NE Snowstorm Day 3 - It's Official

9:00 am
The weather man made it official....we've got a Nor'easter on our hands.

10:00 am
I really do love my husband and cat, but I'm not sure I can stay at home for another day. I've just looked at the bus schedule and planned an escape route to TJ Maxx and Old Navy.

10:05 am
Just looked out the window again...don't think we'll be going anywhere today.

2:00 pm
We've worked up the courage to go shovel again and dig out the car.

7:00 pm
The snow has stopped and the wind has picked up. The weather man was just on forecasting 50 degrees for the high on Christmas.

NE Snowstorm Day 2

9:00 am
Made waffles and bacon to fuel ourselves for the shoveling to come.

11:00 am
Shoveled out the car as you've seen on news footage of New Englanders digging out from snow.

12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Knitted, watched bad TV. It's been snowing all day. What we shoveled has now been covered with a fresh layer of snow.

7:00 pm
Rick made delicious burgers with blue cheese. I made an acorn squash.

9:00 pm
Watched the movie "Bottle Rocket." Hoping snow will let up a bit tomorrow.

Preparing for our first big NE Snowstorm

People are absolutely freaking out about the snowstorm that is anticipated to hit us this afternoon/evening. The Governor even ordered all non-essential government employees stay home from work today. Here is how my snowstorm day went:

8:30 am
Dropped off Rick at the T station.

8:45 am
Went to Roche Brothers grocery store to pick up cardamom for a recipe. The parking lot was packed. People were circling the parking lot in their cars waiting for a parking space to open up like buzzards circling an almost dead animal. No cardamom but did get some asparagus for a salad.

9:15 am
Stopped at Bay Sweets Middle Eastern Grocery on my quest for cardamom. People were also stocking up there. Pita, olives, and yogurt were bought in mass quantities. One gentleman bought three quarts of olives. Really? This storm is only supposed to last the weekend. How many olives can you eat in one weekend.

9:30 am
A. C. Moore craft store. I had to return some yarn that I did not use on a project. Total old lady thing to do, but I wanted my two bucks back.

10:00 am
Costco. I was there yesterday and it had been nuts. Today was even worse. At least 75 people were lined up outside the store waiting for it to open at 10 am. All I wanted to do was an exchange on some sheets. Boy I picked the wrong day to do that. Lines were long but I made it out of there in a half hour.

11:30 am
Watched The View and had a little lunch. Also ate a couple Christmas cookies. No snow yet to report. Noon news was doing it's best to get everyone nervous about the storm.

1:45 pm
Just finished knitting a winter hat...not for the storm, for a Christmas gift. First tiny snowflakes begin to come down.

2:30 pm
Light dusting of snow on the ground. I'm off to pick up Rick from the T station. Although we have a driveway, we usually park on the street. Our driveway is very narrow and has huge cement walls on both sides (remember, the house is built into the side of a hill). I'm thinking that back in 1925 they were only concerned about fitting their Model T in the driveway hence it being so narrow. Everyone who lives on our street has there "spot" where they park everyday. Today when people left for work they put parking place holders in their spots. Most have orange road work cones marking their parking spaces. This city must be missing an awful lot of orange road cones. One person marked their spot with their trash can. I was told by a neighbor that you can pretty much put anything out in the street to hold your parking space. Since I haven't "borrowed" an orange cone from a city crew yet, I will be placing a large Lowe's leaf bag full of leaves in our spot. The Boston Globe put together a nice slide show of parking-spot savers here: http://www.boston.com/realestate/gallery/parking_space_savers?pg=7

3:15 pm

Traffic wasn't bad on my way to get Rick and back. Once we arrived home we decided to walk down to the village for a few ingredients needed in our dinner. The snow was pretty wet and the wind strong. The snow was like little needles on our faces. After our supplies were bought, the trek back home wasn't too bad. It was uphill but the snowflakes were bigger and softer.

