I live on Lake St and every couple years you find out why. We were away this weekend when our entire neighborhood flooded, stranding cars and trains. Here’s an awesome video by Paper Fortress Films showing the situation Saturday afternoon.

A couple years ago, I made this much less awesome video to show a flood.

Remember last week when I was telling you about how much the people of Somerville loves Tom Champion. And how they love him so much there’s a fan group on Facebook? Cosmo Catalano has remixed the latest snow emergency call into some bumping Tom Champion fanmusic. Just listen to it.

Somerville is a city that LOVES its snow emergencies. We’ve had a snow emergency for every snow storm this year, during which, you can only park on the odd side of the street. The City LOVES them. Sometimes, they call a snow emergency the morning of the day before a storm. We love our snow emergencies so much, there’s even a Facebook Group in appreciation of Tom Champion, the guy who records the snow emergency phone messages. This past week, we even had a cold emergency. There weren’t any parking restrictions, but Tom Champion didn’t want us going outside unnecessarily.

Except for a couple hours this afternoon, it’s been snowing ALL day, and yet no snow emergency. You’ll get’em next time, eh, Champs?

I’m calling it right now.
To: All you hardy New Englanders making noise about other New Englanders making noise about the snowstorm.

Look, people freak out about the weather. They freak out about the snow. They freak out about the cold. They freak out about the hot. They freak out about the rain. They freak out about the lack of rain. It’s not just weather either. Any event that is happening to a large group of people is going to cause some percent of that population to freak out. And you know what? Another percent of the population is going to stand on the side of the that group and they’re going to ridicule them for freaking out.

This is no loner acceptable behavior. It’s over. Right now. This has to end. It’s possible you didn’t know how many of your acquaintances freaked out about weather and such before Facebook Status Updates and Twitter, but you’ve seen television news, right? Who do you think the reporter on the side of the road in the parka and mittens was talking to? Who do you think was watching all that stock footage of plows and sanders rolling out of the DPW yard? This is how people are. People like getting worked up about things and getting fired up about them getting fired up isn’t going to make them not be fired up next time. Believe it. And you better know I’m serious if I’m using a euphemism that involves sharks. I hate sharks.

From: Me

Earlier this afternoon, a thunder storm rolled through Union Square, Somerville. I’m not sure what happened, but soon the street was flooded under about a foot of water. About an hour after it stopped raining, the water was gone.

Click on the picture to see a video of the scene.

My Prius is floating away.

It was terrible weather for a cruise around Boston Harbor, but Lucero is one of my favorite bands and I was on a boat with several of my friends. The sound wasn’t so good, but Lucero is one of my favorite bands and I was on the boat with several of my friends. You couldn’t see the band at all, but Lucero is one of my favorite bands and I was on the boat with several of my friends.

Every burgeoning bike rider probably has a stuck in the rain story, below is mine:

The clouds looked ominous as I left work, but I hoped the weather would hold off for the 20-25 minutes it would take to get home. Unfortunately, about halfway home, as I started across the Mass Ave Bridge, I felt the first drops. Big, intermittent, falling from the sky with more urgency with each pedal. By the time I crossed the bridge, it was a full out sideways rain thunderstorm. My shoes filled with water. Dirty water from the street was spraying into my mouth from the tires. My glasses were quickly rendered opaque by the drops and when I looked over them to see, water laser beams shot into my eyes. It was an angry, confused shower, filled with all the bitterness of a scorned Mother Nature.
I wasn’t sure if I should stop (I should have) or keep going to meet the HVAC guy who was coming for a spring tune up (what a waste that was), and I wasn’t sure how much protection my backpack would provide to my laptop.
Of course it stopped raining a couple minutes after I got home, but by that time, I had already seen the angry, blinking lights of my soggy D430 and taken the battery out. I tried it one more time after the HVAC guy left (seriously, a waste of time and money. He hadn’t even brought a ladder to change the air filter, leaving it for me to do). And one more time a couple hours later before leaving it in an A shape on the table to dry. And then I waited. And waited. I’d say it was the longest 24 hours of my life, but that would be cheap hyperbole, wouldn’t it? Finally, I couldn’t wait anymore and put the battery back in and it worked no problem. It came right back from hibernation somehow and it seems to be fine.
For those of you looking here for instructions on what to do with a wet laptop to guarantee bringing it back to life… I don’t know. Shut the power off right away. I guess probably don’t leave it on standby on your way home to reduce the chance of it getting wet while it’s powered on, also. And then hope it works after it dries for as long as you can stand drying it. Hope and Luck. That’s what you need with a wet laptop, because I imagine I had as good a chance of getting a brick out of the whole experience.

