Hiking and the Schuss House

A friend in Greg's running club also belongs to a cool, old skiing club, which has a ski lodge/farm house in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. We've gone up there a few times to go hiking, and there are usually around 20 of us. Last fall, we hiked Mt. Washington, and it was an epic adventure. This time, there were three hiking groups instead of two, and Greg and I went with the middle group. It was a refreshing change not to end the day limping with sore knees.
My Pat the Patriot hat
New growth



We hiked to the top of Mt. Kearsarge, which has an old fire lookout at the top. It rained most of the day, so there wasn't a view, but it was still a great day and a great hike.



We ended the day with cold beer, a warm fire, and friends. Another great Schuss trip.

My First Red Sox Game!

Greg surprised me with tickets to a Red Sox game (my first). It was really fun, and they won!
The stadium is usually near capacity, even on a weeknight.
In the background, you can see the John Hancock Tower and the Prudential Tower.
Greg's brother Mark and sister-in-law Shaney also came to the game.

A Few Green Things

People here revel in warm weather. These people are laying on the grass on their lunch breaks from work and medical school.

It's Snowing Pink!

"Into each life, some rain must fall." But if you live in New England, some petals will fall on you too. All of the leaves on the trees pushed the flowers out, and the petals were everywhere.

You may be able to see that a street sign is engulfed in the tree.

Can you see the petals blowing from the tree?

Boston Marathon (with pictures)

Greg and his friend Logan engineered a device that would track Greg as he ran the Boston Marathon in real time on a Google map. It would have been really cool - if it had worked. Logan and I drove out to the 10k mark (6.2 miles) so Greg could get rid of the device if it wasn't working. A marathon is 26.2 miles, so Greg didn't want to have the thing strapped to his arm if it wasn't necessary. The thing didn't work, so we did the hand off. That's my main excuse for not having running pictures of Greg. (Development on the device continues...)

Greg's family and a bunch of our coworkers came out to watch Greg run past the 25-mile mark, which is just a mile from our office.


The trees weren't very leafy yet, but many of them were flowering.

Greg was pretty wiped out after the race. Yay Greg!

There are blooming tulips everywhere.

I love how much this tree (below) leans. I'm sure when the leaves fill out, it will lean even more. One leaf isn't very heavy, but hundreds of leaves must be heavy enough, because I've seen branches hanging lower than they had been.

Flowers and Such

This plant was hanging onto the rain water.
See the big, fat drops in there?The community gardens by my apartment are coming back to life and look amazing.
Hyacinth flowers in bloom


Pink trees!?!
The robins are back.


There’s masonry work being done on the exterior wall of my apartment building. Men walk along the fire escape outside my 4th floor windows and there’s a lot of banging around. But the men laugh and sing, and the lilt of their accents makes it much more tolerable.

Boston Marathon

The 114th Boston Marathon is tomorrow. It's Patriots' Day, which commemorates the anniversaries of the battles of Lexington and Concord, which kicked off the Revolutionary War. Patriots' Day is a Massachusetts holiday that now coincides with the marathon and a Red Sox home game. Not all businesses close, but many of those who don't get the day off end up working from home if they can. The marathon is almost a straight line, 26.2 miles outside the city into downtown Boston. If you normally cross the marathon route to get to work, you're pretty much out of luck on Marathon Monday.

Greg is running for the second year in a row, so I'm taking the day off to watch. Greg's parents are coming up from Connecticut, and his brother, sister-in-law, and aunt are also going to be there. You can only run the Boston Marathon (officially) under one of three circumstances: You can run for charity, you can be given one of the two spots each local running club is given, or you can qualify. For the men's 18-34 age group, you have to run a marathon in 3 hours 10 minutes. Greg qualified last January at the Disney Marathon in Orlando, which qualified him for two consecutive years.

It should be a very exciting day!