mike in progress

My friend was going to hook me up with Jodie Sweetin, but she wasn’t ready for a relationship as she was recovering from her meth addiction.

Dear blog,

How I have neglected you so.
Love,

Mike

No, everyone, I am not dead.  I’ve just been terribly busy at work.  For those of you that didn’t know, I transferred to a new location that is being built here in Boston.  Same job, same company, although with a few more responsibilities.  Mainly because team I am on will consist of mainly new, external hires, about 90 percent or so.  But I digress.  Here’s a quick recap of what’s been going on.

The first week back to work for me had me in Chestnut Hill training some of the external hires.  That was all well and good except Chestnut Hill was an incredibly dead location.  I wanted to kill myself out of boredom.  The week after that I spent training some more people in Cambridge.  This was much more enjoyable because I was hanging out with some pretty cool people.

Since then, I’ve been doing more training.  And to be honest, it’s getting kind of old.  Thikning about it, it’s been an entire month, since I’ve done what I was originally hired to do.  Once the new location opens, that will change, but the fact still remains that I have a while to go still.

Anyhow, I find it quite remarkable still that I am where I am.  If we go back to College Mike, I don’t think that he would have ever imagiend himself having a job here, much less a career.  Sometimes Present Mike is also amazed by the fact.  I have a career with a company that I love with people that I love working with.  It’s pretty flipping sweet.

I was on the T the other day, and I saw a cute girl sitting there on the Green Line.  And then she pulled out a pink Nintendo DS and started to play it.  I fell in love.

Now, I am a person that is rather resistant to change.  Especially when it comes to footwear.  I’ve had the same pair of sneakers since freshman year of college.  They’re completely broken in, they fit my feet perfectly, and for the most part they are in one piece.  Now, I have a pair of brown shoes that I wear EVERYWHERE.  To work, out and about, you name, I wear em.  So as I was wandering Boston the other day when it was wet out, I noticed that the bottoms of my feet were getting wet.  This was quite the surprise as these shoes are leather.  And I hadn’t stepped in any puddles so they couldn’t have entered through a seam between the sole of the shoe and the leather upper.  So, I flip the shoes over, and discovered that I have work the shoes right through the sole.  Right at about the balls of your feet, in both my shoes, there are holes.  That is kind of a testament to how much I’ve worn these shoes that I’ve worn a hole right through them.

It’s also interesting to see the pattern of wear on the shoes.  The right shoe is worn down a lot more than the left, and there is major wear on the heels of each shoe, on the outside, again, more on the right shoe than the left.  (I am right handed).

The problem now, is that I cannot find the same shoe.  I want the same shoe.  This shoe has seerved me well for four years, and sadly, I cannot find it.  I got this shoe from American Eagle, and they don’t even sell shoes anymore.  They sell sneakers and socks, but no shoes, so I can’t even find an updated model, like with sneakers.  Sneaker purchasing is somewhat easy because every year, the sneaker companies come out with a model that’s quite comparable to last years, only with some style changes.

It has come to the point where i need to buy a new pair of sneakers and a new pair of shoes, and I dread it ever so.  They’ve served me well, and it seems like such an act of disloyalty to simply toss them away…

I was shopping in Whole Foods today, and much to your surprise, I’m sure, was looking for some bacon.  But all of the bacon there was of the uncured variety.  So this got me thinking, what the heck is uncured bacon?  Well evidently, all bacon, by its very nature is cured.  Its what makes bacon, bacon.  The difference here is that uncured bacon uses salt instead of cured bacon which uses sodium nitrites.  In the late seventies, there was a whole thing about how sodium nitrites were bad for you.  So in uncured bacon, they just use celery and lemon juice and salt and some other stuff in order to get the same sort of effect that sodium nitrites got you.

Anyone that’s been talking to me since I’ve moved to Boston has probably heard all about how much I love the T.  The T is pretty much Boston’s version of the NYC Subway System.  The awesome part about it is how easy it is to figure out.  I’ve lived right next to NYC for most of my life, and I never bothered to learn the subway system.  But here, in just a few days with extensive consulting of the subway map, I can get to anywhere I need to go.  The only thing I am not too confident about is what things are close to what stops.