5:00 pm
Just in from shoveling. For once in our lives we have to shovel our own stairs and sidewalk. Every other place we've lived was rented and we had landlords and snow removal services to take care of these tasks. As I am typing this, the news just reported that it's snowing one inch per hour. The problem with living on a hill is where to put snow! I ended up shoveling the snow up against the stone wall. There was no way I was going to haul it up onto the hill. Plus, I think that snow melts here within a week. It's not like Minnesota where once you've shoveled snow in one spot it doesn't leave till March.

5:05 pm
Rick fixed us a little snack and a drink to warm us up from the inside out. Then we began to make dinner...Mughlai Chicken. Recipe can be found here http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/nigella-lawson/mughlai-chicken-recipe/index.html . It was delicious.

7:00 pm
Rick took the next round of shoveling while I took a soak in the tub.

9:00 pm
The winter wonderland outside continues. Rick and I hunker down for a few games of Cribbage.

10:30 pm
Rick doesn't want to play Cribbage anymore. Probably because I beat him 3 times. Yep, that's right 3 times.

Here is a pick of our street:

12:00 pm
Bedtime.

Granted, Mass Winter is a Hoax

While temperatures in MN hover in the imaginary numbers, we've had a warm spell of late. It's the middle of December and the herb garden we inherited still has green thyme and rosemary. Thanks, previous owner hippies. Yesterday Liz picked up leaves in a tank top and I had St. Louis levels of wet boxer elastic after my ride in. But while temperatures have been mild, winds have been wild. I'm told that this is normal for Boston, and since we live on a pretty substantial hill we take its full force right in the kisser. And by kisser, I mean house. Last night was among the worst; any 'coons that may have been lingering in the trees are probably now residents of Martha's Vineyard. But hey, I'll take 60 degrees in Dec. any time. The ice storm that decimated Western Mass. last week didn't touch us, although 20 miles east of here looks like a war zone. The ocean does strange things to the weather patterns that I don't understand. Amateur meteorology was easy in MN and MO--look west, wait. That doesn't seem to work here.

In other news, I'm writing my first grant proposal. It is on Alzheimer's disease. I'm kind of new to this so I alternate between feeling like the smrtest person in the world and an incompetent boob on an hourly basis. Sadly, I think only one of those can be correct. Maybe if I cure it they will let me change the name to Sherva's disease. Rub it in the faces of those uppity Gehrigs, Hansens, Korsakoffs, and Christmases. Huh, turns out Ricketts is named after a person, probably me. With my legacy secure, I think I'll call it a day.

Happy 33rd Birthday Richard!!

Yesterday was Rick's 33rd Birthday. We celebrated by having a lovely lunch at Equator (Thai restaurant) and a nummy lobster dinner at Chez Sherva. That's right, in a move to become more New Englander we (and by we I mean Rick) made lobsters at home. That's right folks, Rick picked them out of a tank at the store, they were driven to our house in our trunk (no way were they getting in the actual car), and given a lovely, new, steamy, gingery, garlicy, lemony place to live in a pot on our stove. They were accompanied by a lovely pea and white wine risotto.

Here is the Chef in action:

*Rick nicely alerted me to leave the kitchen before our pals were placed in their new "home."

In the pic below you can see the steam coming off of the lobsters:

So this was the first time I had ever had eaten lobster out of the shell. I have only previously had it as an ingredient in pastas and such. It was probably one of the messier meals that I've eaten. It took a little getting used to where to crack open the claws and legs.

In the picture below I'm about to take my first bite:

*Note to concerned fashionistas: I did have a cute outfit on earlier in the day...I changed to an old sweatshirt instead of using a lobster bib.

Turns out I don't really like lobster. It's okay, but I knew I wasn't enjoying it as much as Rick who was raving about how delicious it was. We topped off the evening of course with some devilishly good birthday cake...homemade chocolate cake with homemade chocolate cream cheese frosting.

More NE firsts

Snow flew for the first time here on Sunday morning. It was pretty weak from an accumulation standpoint, maybe an inch of large fluffy flakes. Although the area's original inhabitants may have had multiple words for snow, my descriptors are limited to those used by the pilgrims, whose ancestral form of English had only one word for snow (Snowe). The E was silent, as we all know. But it is a little known fact that was also deadly, due to the fact that the small pox virus was carried to the New World in the bottom of a bottle of contaminated ink from China, which was subsequently unleashed upon the Americas when one of the pilgrims was quill pen blogging about the first winter. Had the E been left off the end of the word, the virus may never have become airborne, and hundreds of millions of lives might have been spared. But hey, we'd all be speaking Algonquin right now if it hadn't, so thanke Gode fore olde Englishe.

