But just during the fog and rain:

Does it get any better than hanging out with your friend’s lovely daughter and your other friend’s lovely, well behaved Boston terrier?????

No I don’t believe it does.  It takes a long time to make good friends, but once you do, hold on to them forever:

Marathon time!!!!!!!

Many years ago, I wrote on this blog that inside the heart of every Bostonian, there is a desire to throw on a costume and go outside.  I still hold that this is true.

And marathon time.

I mean combine those two and you never know what’ll happen sartorially.

Never, never, never, never know what will happen.  First up, an example of that:

No need for a checkered flag at the marathon.  We had these two!!!!!

Second up, the most Boston photo ever to have been produced:

The Keytar bear with a woman wearing a marathon blanket.  I mean this is more Boston than you could ever imagine.

Next up, this man and his choice of marathon neckwear:

Marathon hoodie and glasses, check:

Blowing into a conch shell.  Yeah, why not??

UMass Patriot??  He was there too!!!!

How about this man with his flag??  Fabulous!!!!

And this lady with her antennae?  She was there too!!!!

And finally, this crew to make everyone’s marathon day a super fabulous one:

Yeah.  Mardi Gras and Christmas combined with athletic endeavor!!!!!  I always write about the marathon up here and how much I love it.  That love will never be extinguished.

This year was relatively calm and featured lovely weather.  I also enjoyed how the city was full of people who had never been here before and were experiencing things like Boston’s odd weather and the green line for the first time.  Oh out of towners, you don’t know what you are missing out on!!!!!

Either way, it was a fabulous day.  Let’s check out our runners in this first of what you know will be more than one entry:

Sometimes in life, you get stuck in a conservative rut where you think that what you have been doing so far is fine.  Then, well, then you loosen that cardigan.  You undo a button on the cardigan and you say “yes, I will be more free with myself.”

What am I talking about??  Museums of course.  Didn’t it seem obvious?

Did you think I was talking about something else?

Well, today was a revelation.  I’ve been to the Isabella Stuart Gardner museum by my estimation like literally a million times.  Nah, I’m kidding.  I’m not a time traveler, so now I could not have literally been there a million times, but yeah, I’ve been there upwards of 30 times.

Every single time I’ve ever been there, you cannot take photos in there.  You just can’t.  They snicker at you if you even fiddle with your camera for one minute.  I get it.  The place was robbed, but come on.  It is 2016.  That phone call making device in your hand is a camera now.  Undo a button on that cardigan already!!!!!

Well, the Gardner museum decided to do that.  They are finally letting people take photos in the museum because it is a gorgeous place that should be seen by the world, of course.  That cardigan, it should have been loosened ages ago.

Once you loosen that cardigan, you can never go back:

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Mother nature owes me one for this past winter.  I went and lost 40 pounds and suddenly, I could ski my little heart out wherever I wanted, whatever trails I wanted to go on and do it moderately well.

So how did mother nature pay me back?  By not having a winter.  I mean we had a couple of tiny little winter storms but this past ski season was characterized by a lot of cancelations and general disappointments when it came to skiing.

But whatever, I’m over it.  Its spring, right??  Well, mother nature has other ideas it would seem.  See the weather in New England goes something like this:

A heatwave with a change of a blizzard.  Dragons.  That’s life in New England.  Last summer I became friends with a person from more exotic parts and we sat and had a conversation about the weather for an hour.  At the end of the hour, my new friend turned me and said “we just had a conversation about the weather for an hour.”  I thought to myself, ah yes, just an hour.  Would that talk of the weather in New England contain itself to just an hour.

Last week we had an example of what I like to called “Spring-inter” when mother nature can’t quite decide what to do with us weather wise.  It is spring?  Is it winter?  Are we going to have a heatwave with a chance of a blizzard??

Only mother nature knows for sure.  But either way, spring-inter makes for some beautiful light that was in full effect last week when I visited Somerville:

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Its an Olympics year and as I have been every year since I was seven years old, I’ve been glued to the television for the full proceedings this year.

Whenever I watch the Olympics, I always look at the athletes and think do they ever wonder how they got there?  Did they turn a cartwheel or put on an ice skate and discover there were better or faster than someone else on the same apparatus but then soon discover that they were a lot faster and then somehow they landed at the World championships or Olympics?  Does anything ever prepare you for that?  Do they go out on the ice or the field and think “how did I get here??” or do they think they really belong there??

