Here’s what’s been happening on the East Coast: on Thursday morning, Jessica called me and said that she was in Cambridge. Cambridge, I asked incredulously? Cambridge, she assured me. It turns out that she was visiting Akira, who is currently attending MIT, on very short notice. So I spent the day hanging out with Jessica and her friends, wandering about Harvard (we even ate in the Freshman dining hall) and the Natural History Museum (which never gets old).

On Friday, I spent the day with Rachael’s friend Ed. We did a few errands, including looking at beautiful watercolors by Kenneth Stubbs, before going to the Museum of Fine Arts. We had a delicious lunch (salad with pears, radishes and candied pecans) and looked at a small collection of impressionist paintings. Somehow I never thought being in the presence of Van Gough’s brush strokes would be so profound — art is so much more meaningful when you see it up close, with all its glorious texture. The “Empire Art” exhibit, our main event of the day, was almost pale in comparison, full of the baroque and heavy furniture and artwork of Napolean’s reign. Ironically, one of the few pieces I genuinely liked was the silver cup molded from Napolean sister’s breast.

Then, yesterday, it snowed. It was glorious! Inches of it carpeting the ground and the roofs and the railings, and big fat puffs of it tumbling from the sky. Yet it was not long before the streets and sidewalks were cleared, and Mary even took her driving test this morning with no problems (due to neither weather nor skill). Ah, but it was a lovely sunny afternoon, and I walked miles along Christmas-y Cambridge streets.