Yes, We Have Coon!

Over the past month that we have been living here in our new house we've heard some suspicious sounds. One night about a month ago, just as we had gone to bed we heard a squeaking noise. Not a cute squeaky noise, but one that was definitely coming from some sort of animal that I did (and do) not want to share my house with. This sound freaked me out and I made Rick investigate the closets that are in the side eaves of our house. Oh no...had we just bought a house with an animal infestation. He didn't find anything but I decided that a war was upon us. The next day I purchased some good old fashioned mouse traps and hoped that we just had a couple mice in the house. Crossing my fingers that we were not dealing with squirrels or bats in our attic, Rick took care of the dirty work and put out the traps.

One night Rick and I were relaxing in the living room when Phoebe happily pranced into the living room with a baby mouse in her mouth. Ah! She doesn't kill them, I think she just likes to play with them. The baby mouse fell out of her mouth and Rick finished the job that needed to be done...with a shoe. We eventually caught another mouse in our attic. It's been warm here the past few weeks and we have been mouse free. I'm hoping that as it gets colder the neighborhood mice look at our house and remember that two members of their mischief did not return. It probably also helps that there are three neighborhood cats that wander through our yard.

We have a ton of leaves in our backyard. Since our yard is tiered, it really isn't rakeable. At night you can hear things rustle around in the leaves. I had always assumed that it was squirrels or mice until last night. My assumptions were wrong. As we turned out the light and snuggled into bed I heard that horrible squeaking noise. I cringed and made way onto Rick's side of the bed. There it was again, squeak squeak. It sounded like it was coming from under the bed. This is not possible since we do not have a bed frame. The head of our bed is up against the windows in our bedroom. I heard some leaf rustling and saw some movement out the window in our backyard. Rick got the heavy duty flashlight and we investigated. Sure enough, three raccoon were hanging out on the rock wall in our backyard making their way onto one of the large oak trees. Rick was able to point the flashlight right at them as they looked back at us! Oh no! We have coon in our yard!

So as I fell asleep last night I wondered where to raccoon sleep during the day? Do we have a burrow in our yard that they go down during the day? I then fell asleep until they woke me up again an hour later with their squeaking and leaf rustling.

So this morning (after I fell back asleep for another hour after Rick left...so tired from the raucous raccoon ruckus) I have been researching raccoons. When my sister-in-law and brother-in-law first moved into their house in Maple Grove they had a bit of a raccoon problem. Our brother-in-law received a BB gun for Christmas and the problem was taken care of. I kind of felt bad for the poor raccoons that entered A and N's yard after N received the BB gun. But now I understand.

So here is what I learned about raccoons this morning:

1. Their conservation status is listed as "least concern." - Good, nobody will notice if three mysteriously disappear from my yard.

2. Average life expectancy is 1.8 to 3.1 years. - Hopefully we'll be bringing that range down in our neighborhood.

3. Raccoons in urban settings are usually met with a range of outrage to intensive feeding. Wildlife authorities caution against feeding wild animals as they may become obtrusive. - I am obviously outraged. This statement made me think of Rick's aunt Lori who has been known to leave food out for the "cute little mice" that live around her house.

4. The fur of raccoon is used for fur clothing, especially for coats and characteristic coonskin cap. - Hmmm, I like fur coats. I'm sure my nephew Reilly would like a coon skin cap.

5. The first edition of The Joy of Cooking, released in 1931, had a recipe for preparing raccoon. - One of the farmer's markets that we used to frequent in St. Louis had a meat market. One Saturday as we passed the meat market there was a huge sign that read "Yes, We Have Coon!" So I do know for a fact that people still eat Raccoon.

So after my vast research of raccoon on Wikipedia (everything on that site is for sure true), I am most certain that a den of them is living under the oak tree in the backyard and they must be dealt with. Maybe Rick will find a lovely Red Ryder BB gun under the tree this Christmas.