Anyhow, I am growing to not like the green line.  In fact, on my way to Cambridge today, I took the Red Line instead and walked a few blocks instead of riding the T all of the way to Lechmere.  However, since it started raining, I decided on the lesser of two evils and took the Green Line back to Copley.  And on this ride of rides, I had two lovely occurrences happen.  First, I had the pleasure of a homeless woman sit next to me.  How could I tell?  Her shabby dirty looking clothes.  Oh, and because she smelled horrid.  After that, the train or tram or whatever you want to call it, got rather crowded.  And a rather large girl was standing really close to me.  When I say really, I mean really.  Really as in she was pretty much straddling one of my legs.  It was awkward.  Not awkward turtle, not awkward moose, but awkward dolphin.  That was how awkward it was.

Anyhow, it is time for me to end this post.  Marcus moves in tomorrow.  I think I’m going to try to not be here so I dont have to carry anything.  I think I shall update this tomorrow and start talking about some of the restaurants I’ve been dining at around here in my refusal to cook. Which is another story.  I have enough china and silverware to have eight dine in comfort.  I have more kitchen appliances than Martha Stewart.  But I don’t own a single pot or a pan.  Well that’s not completely true, I own a cast iron pan.  And it is glorious.

Well, I know it’s been a few days, but I thought I would now write a comprehensive post on my moving.  I moved Tuesday with the help of Geoffrey and jared.   I got settled in.  I immediately noticed that at night, it gets pretty freaking cold.  I think that’s a consequence of having an apartment with so much glass.  Other gripes I have is that it gets entirely too bright in my apartment.  Sun shines in my window in the morning.  The past two days, I have been up at about seven in the morning because of the cursed day star. 

So yesterday I spent exploring Cambridge.  Not for any other reason than I had to go to the Target there in order to get myself a shower curtain and curtain hooks.  I also had the oppotunity to stop at the Cambridgeside Apple Store, which is located in the Cambridgeside Galleria.  It was neat, a larger 45′ store.  But the one thing I noticed immediately about it was that it smelled funny.  I think it’s just me though.  I think that each store has it’s own distinct smell.  Someone should probably look into why that happens.

And so that brings us to today.  Today I wandered the Financial District.  It was neat.  I also got to experience the T during rush hour.  Now let me propose to you a conundrum?  If you are a large person, when encountering a full train car, what do you do.  Do you a, get off the train and walk home in order to lose some of that mass, or do you just push your way into the train car, sort of like the Kool Aid Man bursting through a wall?  Yeah.

What I am amazed at is that I’m actually liking this area.  I live in an amazing area, and I absolutely LOVE the fact that there is a decent mass transportation system where I can get to pretty much anywhere I want without driving.  Combined with the fact that my work will pay for my monthly subway pass, this is pretty freaking cool. 

I do have to say though, that I am not pleased at all of the Red Sox fans about.  It wasn’t four hours after I had moved here that I was accosted by one.  I had returned my U-Haul back to its location, and I was riding the T home, and I was waiting for one, when a random guy gave me a thumbs up and said, “Yankees lost!”  I smiled and nodded, much like one would when you have a toddler show you a picture they drew in kindergarten, no matter how much like crap it looked…

Adam on Matt’s girlfriend:

“It looks like she’s still evolving.”

(He’s saying she’s ugly.  Either that or the physical qualities of a neanderthal.)

So I had a good day in Boston. I moved the first carload of stuff to my new apartment. I have to say that I am loving the location. I have three restaurants in the ground floor of my building, all good ones, there’s a Morton’s across the street, and numerous other eateries abound.

On another note, I read the most interesting quote on pacifism. It pretty much said although war is ugly, there are many things that are uglier. And that the most frightening prospect of all was a world where there wasn’t anything worth fighting for.

Side note: I talked to a pretty neat girl.