Those kinds of thoughts crossed my mind last week when I attended the Figure Skating World Championships here at the TD Garden.  The Garden is a Boston venue that I have no yet learned to love, but the night of figure skating, somehow it was OK.  The crowd was nice and nobody tried to frisk my mother, with whom I was attending.

We went to see ice dancing and the Alex and Maia Shibutani were absolutely wonderful, robbed of the title if you ask me.  Nobody asked you.  I know.

I got some photos of them and a couple of the other pairs because why waste an opportunity to get a good photo.  No, I wasn’t going for a kind of an impressionistic thing with the pictures.  TD Garden, bless their hearts, does not allow cameras into their venue with interchangeable lenses so I had to use the mini camera to make the skaters look like clay figurines that skate:

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The beginning of this entry is going to be depressing, but I promise there will be a happy ending.

The quote at the beginning of the entry comes from none other than Pepi Leistyna, my wonderful professor from UMass Boston who passed away almost exactly one year ago to the day of today.  Not a day has gone by since he passed away that I haven’t thought of him.

In a class I took with him two years ago, he said that culture goes beyond fun, flan and festivals and it is true, but I also always like to note that all cultures go through the same things.  We all laugh, we all cry and we all deal with broken hearts and sadness.  Pepi always said we all deal with it in different ways and that is true.

This sounds trite and cheesy, but music unites us all, in our happiness and our heartache.  Tonight I attended an amazing event at the Berklee College of Music that really brought that home to me.  The College annual hosts an occasion where they have a folk music festival.  Someone next to me said “what are they singing about?”  I said “heartache, sadness, etc” and in fact they were singing about those particular subjects.

It was a beautiful night.  Outstanding.  The performers were some of the best I have ever seen and the music was from the heart.  It was wonderful:

Every year I buy my mom a ticket to the Boston flower show for her birthday.  She loves flowers and gets to go around and enjoy everything.

Me, I’m not as big into the flowers, but hey, there is always a chance to get a great photo or do some people watching so I always tag along.

This year was no different.  We found out what the newest flower arrangements were in style, which gnomes we should decorate our gardens with, the newest styles of hats and that Great Danes are gigantic.  Sorry, I couldn’t manage to snap a photo of the enormous great Dane I saw in the exhibition hall for fear he’d eat my camera.  I also expended all of my dog time with getting his photo with my phone.

Just an afternoon at the flower show, as you do here in late winter/early spring:

So many tears I’ve cried, so much pain inside.

So many years we’ve tried to keep our love alive, but baby it ain’t over till its over.

Is that an entry about love and loss??  No of course not.  Its an entry about ski season, but hey, that is a story of love and loss this season.  It was a total story of love and loss this season, where there have been a few ski trips where I’ve sweat for most of the trip and one ski trip where I got frost bite or as I like to call it, a little kiss from the mountain….

Either way, I chose the title “It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over” because this week’s ski trip was a perfect illustration of that.  Every weekend I trudge over to Back Bay station to meet my ski bus.  Every week this season I’ve had to check if the trip was even on because of the crappy skiing conditions that have taken hold, given mother nature’s refusal to produce even a drop of natural snow.

As luck would have it, this weekend I visited a place called Jay Peak, which I also like to call the crazy bitch of mountains.  Actually, the bitch was less crazy than she has been on previous trips.  I’ve visited Jay Peak a total of three times.  The first time I stayed strictly on flat land because I was learning to ski and it was my first season.  I didn’t even go to the summit of the mountain for that first trip because the tram said it was for intermediate and advanced skiers and I didn’t belong to either of those categories.

The second time I visited was much more interested.  Prior to my frost bitten experience in Stowe earlier this season, the January 2015 trip to Jay Peak took the record as the coldest I have ever been in my life skiing.  It was an insane trip where I thought I was going to die on many a passage down the mountain.  I also realized that people mostly ski the glades up there, which was assuredly something I was never going to do.

The third trip was yet more interesting.  The skiing bus was virtually empty so I had two seats to myself and got some really good sleep on the way there.  Yet once I got there, I didn’t want to get off the bus and just wanted to sleep.  Once though I got a look at the gleaming slope, off I went.  I sped down the intermediates and for the first time in my life, ducked into mogul filled semi glade.  Rocks and rocks of ice and tree branches and other such detritus that made me realize immediately that it was the first time I was going to duck into a glade.  And the last time.  Otherwise, the trails were a lot of fun and the conditions were quite nice.  It wasn’t too cold and I wasn’t sweating either so ski season isn’t over just yet.

It ain’t over till its over:

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