Thanksgiven

We got our first New England (NE) Thanksgiving (ThxG) under our belts. Not to sound smug, but until you've experienced ThxG in its birthplace, well, you just haven't experienced ThxG. I'd love to tell you all the secrets, wonders, and rituals associated with ThxG in NE, but we were sworn to secrecy in an ancient and elaborate initiation ceremony and were we to disclose any of those secrets we would be forced to submit to another ritual known as "The Stuffing of One Thousand Sorrows," a fate worse than death. Well, OK, I suppose sharing just one NE ThxG secret wouldn't hurt: here, they have a magic gravy made from angel drippings that temporarily gives you the ability to fly but it tastes just like regular gravy.

Actually we went to a co-worker's house who likes taking in strays on major holidays. It was really fun. She had a very diverse family with representatives from several countries and "all" major religions. This translated into more diverse food choices as well.

Brisket on ThxG: good idea.

My co-worker's husband was a character. He works two full time jobs because he likes "The good life," which means throwing elaborate parties several times a year and having a substantial supply of rare whiskey and good cigars. He was a dead ringer for Muhammed Ali and doesn't take kindly to people wearing hats inside the house. I was glad I don't wear hats. Everyone was friendly, which is nice when you have twenty-odd people in a ~700 sqare foot condo, approximately half of which were occupied by ThxG decorations and half of the remaining half by food. It was fun. We had our own ThxG on Sunday so we could make everything exactly the way we like it. We did use the new magic gravy recipe but were too full to fly anywhere safely. Plus, the Vikings were on TV.

This Old House - Upstairs Edition

It's almost Turkey Day! This year will be truly an authentic Thanksgiving since we will be celebrating in Massachusetts...the home of Thanksgiving!

As promised, here are some before and after pictures of our upstairs bedrooms. You will notice that the guest room had been a shade of pink (surprise, surprise). The "master" bedroom was green. I put master in quotes since it's just a regular bedroom with the exception that Rick and I sleep in it.

"Master Bedroom"

Before

After

Guest Room

Before

After

Doesn't the guest room look inviting now? If you come visit we'll make Phoebe get off the bed.

Wishing you all a wonderful Thanksgiving!

-Liz

This Old House - Dining Room Edition

Last Friday I cleaned my paint brushes, recycled my cardboard "dropcloths" and retired my painting tools and leftover paint to the basement. After a month of painting I am ready for a break.

As promised, I am sharing some before and after pictures of the rooms that we painted. We never met the previous owners of our home, but I can only assume they were either colorblind or had an unhealthy obsession with all shades of red.

The pictures below are of the dining room with the previous owners furniture. You may notice that they have three dressers/bureaus, a dining table and a piano. Yes, all of that was in the dining room. The whole house was "overly furnished" when we first toured it.

Here are a couple more pictures of the old red paint color with their items moved out. You can get a sense of how suffocating the room was.

And now I present our wonderful newly painted, undecorated (cut me some slack, I've been painting for a month non-stop) dining room...

Future installments of my painting adventures will follow.
-Liz

Climbing with loaded weapons

Back from deer camp '08 and have just finished turning a deer into food. Yes, one lucky deer volunteered "him"self to become steaks, burger, chili, stroganoff, and jerky, thus saving "him"self from potential fates including starving/freezing to death and being eaten by wolves who probably don't even know how to make a red wine reduction. I put "him" in quotes because he didn't have antlers, and I was pretty shocked when I flipped him over and saw deer nuts under a buck.

In non-hunting news, tales were told, friends and relatives visited, whiskey was passed, cribbage played, and wicked wind and cold were endured. In other endurance news, I shared a futon with my dad in very small log cabin. For those unfamiliar, he is a prodigious snorer. I compare it to the sound of a chainsaw cutting through a haunted iron bathtub filled with snot. His ability to reach full volume 37 seconds after lying down, and recovery rate after a rollover nudge are second to none. There are three people in the world who are in the same league:

1: Justin Peik, who brings his own tent to the BWCA and puts it up as far from the respectable folk as possible.

