Holy mackerel.....

....Just one of the phrases we heard on our 3rd and 4th grade field trip to the Massachusetts State House today.  Richard and I are resting - exhausted! - after helping to shepherd forty excited children from classroom to subway to state house and back again through Boston's best slush and ice.

Tom has to write a few paragraphs on his trip for tonight's homework. Here's my version.

Massachusetts politicians are Very Proud of beating the Brits. They also spent a lot of money on their State House. It has lots of  marble statues. The statue of George Washington shows him wearing a Roman toga, but there was a fuss because people in Boston didn't want him to think he was a king or anything, so everyone agreed that this is officially a blanket. The State House has an awesome dome. It started as wooden shingles but they had to be fixed a lot. Then they tried copper, but it went a funny green colour. So they spent more money put on gold leaf but do you know that all that gold is spread so thin, the whole lot only weighed five pounds? 

The Massachusetts State House has a Representatives chamber and a Senate. The Representatives chamber was in business, and the men outside shushed us a lot. So here we are in the Senate. You can see our teacher Jen is standing at the front. 

The Representatives used to sit in here and they had a sculpture they loved, which they called the Sacred Cod. When they moved to their new room, they took the Sacred Cod with them. The Senators were upset, because they wanted it. So someone gave them their own fish, which hangs above the chandelier and it is called the Holy Mackerel.

(My mum says the pictures are skew wiff because she wasn't supposed to be taking them...)

At the end of our tour we met our own senator from Cambridge and had to sit still for group photographs. This is my mum's version but there'll be a proper one later from the real photographer who made us all count to three and then shout "Money!"

Tom the musician

We've just signed up for a second term of violin lessons for Tom and bless him, he's very keen to get his fifteen minutes of practice in every morning before going to school. His teacher is super strict, never smiles, constantly corrects his basic technique... and it seems to be spurring him on!

 Meanwhile my cello sits neglected in the corner just out of shot. I must do better.

It's a very white world out here

White and wonderful if you are a student wrapped up warm with a camera to hand. Not so much if you're trying to get to work or get to grips with a snow shovel. Still, yesterday did feel special. Much of Cambridge closed down  - no schools, no Harvard, no traffic. All was calm, all was quiet.

If anybody can identify the lovely bird that sat in the tree outside our window during much of the blizzard, do let me know in a comment!

Tom has been thrilled by it all. He and Richard built a snowman yesterday while I headed off in my Arctic gear for a class at MIT.

This morning's walk to school was also much delayed by Tom alternately  running up snowbanks to pose for photographs, and scooping up handfuls of the wet stuff to throw at me....

Fairy lights on Broadway #bostonblizz

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Settling in to the Boston blizzard

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

"The British are coming!"

But this time they arrived in Lexington Massachusetts to tour the National Heritage Museum. We left our muskets behind us. We learned a lot about the revolt against the tea tax, Paul Revere's Midnight Ride, and the first battle of the Revolutionary War. But that was just a starting point. How about this?

The all seeing eye is from a surprising stained glass window just inside a grand front door that is inscribed to the Scottish Rite Freemasons. They founded the museum, which also proudly tells the story of how Washington DC was laid out along Freemason lines  (not just in Dan Brown's imagination.)

More surprises follow. It's a place that throws together both grand designs and endearing eccentricity.  There's a Curator's Choice exhibition of everything from soap box rally cars and vintage children's toys to someone's ancestor's silk wedding slippers: a sort of "how we used to live" catch all. There are two walls dedicated to neon-lit photographs of classic American diners. There's the exhibition we actually went to see, the stunning photographs of all 58 national parks by Vietnamese American photographer Quang-Tuan Luong. And then there were cuckoo clocks.

These I adored. The Enchanted Clocks of George McFadden were his retirement project - he made one a year before he died in 1991. They were put up as a temporary exhibit and loved so much by visitors that they stayed there.

They're so funny - and irreverent - and unexpected.  We started to walk past them, then went back for more.

I like the details.  Noah swigging from a bottle in the doorway of the ark while his wife sets about catching  fish for supper.  Jonah sitting in the mouth of the whale looking for all the world like he's landed in a deckchair. 

What a day. We needed caffeine. What better for a couple of culture vultures than a trip to Dunkin' Donuts?








Sometimes you just have to stop and take a photograph

In this case, we drove past, giggled, wondered about it, turned round the car and went back for a shot. This is my memory of Stoughton Massachusetts.

A New Year outing that was small but perfectly formed

Tom was in school. We'd run an errand south of Boston and had a few hours before pick up time. Richard said "this place gets great reviews". And so off we headed to the Fuller Craft Museum which is an extraordinary building staffed by extraordinarily friendly people and full of intriguing bits of American art.

The contraption on the left is called "Sounding" - and apparently it "evokes" the world of "Moby Dick". 

Two years ago, two sculptors from San Francisco made a wire table, filled it with beach rocks and lowered it into the sea for two months. They recorded the ambient sound with a hydrophone. Now when you stand directly underneath the funnel, you too can experience the underwater atmosphere. Puzzling. Do I hear you say pointless? But cool. A passing volunteer told us how excited her groups of  school children get when they see it - she said they all "see" different images in the installation.

There's much more.. glass planets... copper quilts... bronze bison...porcelain photographs... and a lot I can't really describe. On your right, a parakeet sits in a cage. But the bird is on a video screen, and as you watch, it preens and flutters, flies out of sight and returns. What does it mean? I don't know but it's hard to stop watching.

 The museum building is all cedar shingles and jaunty angles, braced against the chill off Porter's Pond - right now just a sheet of ice.  I glimpsed bits of sculpture outside and resolved to go back after the thaw.

A two year old packed my heart in his luggage.

Fynn Sturk came to stay in Christmas week and brought his parents with him. He is a complete treasure, one of those toddlers who is wide-eyed and enthusiastic about the world around him. Favourite phrase: "What's that?" ("Wossat?")

Tom was somewhat grumpy about Fynn's gentle efforts to explore his space and his toys, and we had to remind the 8 year old several times that he was in fact the big boy here and the host. But then of course he was sad to see his cousin go and when asked by his teacher to write about what happened over the holidays, he wrote all about Fynn! I look forward to the two boys getting to know each other once we are living a matter of miles, not thousands of miles, apart...
Here are a few of our holiday snaps of  Helen and Tim and Fynn.

Chaps, we loved having you to stay.