Boston - Day Three

Day three. Had gotten back at 11:00 last night, so we were kind of tired...Albin slept in some this morning.

Visited the Mary Baker Eddy museum. Saw the Maparium, which as usual was well worth the trouble. Albin liked the Hall of Ideas - with the words flowing out of the fountain and up the wall (it's done with projectors). Saw the reflecting pool.

Noticed this nice little garden+pool just outside the library door.

Talked to Laurie and Elise on the cell phone. Winter weather seems to have arrived back home...it was very tolerable this afternoon, but started to get colder (~60 deg) and very windy late in the afternoon. Guess that's relatively cold for shirt sleeves, but much warmer than back home.

Spent a couple of hours on top of the Prudential building, up on the skydeck. Always fascinating to see the city all laid out in a grid below you. With all the wind today, the sailboats out on the Charles River were having a good time (look behind Albin!) - except maybe for the one that flipped over. Bet those were some wet sailors.


Bostonians do like their Sox. Looks like they're still in it as of tonight, probably tickets would be reallllly tough to get to Fenway today...


Dropped $30 on an iPod charger at the Apple store. Still not sure that was a great deal, but what the hey...it was free shipping.

Walked on over to the Boston Public Garden. Was a nice sunny afternoon, LOTS of people had...the same idea. The Swan boats seem to have flown south for the winter though. (We would have ridden them, was sunnier than last time we were in Boston, but there were none to be had.)


Walked some of the downtown section of the Freedom Trail, since the sun was out and we were right there. Old state house...old South church...that's a nice gold dome. Ended up looking real nice and shiny like in the sun.


Started to get cold and cloudy, but we carried on, to the two old cemeteries and the rest of the sights. Albin like this guy at the old courthouse. There's a restaurant in the basement. "What's that? Meet you at the State House? All I see is this Steak House!"



Stopped in a store along the way, and bought some Instant Gratification to bring home for the homeside crew.


Ended up at Quincy Market. Declined the seafood restaurant called "Salty Dog" - Albin reminded me that would be against our rule of tourist-aimed eating. Went to the other end of Quincy Market, to the basement of the Old Plow pub (or something like that)...Albin got a *hot* burger, and I had some nice fried peppers on an old Italian sausage and (what else?) a Sam Adams. Brewer. Patriot. Boston Lagermeister. And he had free advertising on the "historic" plaques outside on the wall. Hey, he's from around here, right...?


Home again, it's very dark and cold now...to bed a little earlier, and hopefully out on the Freedom Trail (or is that Trial?) nice and early tomorrow. All in all, the day was voted a success by all involved. Or at least the one I asked.

Boston - museum of science

Suppose I should write about some things which DIDN'T come with pictures.

Saw a laser light show. Would have made Laurie feel queasy...lots of spinning patterns...Albin thought that was fun. I was reminded of my younger days, I had in fact been to a rock concert where they played the original version of one of the songs (Soundgarden). Albin's visual cortex hurt after that.

I can't believe that the laser light show cost twice as much ($9 ea!) as the IMAX show!

We were both interested in the polage...cellophane (clear white polarized plastic), cut into shapes (that's the "-ollage" part), which just looks like a backlit white wall. When you look through a polarizing filter at it though (that's the "pol-" part), the different shapes light up in different colors. Very neat (and quite pretty!).

The moon rocket crashed yesterday. On purpose...the front part of the rocket was designed to crash, and send up a big plume of dust from the surface. There were moon talks all day, and we watched the video from Nasa of the rocket takeoff. Talked to a graduate student who had an instrument on the part which didn't crash. His instrument was to measure radiation. For reference, he had a geiger counter and an orange Fiestaware plate - the orange color in the glaze comes from uranium! So the plate is very hot. (Probably alpha radiation, the geiger counter only lit up when the plate was just about touching the detector.) Still, very interesting that you can buy *hot* pottery!

That's enough for this morning. Off to the Freedom Trail today, should clear up this afternoon and be a fine day for walking around downtown. May go see the view from the Prudential building tomorrow. Found out there's an Apple store just across the street from that - so we can finally buy a new iPod charger without paying shipping!