2: Liz's mom Patty, who scores high in sheer volume. Always knowing when your girlfriend's mom was asleep had absolutely no advantages whatsoever.

3. My freshman year roommate, Mike, whose ragged, irregular sleep breathing inspired smothery thoughts.

One aspect of spending upwards of 8 hours in a tree while attempting to remain silent and motionless is perseveration on thoughts either pleasant or unpleasant. Ear worms, whether actual songs or just ideas, are a constant hazard. One day I was thinking about metallurgy and medieval weaponry in the context of a global zombie infestation (had just finished the book World War Z, a fun read about the inevitable zombie apocalypse). For some reason I thought of the phrase "bellows evil" thinking that the double meaning of something bellowing evil and an actual evil bellows would make a cool lyric to a dark and overdramatic rock song.

So, working backwards from "bellows evil" I envisioned a bell or a person's voice sounding like a bell signifying something ominous. I thought about the bell being forged by damned people (which rhymes with evil) in a cursed town or possibly one of Uday Hussein's torture houses with fire smuggled up from the bowels of hell and an evil bellows. In the end, I opted for:

With a voice like a bell that was cast in hell

By desperate people
Using iron that was salvaged from a fatal shipwreck
And bellows evil

So that took up about three hours. Fortunately, by the time I got around to figuring out who would be saying such ominous things or what that message would potentially be, I'd pretty much lost interest. By the third day or so, thoughts become mostly incoherent so nobody has to hear about those. It was a good sittin' year all in all. Was very glad to get home and see Liz and all the hard work she had put in on the house.

Trench Drainage 101

This past weekend Rick and I completed our first major home project (I don't count painting as major). Because our house is built into the side of a hill, it is important that a majority of the rainwater coming down the hill is diverted around the house. I found a potential problem spot in our back yard and had my suspicion confirmed by our home inspector.

So I did a little good ol' fashioned research. I went to the library and checked out landscaping books. I then sketched up a diagram of our backyard and the drainage system that I wanted to install. I also drew a nice diagram of Rick digging a trench...all part of the plan.

So we started on Saturday (1 trip to Lowe's, 2 trips to Home Depot). Here is Rick expertly digging a lovely trench.

And completed the project on Sunday (1 trip to Lowe's, 2 trips to Home Depot).

I think it turned out pretty nice. We'll be planting some lovely shade loving foliage on the right hand side in the spring. Suggestions are welcomed. Otherwise it's back to the library to do some research on shade plants.

It's The Great Pumpkin, Boston!

Of course we carved a pumpkin for Halloween! I did the messy "gutting" of the pumpkin and roasted some delicious salty pumpkin seeds while Rick got down to business.

nice spread

Last night was the big yearly BU gala. It was held in the Omni Parker House Hotel. I took the train there all by myself like a big boy. The hotel opened in 1855 and has some history. Ho Chi Minh was a baker there. Who knew Ho Chi Minh was an American baker prior to his career as an Asian trail? Malcolm X was a busboy. Booth planned an assassination. JFK announced his candidacy for congress, proposed to Jacky, and had his bachelor party there. Man, I wish I was invited to JFK's bachelor party.

The food was spectacular, featuring lobster claws with caviar (We'll have your finest food stuffed with your second finest food. Lobster stuffed with tacos it is, sir), mini lamb chops, and filet. As far as free stuff from academic institutions go, this took the prize. Well worth listening to a half an hour's worth of poeple I didn't know being given awards.

Broken Glass, Loose Change

I find myself thinking about strange things as I bike to and from work. Ever since I rode part way out into an intersection through which an ambulance was barreling, I quit listening to my ipod during rides. This leaves my mind dangerously unoccupied and prone to wandering and/or noticing things. For example, did you know it is impossible to ride more than a mile on a St. Louis city street without seeing a discarded chicken bone? It's the truth. Who, when in the market for a snack on the go, thinks "Ooh, chicken wings!" The proper administration of bleu cheese alone would be a logistical nightmare, to say nothing of the mess potential and the obvious dangers of driving with an open beer. Actually, the driving with beer thing isn't that big of an issue in St. Louis. I guess I should just be happy that people aren't falling for the farce that is boneless wings (yeah, I'm looking at you, Chili's). This message brought to you by the Mama Cass institute for safe automotive snacking.

