(no subject)

Okay, let's talk about some good stuff. While it's certainly heavy times, I'm seeing a lot of pushing through the adversity, in many different ways, and it's important to remember the light. So let's have a long stream-of-consciousness diary entry for this week.

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The highlight of the week was Wednesday. Kate and I took the afternoon off, and wandered out to Great Brook Farm Park in Carlisle.

It wasn't quite perfect -- the farm was shut down (so no ice cream, and no official visits with the animals, although we got to see the chickens up close, since they were wandering around loose); more importantly, the restrooms are still closed, which limited the amount of time we could spend.

Still, it was great fun. The park turns out to have a bunch of well-marked, clear paths, which were a little bit crowded -- as well as some just-barely-marked trails, hiking up and down through the forest, which weren't. We got a good five-mile hike in, running into occasional people (including one group of two mothers and three kids who had gotten a little too deeply into the woods for their own good -- we connected them with some more-experienced locals who helped point their way out), but mostly wandering on our own, scrambling around the dirt and rock, visiting by the log cabin (which had seen better days: something clearly fell through its roof recently), and generally having a grand time of it. It was just what we needed, a bit of nature, with few enough people that we only needed to mask occasionally.

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After that, we got to see some of the beginnings of things reopening.

Personally, I think it's mostly going pretty well. Most people I encountered were being reasonably sensible, which is the most important thing: keeping their distance, masking any time they were near anybody else, trying not to crowd up. I suspect that if everyone was able to be sensible all the time, we wouldn't need lockdowns at all -- sadly, everyone being sensible is a pipe dream. But it wasn't bad.

We stopped at Dairy Joy in Weston, for post-hike ice cream, our first of the year. Kate has been going there for soft-serve her entire life, and she introduced me to it early in our relationship: it's the only place I know where coffee/raspberry swirl is an official thing. (In practice, she gets a cup of raspberry, and steals some of my coffee cone.)

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Thence to Waltham, to swing through Outer Limits for my current comic-book shipment. The pandemic has dealt the comic book industry a body blow, but paper books are starting to ship again, which makes me happy: there's still a lot that I buy in hardcopy. (Although the situation has accelerated my movement towards e-comics via Kickstarter, which are still doing fine: while the comics industry is kind of shaky, the medium is just fine.)

The big surprise in Waltham is that, no kidding, Moody Street has been closed, all the way until November. It's a gutsy but smart move by the town.

Moody Street is arguably the most important restaurant district in the Boston area, and has been more or less since I was in college. Since Waltham was the less-ritzy district, it was where the ethnic restaurants started (the original Mother India on Moody St was AFAIK the first Indian restaurant in the region), and it just kind of started a boulder rolling. Today, I still think of Moody as the best concentration of interesting restaurants around.

The problem, of course, is that restaurants have to spread people out now -- and nobody's got that kind of space. So the city has declared that most of Moody Street is now a pedestrian way, and restaurants are officially allowed to spread their tables out into the middle of the road.

It's very clever. While it doesn't eliminate the risk, there seems to be a solid consensus that covid risk is way lower outside than in. And by using the street, places can have a reasonable number of tables without being too crowded.

So yay for Waltham for going all-in on this experiment. I suspect there will be some growing pains (in particular, I expect some idiots to crowd together too much there), but hopefully it will provide a semblance of normalcy in our abnormal times.

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On the subject of reopening: Bagelsaurus has started doing more-conventional takeout. Hosannas in the highest!

(For those who haven't discovered The Creed of Bagelsaurus: they're my personal pick as the best bagels anywhere. That's a little heretical, since they aren't nearly as chewy and leaden as a classic New York bagel, and they are very, very Large -- but they're well-made, with a fine crust and absolutely packed with flavor, and they toast better than any other. My weekend is not complete without one of their Everything Bagels.)

They've been gently finding their way through the crisis, since the store couldn't be open in its usual form. (Under normal circumstances, the place has a line out the door all morning, every morning.) For the past month or two, they've been opening online orders once a week on Sunday, for pickup at the end of the week. That was a smashing success: for the first couple of weeks, pent-up demand was so high that they were selling out the entire week's supply in less than a minute.

Anyway, they've now moved to more conventional takeout: order online, then swing by and pick up your numbered bag, which is sitting for you in the doorway. The honest truth is, it's easier for me than it's ever been -- traditionally I would spend 10-15 minutes in line to get my half-dozen, but now it takes only seconds.

And yes, it's a little thing: but the little things are what makes life feel a little more normal now.

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Of course, things aren't normal. Protests are everywhere. I'm mostly proud of Boston: all of the protests I've personally encountered so far have been clear and strong, and completely peaceful, with nobody escalating things. Most have been appropriately loud, although I have to say that the most powerful IMO was one lone vigilant, on the corner of Waltham's central square, silently holding up a sign to remind everyone.

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Ending with the stupid little thing that has the most immediate effect on my life: Bridgegeddon is finally drawing to a close! Hooray!

For those who don't live near here: Broadway is the main thoroughfare of this side of Somerville, an absolutely vital artery. That artery has been severed for over a year now, because the Broadway Bridge (a block from our house as the crow flies) was too narrow for the Green Line Extension project, so they had to tear it down and replace it. It has made for a fairly ghastly time: half of the trips out of our house have involved strange diversions, and getting anywhere without going literally miles out of my way required cutting through local roads that shouldn't be used as through streets.

Anyway, as we came home from our out-and-about, we were startled to realize that cars were coming over the bridge. It's still partial -- just one lane in each direction -- but still a huge relief to everyone in this area, since it means that traffic can start to return to something resembling normal. (With any luck, it will mean that city busses stop careening down Cedar Street, which is nowhere near wide enough for them.)

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Putting all that together: it almost seems wrong to say, in the face of what's going on, but Wednesday was a good day -- sunny and friendly and a reminder that the world still turns and we will get through all this tsurrus. And based on the progress I'm seeing as a result of the protests, things might even get a bit better. So I'll take it...