Thanks for clicking on the Free Barcelona Travel Guide. There are 10 chapters total, listed at the end of this post. Check out the introduction for more information.

Sitges is an excellent little city/town. It’s small enough that you can walk all over everywhere and walk by the same streets until they become familiar, but big enough that it’s still interesting to see everything a couple times. Right by our hotel was a block without an official name, Calle del Pecado, or Sin Street, with cafes on either side of the road. The outdoor tables for the cafes are lined up 4 deep to give the maximum amount seats for people watching. This was my favorite part of Sitges, I thought of it as walking the gauntlet. Watching people people watching is more fun than I would have thought.

As I said yesterday, the weather became perfect about as soon as we got to Sitges, so we were excited to head to the beach after slathering on the 800 SPF sun block J had gotten for us. The hotel was a block and half from the beach, so we were basking in the sun reading trashy novels in no time. This being a European beach on the Mediterranean, you should be warned that there are a fair amount of Speedo bathing suits for the fellas, and not all of the ladies wear both parts of their bathing suit.

After about 2 hours of basking and trashy novels among the half-decent Europeans, we walked over to a Creperie on the corner of Sin Street for lunch. Has anyone ever had a bad crepe? I doubt it. By that point, we were exhausted and needed a nap, after which we promptly went back to the beach for several more hours of basking and trashy novels.

After another nap, which admittedly I spent reading trashy novels, we headed out to find some food. Douglas at the hotel had suggested Al Fresco as the 2nd best restaurant in Sitges, but we ended up at their sister restaurant next door, the Al Fresco Cafe. J got the menu del dia which came with vegetable soup, lasagna, and this delicious mango bread for dessert. I can’t remember what I got, but I remember liking this restaurant, so it must have been good.

There are 10 chapters in the Free Barcelona Travel Guide. I hope you find them useful.
Introduction
Day 1: Barcelona to Boston: Plaça de Catalunya
Day 2: More Walking: Santa Maria del Mar, Picasso Museum, Ciutadella, Euskal Etxea
Day 3: Gaudi and Eating: Casa Milà
Day 4: More Gaudi: Parc Guell, Sagrada Família
Day 5: Sitges and Birthdays: Barcelona Cathedral, Parrots Hotel, The Beach House
Day 6: Sitges and Beach
Day 7: Sitges and Montserrat: Montserrat
Day 8: Sitges
Day 9: Too Hot to Shop: Aparthotel Calabria, La Boqueria, Tapaç 24
Day 10: Montjuic: Montjuic

Map of where we went or wished we had.

Click here to blow out the map and get the full effect

Rachel and I just got back from a week in a Caribbean paradise, so getting off the plane in 5-degree weather (in short-sleeves, no less) was a bit of a shock. It was probably that, coupled with a desire to eat in a somewhat more healthy manner, that led us to dub this week the Week of Soups.

We spent Sunday morning searching the magical Internet for soup recipes, and found three that sounded pretty good. The first one was this butternut squash soup recipe from All Recipes.

I shan’t reproduce the recipe here, since you can click that link and see it for yourself, but it basically involves roasting a squash, a head of garlic, and some onions, pureeing them, and then simmering them with spices in vegetable broth. Really can’t be simpler.

Rachel liked it, but I thought it was only OK. It had the sweetness that you expect from a butternut squash soup, but it interacted kind of oddly, for me, with the curry flavor. (It’s entirely possible that lame curry powder and broth are to blame.) If I were doing this again, I might have sauteed the squash with the curry powder to bring out more flavor. I also think it needed some heat — when we get the leftovers out of the freezer in a few weeks, I’ll probably add a dash of cayenne.

People on Yahoo noticed the ridiculous pants the referees were wearing during yesterday’s Patriots/Jets play off match up (playoff matchup? play-off match-up? (I’m uncomfortable with hyphens, now you know (but I LOVE parentheses))).

Instead of the short pants and long socks that referees always wear, Bill Vinovich and crew all had what looked like black track pants with a white stripe down the side. The folks on Yahoo Answers claim these pants are part of the cold weather optional uniform. Now, what I want to know is which ninny referee needed the warm weather option on this brisk, New England, January afternoon? I understand that in the future, when Massachusetts averages a balmy 63 degrees throughout the year, the idea of a referee wearing his winter gear will be outrageous, but… well, the future is now, Sunday was warm, and the refs had on the referee equivalent of snow pants. And it was outrageous.

Was this the best game to try these pants out? Have they used them anywhere else? It was 4 degrees a few years ago for a play off game in Foxboro, that wouldn’t have been a better time for the woolies? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I will pledge to spend a reasonable amount of time trying to quench our collective curiosity.