic boy....

Anyway, everyone has a theory, including me. I think that the series is based on the song Lost in the Supermarket by The Clash.

See if you can follow:

"I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality"

The survivors all thought they were escaping Australia - "special offer". Then they were all hiding or masking who they really are until the crash made their true personality come out "a guaranteed personality".

"I wasn't born so much as I fell out
Nobody seemed to notice me
We had a hedge back home in the suburbs
Over which I never could see"

They fell out of the sky, rescuers can't find them ("notice them") and the "hedge" is a well guarded perimeter.

"I heard the people who lived on the ceiling
Scream and fight most scarily
Hearing that noise was my first ever feeling
That's how it's been all around me"

The people on the ceiling are those weird invisible people chewing monsters that they first had to deal with that made some freaky noise.

"The kids in the halls and the pipes in the walls
Make me noises for company
Long distance callers make long distance calls
And the silence makes me lonely"

The pipes in the walls would be the hatch and the long distance caller making a long distance call is your one Naomi (I think that's her name) who parachuted in with a satellite phone.

Are you with me so far? Makes sense sort of huh.

AND there is no resolution to the song really either.

Hmmmmm....... I think I am onto something here.

Yogurt is ALIVE

My two favorite writers are Ellen Gilchrist and Laurie Colwin.

I picked up "In the Land of Dreamy Dreams" at the Goodwill this weekend, and of course read it through in one sitting instead of doing laundry as planned.

And then because it was late and I needed something quick, I turned to my favorite food writer Laurie Colwin for a little inspiration. Sadly Laurie died at the age of 48 about 10 years ago, but her writing easy and earthy and her recipes always work out for me.

Especially her yogurt recipe.

Basically it calls for bringing milk to the boil, letting it simmer for two minutes, letting it cool for about 20 minutes (or until 110 degrees), whisking in some plain yogurt (1 tablespoon yogurt to two and a half cups milk), putting it all into a glass jar, wrapping the jar in a towel or scarf (it's a yogurt babushka!), and letting it sit over the pilot light all night. In the morning stick it in the fridge and in the afternoon - TA DA - yogurt!

It's delicious stuff.

Although I will confess that first taste was the hardest. I wasn't positive that I wasn't going to be stricken with some savage yogurt food poisoning ailment that would send me to the crapper for a few days...

But I've made it twice now, and so far so good.