Ok, I’ll give a quick rundown of how things have been in Boston sinced I moved in last Sunday.
I’m living on Fairmount St, which is practically right on Tufts camps. It’s a one-block one-way street with about a 30 degree incline (it’s super steep). When I moved in there were two roommates, both asian 19 year old Tufts undergrads who are pretty quiet and more or less keep to themselves, play guitar hero, watch TV, and go to class. But we all get along. A few days ago a third roommate moved in, some guy from Sweden (I don’t remember his name) who’s also 19, but he seems cool as well. So there won’t be any fights at my place at least. There’s a big kitchen, TV room (small, I never go in there), a bathroom, and 4 bedrooms. My room’s pretty big, I”d say 15 x 20 ft with a big walk-in closet and two windows, came fully furnished, etc. You probably don’t care about my room though.
I’m working at a Tufts lab in the psychology department for a professor named Dr. Cook, who works with the pigeon visual system. In the lab are about 50 pigeons kept in cages, along with another “experiment room” with 8 boxes, each of which has a little window with a touch-screen. Images pop up and the pigeons have to peck, and data’s recorded about how they do. Right now I’m writing a program for the next experiment, which will test whether pigeons can piece together two pieces of an object occluded by something in the middle (i.e. when we see a car through a bush, we know it’s a car even though we can’t see the whole thing). I usually work 9-5, unless I open up (2-3 days a week) when I come in at 8. I’m pretty used to it though.
There’s another girl named Ya’el working in my lab from Israel (even though she looks American and has no accent, you’d think she grew up here). She’s about my age, but only comes in M-W, but she seems cool. There’s also two grad students, a guy Matt who’s kind of our mentor, and a girl named Angie. The professor in charge is super chill, which makes working here much more pleasant. The lab is located about half a mile away, so I just walk here, and walk back and forth for lunch.
The T stop is about one mile south…I spent a while checking every path of gmap-pedometer.com and there’s no good straight line to the T stop, so it takes about 20 minutes to walk at a good pace. There’s a map on the right–the green arrow is my apt, the red dot is where I work, and the blue dot is the T stop. I’m 7 stops North West from the boston commons, which is a 20-25 minute ride, so it’s not bad.
Sunday night Aaron helped move me in (he’s living in Brighton, about 30 minutes West) of the commons. It’s a 5 mile drive but takes about 30 minutes to get there because Boston traffic SUCKS (don’t get me started). The drivers are complete wusses, take a minute to start up at a green light, and drive 10mph under the speed limit. It’s pretty frustrating. Anyway, Cambridge is right between Medford and Brighton, so I drive through Harvard. It seems like it might be a cool place to hang out, but I haven’t been there yet.
Monday night we went down to Back Bay (an area north of Boston that was man-made over the water), and met up at a bar with my friend Ted (who does economic consulting) and Jen Freedman, who was in town for the night, and Aaron. The next few days were just driving around learning the area, and learning how to do stuff at my lab, hanging out in the Commons with people, etc. Friday night I met up with Aaron, Ted, Will, Cecilia, and Isaac (all friends from U of R) and some other people that they tagged along with and had a fun night. Saturday night was similar, Sam came down from NH because he had just turned 21.
Sunday we walked the Freedom Trail on a beautiful day, which is about 3-4 miles long and stops through all the famous historic sites in Boston, including the State House (seen left), Paul Revere’s house (we couldn’t go in, so I took a picture of a brick from the wall to say I had a picture of his house), the USS Constitution, a graveyard with soldiers who died in the Boston Massacre, etc. Surprisingly, the USS Constitution (commissioned in 1797) is still fully operational. There’s US Navy marines on it at all times, and every morning they fire each of the cannons on board as a test; he said they could be called out to seas at any time. Of course, if the US did this the citizens would be pretty mad, and the sailors on board would be pretty dead (21st century torpedo > 18th century cannon).
Since last Friday we haven’t had hot water at the apartment because of some confusion with the oil company (some other guy in the apt was taking care of it), and it hopefully got fixed this morning–if it did, they came after I left. I felt too dirty (after having not showered), so I took an ice cold shower this morning and it was miserable. It feels great when you’re burning up after a run in 90 degree heat, but at 7am it really sucks.
Anyway, that’s Boston. I’m having a good time so far, even though it’s only been one week so it’s hard to say exactly. Oh, for Princeton people: I ran into Phil Santiago the other day, apparently he works here. I don’t know how to end these posts…uh, bye.
The pigeons like it. It is better than being turned into squab.
The girl is Cecilia, one of my friends from U of R. As for the pigeons, yeah, I don’t think they live the best lives (the cages are pretty small)–but I guess you have to do some things in the name of science.
According to Wikipedia, there were actually 3 main men involved, the third being Samuel Prescott, a physician. Here’s an interesting excerpt:
Marshall,
Who is the girl in the picture? And what do you think about those poor little pigeons?
All of those trips up and down the hill will be good for your heart.
Your verse should have been published Jon.
I think the other rider’s name was William Dawes (I could be wrong), because when I was in elementary school I wanted give him some credit, so I wrote a quick verse in parody to the famous one by Longfellow about Paul Revere (”Listen my children and you will hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”) My verse started out “Listen my children and you will pause to hear the story of William Dawes.”
I hadn’t thought of it again until now.
Oh, another really interesting factoid I learned in the Tipping Point was that, the night of Paul Revere’s great ride, there was another guy doing exactly the same thing; but nobody knew who he was they didn’t really pay attention.
Yay Marshie!
I remember in 1st grade we had to write these little papers, like 1 sheet with dotted lines to write on. All of the kids in the class would always write “Bye!” at the end of our papers. The teacher always kept telling us not to write it, but we all did anyway. I have no idea why.
We got our hot water fixed, and no I don’t have air conditioning. If it gets super hot I might look for a window one or bring one up from home, but I think I’ll be able to deal. My room’s on the northwest side, so I don’t get too much sun shining in.
Marshall this looks great. Do you have air conditioning?
Remember not to buy alcohol for your roommates. Susan doesn’t know how to take care of that kind of charge. But if your hot water continues to be a problem, call her.
Fantastic post, Marsh.