Pre-First Night Trip to Boston

One of the local events that is a huge draw in Boston is First Night, an elaborate New Year’s Eve celebration of the culture and community of the city. While many other cities and towns across the nation now hold First Night festivities, Boston is the original and standard bearer. It is really quite grand and kicks off well before midnight, starting around 9AM and carrying through to midnight fireworks.

One of the cooler features are the marvelous ice sculptures, no pun intended. They are enormous and beautifully ornate. Since heading downtown with 2 million other people really isn’t in the cards for us. So while I was busy completing some work, Keri and Ali packed up the kids and headed east to see if they could catch a glimpse of the sculptures the day before the official unveiling.

The trip on the train was apparently quite fascinating for our little man, as revelaed by the intense studying visible in this photograph.

Unfortunately, the trip proved to be less than fulfilling on the ice sculpture front. Since the weather has started to warm a bit, it would seem that preservation is of major importance. Also there was some work still to be done. Consequently, most of what they got to see was this.

Ali sardonically referred to this part of the trip as “Gumdrop.” This is a kind of kidsafe code for an excrement expletive, as well as being a reference to one of our infamous exploits to exotic local sights. Sadly in the transitioning this site to a new platform, the images from the original post have been lost. I’ll have to look into digging some of those photos out again.

Nevertheless, they all managed to still have some fun. Hadley got to walk around the city and covered a whole lot of ground. It proved to be quite a journey for both of the kiddos. They were pretty wiped out from it all.

Boxing Day Blizzard 2010

Alright, so we don’t exactly celebrate Boxing Day in the States, but we definitely experienced a blizzard on the day that it is observed. Temperatures plummeted, snow descended, and the wind howled beginning in the afternoon and continued for the better part of two days. It has been downright frigid.

Photo: Ready for Work Photo: I Can't Use My Thumbs

Still, we did need to get the kids outside to prevent them from getting anymore stir crazy. Plus, the post-Christmas pall might have taken grip if we hadn’t. We really couldn’t go anywhere, and it took considerable effort just to dig out the driveway with the drifts building. Those drifts proved a bit treacherous for the kiddos as one of the photos will attest. They could hardly remain standing.

Photo: Having a Hard Time Staying Upright

Reflecting on the Rebuild

I have to say that having a few days to tinker and rebuild fritzwinkle.com has been a bit of a joy. It has been something that I have been wanting to do for sometime.

Over the summer, I conceived of making a big switch and redoing the whole thing, but it didn’t happen. Instead, I got busy doing other things and, for the first time in awhile, just trying to enjoy some of the summer free from work. Of course, I did get myself involved in somethings that took up some time too.

Unfortunately, I had made some miscalculations with the domain name, which rendered everything offline for a bit. That forced me to have to go into a waiting mode, until that got itself worked out. I also have a tendency to get myself quite wrapped up in various projects and classes while teaching full time, as well. This has always made maintaining the site a challenge.

On the plus side, I have been riding a little bit of a website development wave. From tuning things with the various sites I have been using with students, as well as developing the new sites for both the Massachusetts Writing Project and Boston Writing Project. These autumn activities made for a quicker transition once I had everything ready. Plus, I had a lot more knowledge and understanding at the forefront of my mind since I was using it more regularly. This made it kind of fun and it didn’t take forever, which best of all.

Photo: Fall Kids

Fall Kids at Play

Now, as always, I just hope I can keep things updated and fresh, which has always been a challenge.