newly established: Boston thoughts

This morning, as I walked down the bike path to the T station nearest my apartment, I noticed a man biking along. He had installed a little shelf behind his bicycle. I’m not enough of an experienced bicyclist to know the terminology for this shelf, but it was the kind of modification that people generally put a little basket on, for carrying things like groceries.

He had strapped a two liter bottle of Diet Coke to this little modification. The bottle was probably 75% full. I wondered, briefly, what his motivation was for carrying a bottle of Diet Coke down the bike trail. I also wondered if he’d just done it to confuse people like me. Alas, I never got my answers, but I did get to the T station, swipe my CharlieCard, and head off to my workplace.

It is hard to explain how I feel about being here. There are small pleasures. I have an official ID card, with my picture on it. The picture is terrible – we are all familiar with this requirement of photo IDs. I was given one of those clips for it, where you can stick it into your front right pocket and the little tether that unwinds and rewinds itself to keep the card close also allows me to swipe myself in and out of the building.

There’s a strange sense of satisfaction that I get from swiping myself into the building, swiping past security, and particularly for swiping myself into the elevator. Without an ID card, you can only visit the ground floor. This presumably allows anyone who has forgotten an ID to not be stuck in the building until people show up again.

The building itself is quite impressive. There are places to sit everywhere. The conference rooms seem to all be glass-walled, and most of them have curtains around the inside that can be drawn. There are at least two Keurigs per floor, and the Kcups are provided as well as a true arsenal of cream and various sugar and sugar substitute packets.

At my desk, I have my own phone, which naturally is on the verge of being a constant source of stress to me. Luckily, it never rings. The desks are at the back of the lab space, and the lab space is one continuous array of benches and hoods that transition from biology to chemistry as you move on through. They (the desks) are arranged in fours, each little module cozied up to the adjacent units, and open to the lab space.

I hate that they are open to the lab space. I am not allowed to have coffee or water at my desk, and I am particularly upset about the water. I used to go through a lot of water every day as I sat at my desk, and now I have to go to the lounge to have a drink. That sounds very indulgent, but it isn’t, not really.

I have not been assigned a hood yet. A friendly woman named Bridget walked Kate and me around the lab and pointed out three unoccupied hoods that had been left full of stuff by their previous occupants. We nodded, but ultimately did not resolve anything. It’s okay; our chemicals haven’t been moved here from Yale yet, so there’s a distinct dearth of research to be done at the moment.

That, too, is all right. I’ve been coming to work anyway, attending some meetings, generally making myself available should Andy walk through. I see him a lot more these days, too: his heart has been in Boston for at least the past year, and his body’s been following.

I have been set up with a computer as well. This is one of the more exciting perks of the move. Andy advised us to go Mac instead of PC, which was a big move for me, but when it’s not on my dollar… so we’ve been established here with brand new, fifteen-inch Macbook Pros with retina display. I didn’t think retina display would be a big deal.

It’s a big deal.

On Wednesdays, there’s a farmer’s market in Kendall Square. I have stopped by it several times, wandering around the tents. There’s a tent there that sells fruit vinegars, and I bought a couple of them: a white peach, and a blood orange. The girl who sells them is very friendly, and she has little plastic cups like communion cups that she offers samples. While you taste them, she makes recommendations (“This one is great for chicken or fish, this one is great for salad dressing…”). I bought them with the intention of switching up my salad dressings and the secondary intention of maybe trying them over chicken breasts.

I haven’t been able to bring myself to open them yet, so they’re just sitting on the counter, tall, slim bottles of earthy jewel tones in warm oranges and orange-yellows, waiting for me to make a decision. Maybe when I run out of white balsamic.

Last night, Emily (Kate’s sister) and Max (her boyfriend) brought pizza from Regina’s to our apartment, and we sat around the table and ate it. Then we played a few rounds of Clue – they left it with us – and Kate and I made a quick batch of peanut butter cookies. We only made peanut butter cookies because we were out of chocolate chips, but they were actually delicious, and I usually am no particular fan of peanut butter cookies.

Kate and I set ourselves up a little assembly line in the kitchen, sort of similar to the way Laura and I used to make cookies. After we whipped up the dough, I formed them into little balls and dropped them into the little bowl of sugar that Kate had set out, and Kate made sure they were coated, then dropped them on the cookie sheet and pressed the fork into them twice.

I am thinking that maybe we will be able to make cream wafers this way, and I can share my favorite Christmas cookie recipe. In the meantime, I need some recipes to use up the rest of the yeast that I bought for the cinnamon rolls that I baked, three days into the apartment. I could just make more cinnamon rolls. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.