Boston - museum of science

(Posting from yesterday, when we visited the museum of science...all day long.) We found the T stop again. The train runs down the middle of Beacon street.



Riding the T to the museum.


The "Audio-Kinetic" sculpture was a favorite, as always. (It's one of Albin's favorite things.)


Digital Fishtank...fiddle the schooling habits of fish (and children)


Some great computer-type exhibits. For this one, you assembled wooden blocks into your program...then a camera did pattern recognition on the image, and figured out how your blocks were connected, compiled the program, and then made the robot go.


Electricity demonstrations. Albin in control of the plasma...

And now the plasma has gotten the better of him!


Life Science section (in the Green wing, that we'd never visited before) had some very interesting experiments about vision - turns out that Albin and I are both right-eyed. Who knew?

Picture of Brains for Peter. Note that the cockroach brain is very, very small.


Saw the Science of Risk in IMAX. The science part was the physical response to fear...adrenaline, the natural response if you're in a dangerous situation. Turns out that people who have a lower than average number of Serotonin receptors in their brain take more risks. So then they had to follow people skydiving...lots and lots of skydiving...and base jumping (where they jump off a 4000 ft cliff in Norway).

On the way out, had to show that ol' T Rex who was the boss.



Took a movie of the Theater of Electricity show.

The takeover is complete already.

OK, now I'm an author on this blog.
What shall we do today, Brain...?
Same thing we do every day, Pinky...plan to take over the world!

PS. We stopped in at the Booksmith. (Which is where we got our clearly-local postcard.) They had a stack of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies...the Wait Wait gang interviewed the author on the show one day (Albin had heard that too). And there's a new Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters book...with a trailer on Youtube that is worthy of the name "bad and gross horror movie". (So do NOT let Elise see this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jZVE5uF24Q)

Anyway the cover of the book is cute:

I HAD never been to Boston in the faaaaaaalll

We made it! (Karl and Albin will be masquerading as Mommiepie for the nonce. Lemme see...maybe I can grant myself security to publish on this here blog. Since I have the administrator's password and I guess her permission. Muah-ah-ah-ah!)

Left home about 11 AM...connecting flight in Milwaukee...waited for the Silver Line bus at 5:30...transfered to the subway/trolley, and two trains later...here we were! (Yeah, I know it's cheesy to borrow from Google Street View, but it's dark and it will look about like this during the day time.)








Talked to our host (Steve), found that we are very near Coolidge Corner. Walked up there and had Soup and Bread. (At Panera, but hey if we can agree on a place to eat...and the food is all right...then it's OK with me that it's a chain. I'm not sure I'd ever actually eaten there anyway.)

Found a "local" postcard.

Ate up our first chocolate bar.









Going to bed soon...









Will be a good/long day at the Museum of Science tomorrow...they're open from 9 to 9, and we'll probably stay for the 9 PM IMAX movie, Adrenaline Rush or something like that. Should be cool to see extreme skydiving firsthand in IMAX!

Not the real poo.
Gas station at the Pioneer village.
I want to know how big an adventure that is. In our case, I think it involves knitting and beer.
One of the wildlife critters we have seen from the canoe on this lake. We've also spotted deer, yellow dragonflies, frogs, turtles, perch, sunnies, minnows, beaver, yellowjackets, red squirrels, mosquitos, water beetles,a beaver, and a brown bird that we are still arguing on what it could be.

I always wondered what life would be like once the children are grown and gone. If it will be anything like yesterday, it will be quiet : ). We had a long hike on the Ice Age trail, cooked a picnic lunch with leftover camping food, canoed on the lake at the b and b, had a nap!, ate cheese and crackers with wine for supper, and watched The Triplets of Belleville. Today we will have pie at the Norske Nook in Rice Lake, see the Pioneer Village in Cameron, and have another canoe ride or two. Perhaps tonight we will watch Jeeves and Wooster or The Two Towers, or perhaps Dune...can't decide yet.