Harborfest is over

And it has been a very, very busy week for me, between the two jobs and police details.

I worked a lot at my two jobs, working pretty much every day during Harborfest.  For those of you not from the Boston area, Harborfest is the week-long celebration held every summer up to and including the Fourth of July.  So we had lots of visitors to both sites.  I got to talk about history a lot, and that always makes me happy.  And the visitors who really are interested and have a lot of good questions always make me happy.  Yesterday that visitor was a very bright and precocious ten year old girl, who proudly told me all about the books she had been reading and about all of the history she had learned.  And so many tourists wanted to get their picture taken with me.  That is almost always fun.

And there was one picture I just had to get, and so one of my coworkers (also in period costume, although he was dressed in circa 1820 civilian clothes) walked with me up Beacon Street so he could take the picture for me.

I also managed to give away a couple of pieces of authentic hardtack to some historian friends of mine: Ross, who is ABD* and works with me; and Ben, who always brings his tour groups in to visit us.  It is always a pleasure to talk history shop, so thanks for indulging me, guys.

Yesterday was the longest day of the week, since I had to work all day and then rush home to put on my police uniform and head out for the biggest detail of the year, the Fourth of July fireworks display on the Charles River.   And of course, Murphy’s Law always applies to these events, and so we were worried about bad weather ruining the event.  As it turned out, they postponed and then nearly cancelled the event, then put it back on thinking the storm passed us by, then we got hit with bad weather anyway and got drenched.  So yeah, that’s about normal.   And people not knowing that roads are closed, even though everything is announced in advance, is also normal.  Come on people, I expect the tourists to not know, but if you have lived in Cambridge for years and still haven’t figured out what the Fourth is like, you have no excuse.

*All But Dissertation, meaning a graduate student who has finished all of the classwork for his PhD.