Another thing I've noticed is that the amount of broken glass on the roadway is perfectly negatively correlated with the affluence of that neighborhood. Not surprisingly, about one in every ten cars you see parked in those neighborhoods either has a flat of or is rolling on the donut. I've observed the same pattern here in Boston. Then, it hit me--what if this phenomenon isn't just the result of lower class/education people being more likely to throw bottles out their windows which leads to more flats? What if correlation, twice removed, equals causation? Maybe...broken glass is the cause of poverty.

OK, brace yourself now for what I'm about to drop on you--what if this broken glass/disabled car/low socioeconomic status cycle isn't coincidental at all? What if it's a massive conspiracy to keep us (them) down? Think about it, what better way to subtly subjugate the poor? Pretty tough to get to work or college with a flat tire. And who has time to work anyways when you're taking your kids in for stitches twice a week.

OK, so let's talk suspects. First, who would have the motive to perpetrate this scheme? Who has the means? Well, I guess anyone with access to glass bottles would have the means, so let's focus on motive. My initial suspect was, of course, The Man, possibly acting in conjunction with Whitey. But then I remembered Whitey keeps pretty busy suppressing minority voters this time of year and The Man gets pretty preoccupied with keeping the worker "down" and having "it" "stuck" to him all the time that he'd hardly have time to spread glass shards throughout every poor neighborhood in every major city in the U.S. (Sidenote: The Man is one kinky S.O.B.). So yeah, I'm pretty sure it's an inside job. We're through the looking glass here people, and the looking glass is broken.

October 20th Update

Liz would probably do this normally but since we don't have internet at home yet, the status update will come from me. We left St. Louis at about 11:45 AM last Monday (October 13th) with the back our 24' Budget truck stuffed with stuff, the cab stuffed with Liz, Phoebe and me, and the car in tow. The car was also stuffed with stuff. We had an uneventful drive through IL, IN, OH, PA, NY and MA and made it to Boston in around 23 hrs. We smuggled the cat into a hotel for the first night and bought the house the next afternoon. We got some movers to help unload the truck, two guys names Paul and Lama. Why they didn't name their company Pauli Lama movers remains a mystery (Your furniture and the world in one peace). The only casualty of the move was the handle of our turkey roaster, which Lama, an admitted vegetarian, dropped on the basement floor. Suspicious.

I went to work on Thurs., and everyone here seems nice. It may get a little tougher since my go-to small talk topic lost to the Rays last night. Attempts to hide my glee have been successful so far. Jess, a woman I went to grad school with and who lives a block away from us, showed me an excellent bike path that leads right to my work, leaving only about a mile of Boston roadways to be navigated. I guess if you can drown in 5 inches of water you can get crushed in a mile of road, but that's loser talk. The driving is tricky but we're managing. Helps when you have one person to drive and one to navigate. We may end up taking the advice of some guy we met and--"Get a Gaaahmin."

Liz has been getting stuff put away and scoured. The previous occupants were, we suspect, dirty hippies, as they were musicians, didn't clean any "hidden" areas, and had the whole house painted dark red, pink, and "flesh". Flesh is the worst. We met the next door neighbor and he seems very nice. He offered to mow our ~100 ft2 of lawn for us and told us the Hatians across the street are not to be feared. Liz's cousin Nicole who attends Union College in Schenectady, NY, came to visit Saturday night, so we got out to see some of the town on Sunday. We ate cannoli from Modern Pastry, which is apparently famous. Our cell #s are the same for now. I'll be back to stalk the elusive whitetail in a few weeks and we'll be home for Christmas as well. Out. -Rick

The Most Delicious Town in America

Moving heavy items is not fun.

Luckily, the windows in our St. Louis loft were very large. We were able to lift items and boxes out through the windows and move them right onto our rental truck.

Movin' on up, to the East side...more specifically Boston!

That's right. We is moving to Boston. It's official, Rick has signed all the papers. He is the newest Research Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine Genetics Program.