I did it! The couch to 5k is complete! Here I am pushing towards the finish line. We need a new camera. Whatever, I am so glad I did it. As you can see I did not come in last. I also got my best time ever, not sure what it was exactly, but less than 30 minutes. Nathan ran his first race today, too.
I went to the Shakira concert last night with some friends who also have Colombian ties. I actually don’t know her latest album aside from the cover song but I had a pretty good time since she played some of her older (and better) tunes too.
My company moved to new offices this week. We were in a refurbished 19th century factory in Lechmere, now we’re in a sparkling office tower in Kendall Square. I have to say - I like the sparkling office tower. Everything is so new and spiffy, it’s fun. The views are pretty remarkable. This picture was taken in a meeting room, but from my desk I can look straight ahead and see MIT’s great dome, the Back Bay over the river to my left, and the new ultramodern biotech buildings of East Cambridge to my right. I admire the views when I need a micro-break from my work. I can’t wait to see the fireworks from here.
Saturday was going to be so beautiful that we decided to find a fun day trip. Lisa spent a long time researching the various fairs and special events going on in the area. We finally agreed on the Maritime Festival in Salem, especially since it was great excuse to take the High Speed Catamaran.
It was great - Nathan loved going on the Catamaran,though his obsession with the Catamaran’s “Cafe Car” (his generic term for snack bars - even our grocery store has a Cafe Car in his mind) got a little trying on the return trip. Even after gorging on ice cream the boy can still collapse into tears screaming “I need SNAAAAAACKS! SNAAAAAAACKS!” (he was pretty wiped out from the long day of fun in the sun).
The catamaran really is fast - it is so windy out front it can be hard to stand up. We all got really wild hairdos.
Nathan’s favorite part was the remote control boating which we visited more than once. I thought they were pretty cool too, one of the perks to having a little kid is that you get to do stuff like get a turn with the remote control tug boats.
We had a lovely trip to the harbor islands this week. It was Nathan’s first trip out there and his first experience on a ferry boat. He loved the boat ride which of course has the added feature of going right past the airport so you have planes right over your head for some of the trip.
Nathan managed to play in the water at Lovell’s Island despite the frigid temperatures.
Oh well, I’m not too inspired to write anything about this. I just thought it had been a while so there you go. We’re off for a weekend of camping today…
Nathan had a great time playing on all of the trucks and diggers at the vehicle road show this morning. Unfortunately it was very chilly this morning and we should have been wearing our winter jackets. If you look at the photos page you will see Nathan slowing adding layers as we went along. Every vehicle that was there runs on biodiesel.
One of the pleasures of working at MIT is wandering into weird geek performance are like this. See this table can hold a lot of weight. It’s loaded with blocks of concrete and the 5 people who worked un it got up and stood of top of it. That’ts it. Just the pleasure of building a table that can hold a heck of a lot of weight.
The hawkcam is back (remember season one?) This year’s camera is positioned pretty much right on top of the hawks, and the high bandwidth video provides lots of gory video. As I write one of the Hawk parents is tearing morsels from a rat for each of the chicks. Nature is not for the squeamish.
(so far only high bandwidth video is available, which might be difficult if you don’t have a really strong internet connection).
Last week Ben picked up reduced priced tickets to the aquarium for us. Unfortunately I seem to have lost them on the way there today though I really don’t know how it could have happened. I debated not going in since Nathan wanted to go mostly in order to take the Blue Line and we had already done that by the time I discovered the missing tickets. But he did have a list of things he wanted to see there like the octopus and the jellyfish (which are now called jellies by the way) and I wasn’t up for a scene. So it ended up being a very expensive visit given the very expensive normal ticket price combined with the reasonable discount ticket price. Oh well, it was a cold dreary day and we had nothing else planned.
Once we got inside Nathan quickly peeked at the jellies and octopus but repeatedly returned to the tidal pool area to hold the hermit crabs and starfish (now called sea stars by the way). I learned something new while Nathan tormented the really big hermit crab which is that the tail on a horseshoe crab is used only for turning itself over should it wind up upside down. All those years at the Long Island Sound fearing that I’d be whipped by a horseshoe crab if I got too close…
