Mark your calendars! Cambridge Open Studios is coming!

Cambridge Open Studios is back, and this year it is all of Cambridge in only one weekend.  Just like last year there will be a shuttle bus that will take you, for free, all over town.  And, lucky for us all, the primary departure point will be at Cambridge College, 1000 Mass Ave, every hour on the hour.  That also happens to be where I’ll be showing my work this year.  I love it when a plan comes together.

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Go out and get some culture! Concerts for YOU.

I have concert listings.  Lots of concert listings.  These are upcoming concerts that I’m not performing in but will try to attend.  You should try to go as well.  Music is good for the soul.  Also, Bach rocks.  And, there may be cake.

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Yeah… about that “winter is over” bit

A little while back I had commented about how we were experiencing winter’s “last hurrah”.

Oh, man was I wrong.

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Being a Stubborn Dachshund has Consequences

Yesterday Rerun had his second bout in a little over a week of vomiting and listlessness.  Last night was the worse of the two episodes and it was clear by bedtime that he wasn’t a happy dog.  He didn’t want to eat anything and he was clearly uncomfortable.  He woke us about every hour through the night heaving, vomiting, or whining.  We were encouraging him to vomit because there was clearly something bothering him that he needed OUT.

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Medieval mutton stew, slightly modified

Great stew for a cold winter's eve.
Great stew for a cold winter’s eve.

I used the mutton stew recipe I mentioned yesterday to make this, but I did make one change: I added yellow carrots, which would certainly have been known in Europe by the late middle ages.  Orange would not become the typical carrot color for a few more centuries.  Red would also have been common, but those are a little more difficult to come by these days, at least outside of a farmer’s market full of heirloom gardeners.  It just felt like the stew needed something besides meat, an egg, and seasoning.

Note to self: get a better background for medieval cooking photos.

-Geoff

Valentine roundup

On the day I wear black and refer to as The Crispus Attucks St. Valentine’s Massacre Memorial, the rest of the world celebrates Hallmark’s day and overspends on chocolate, jewelry, flowers, and all things pink and red.  Last year we presented valentines in this space of a special variety.  This year we’ve gathered some of the best that showed up in our Twitter feed.  And by “best” we mean Geekiest.  Enjoy.

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The dual basket idea worked, apparently

When we decided to put a second basket on top of the upright freezer as a cat bed, we had hoped that eventually the cats would be able to use them at the same time.  And so they have.

Yesterday, as I was finally finishing up the major kitchen cleaning and reorganization project I mentioned earlier, I put out the jar that holds cat treat and stocked it.  That got someone’s attention.

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Today in Equality

With the opening of the Sochi Olympic games on Friday there are all sorts of things going on right now to remind us that the world is full of both hateful bigots (I’m looking at you, Putin) and wonderful people (Canada, Scotland, that would be you.)

This is what has popped up in the latter category in my various news feeds today.  Enjoy.

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Today is Four Chaplains Day

On February 3rd, 1943, a small convoy named SG-19 was making its way across the Atlantic to Greenland from New York.  It consisted of the United States Army Transport Dorchester and two smaller merchant vessels, the SS Lutz and the SS Biscaya, escorted by three Coast Guard cutters: Tampa, Escanaba and Comanche.  Somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland at about 12:55 AM that morning, a German submarine torpedoed the Dorchester, knocking out her power as well as opening up her hull to the sea.  Below decks were hundreds of young American servicemen, many of them on their first ocean voyage.  They had been instructed to leave their life preservers on in case of attack, but the heat of the ship’s boilers and engines led many of them to take the jackets off.  And with the loss of power they were all suddenly in the dark.

Among the personnel on board were four Army Chaplains, all First Lieutenants: George Fox (a Methodist);  Alexander Goode (Reform-Rabbi); Clark Poling (Dutch Reformed);  and John Washington (a Roman Catholic priest).  The four had become fast friends at the Army Chaplains School on the Harvard University campus, right here in Cambridge.

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