I’ve lived here in Boston for close to six years. A friend of mine told me that I am a Bostonian in my soul and that is true. Somehow in this relatively short amount of time I have managed to shake off my New York-ness. Sure I still say “cawfee” sometimes and I still think that the single finest slice of pizza that can be found on earth is contained in any 99 cent pizza parlor in New York, but otherwise, I have become fully Bostonized. I worship the Gronk and Big Papi. A highlight for me in 2014 was touching the actual Green Monstah in Fenway Park. I mean walking on the field was an amazing experience in and of itself.

I don’t know what it is about this city. I came here to live and thought “I know this place. What is there even to know? Harvard, Faneuil Hall, some other things but really, is there anything else to little city? Turns out there is a ton more to know.

Which brings me to the subject of this entry. In Boston there is a tradition, no a kind of gentleman’s agreement that you can dig out your car after a snow storm and then place some object to hold said place. I never witnessed this in New York. A New Yorker would probably just throw whatever object it was you chose to save your spot. But Bostonian, polite New Englanders that they are don’t do that. Its kind of quirky, but nice:

Doesn’t this look like a monstah?

Well, not a straight up cliche. I mean I didn’t serve up two shadows of people holding hands or some kind of a sad railroad track or something so banal.

But I guess I need swerve towards something a bit cliche with this one. This guy just quietly getting a haircut with that giant hill of snow on the ground. It was during my nightly constitutional around the block to get out of the house during this latest snow emergency. Actually, I quite like these:

I’ve written on this blog before that this blog has three patron saints. Rufus the Colored bull terrier, Bill Cunningham and Arvydas Sabonis. Notice that only one of those people is actually a photographer, whereas the others are a dog and a Lithuanian basketball great.

Well, I am adding another patron saint. In appreciation of the Patriot’s 2015 Super Bowl victory and the fact that we share a common ancestral heritage, I am adding Rob Gronkowski, tight end of the 2015 Super Bowl champion New England Patriots as a new patron saint on this blog. Again, I really do hope he reads this blog and understands exactly what an honor I am bestowing upon him.

What does being a patron saint of Wrong Side of the Camera actually involve? Well, Mr. Gronkowski, you will be written about in a way that you are not usually written about. I will not write about your football playing ability. Rather, you will be written about in the the manner I will describe you in the next paragraph.

Some genius (not me) came up with a measuring scale for our recent snow fall. He (or she) invented a new unit of measure called a “Gronk” measuring 6 feet, 6 inches, the size of an approximate Gronk found in the wild. It is all illustrated in this handy graphic:

So as you can see from Gronk’s arm sticking out of the pile of snow, we’ve had nearly a full Gronk since the snow started.

Today we adding another Gronk to our snow totals. Pretty soon we will have two or three full Gronks. And then I will simply be able to ski from window, down to the street.

Gronk:

Well, another snow day. Thanks Boston!!! Every weekend seems to be a three day weekend now. If I have nothing to do and am locked inside all day long, I got a little nuts, but I have school readings to do. Usually the school readings get done on some break between one of the multitude of things I do during a week but because of the snow day, I can actually peacefully do them with no problems or drama.

There was just one problem. I have to find a place to do the readings. During the first snow day a couple of weeks ago, I called my local Starbucks and nobody answered. On the second one, I ventured out and discovered it was open. This time I just decided to go. It was completely and totally packed but still had coffee and breakfast sandwiches. I found some kind of a seat and started reading. At that moment, I realized that I didn’t have my headphones, when the person next to me started saying things like “robustness with respect to the power point” and “clarity of plan.” Interestingly I was reading an article about the different ways that language shifts and changes. Hopefully the English language isn’t heading towards full time use of terms that should only really be used in a board room.

Anyway, just reading can be boring, so I set up the camera on the little ledge on the window and pointed it at the people going by. It was interesting to see the people just kind of walking by in the snow. My little view, I guess:

No matter who you are, old Hollywood glamour will get to you. Jennifer Aniston is a star, but also a real person and I don’t mean it in that cheesy magazine profile way. She isn’t an untouchable glamour person living an impossibly glamour life. She’s a movie star, wealthy, dating another wealthy movie star, but she is also photographed going to the gym and getting Starbucks. Her life isn’t that different from the life of a normal person, albeit with more money.

Then you have those stars of the Hollywood Golden Age. Was Gary Cooper ever photographed grabbing lunch with his buds? Did Marlene Dietrich ever go to her local coffee joint in her sweatpants? No, not really. Not at all actually.

And the clothes the woman wore. I mean the thread of a button of a seam of a fishtail hemline. To die for!!!! (Just kidding. I’m not Rachel Zoe). But I bet she’d love these outfits:

Warning. A story from the real person who writes this blog. Not made up, not created, but of actual real stuff I do, not of any pretend worlds, that I usually inhabit.

Two years ago, I sent off my application to the Applied Linguistics program at the University of Massachusetts. It wasn’t really anything I wanted to do. I did my job, I liked my job and I have been to graduate school before. One trip there was enough. It was like the dentist. Who wants to willingly go to the dentist to have their teeth drilled into constantly? Well, the trip to graduate school one resembled that.

I waited for the response from the graduate school. I rode the ski lifts up the mountains on my winter tour of New England ski resorts, thinking ever the while “well, if I don’t get accepted, I’ll get to keep going skiing every weekend in winter.

After a few weeks, I got worried. I wasn’t getting anything in the mail. Had they not accepted me and not bothered to tell me?

In March 2013, while I was on ski trip in Stowe, I got my acceptance letter. I was so happy when I saw the letter. That night it snowed during a sunset on this idyllic Vermont scene.

I didn’t even know what I expect when I started the program. All I knew was that I would be working and going to school for the first time in my life. And I work A LOT. How was that all going to work? Was I going to be able to accomplish all of it? Or even any of it? How was it going to go?

Well, somehow it actually managed to work out. Yeah, I have a breakdown every semester for one reason or anything, complete with water works, but I usually get it together within ten minutes.

Last night I was at school I realized that doing the program had actually turned out to be a really good thing. I was in a room listening to an education scholar named Antonia Darder. She was very animated and alive during her talk. I looked around and realized that the school provides me with a place to go that isn’t connected to my work, where I can interact with people in a different way than I do in my everyday life. It is a kind of a refuge from my everyday life, with people who laugh at the same jokes about grammar. When I have trouble, I go up on the roof. My roof are the classes at UMass Boston.

When I was at Dr. Darder’s lecture yesterday, of course I had my camera. I snapped some photos of her and one of my professors from last semester came over and immediately told me to send her the photos. It feels nice to be appreciated for what I was doing, especially after leaning back to take a photo, I knocked over a bottle and a box of cookies.

Dr. Darder didn’t seem to mind. Here she is looking pretty happy to be with us. And we were happy to be there. If you look really closely, you will see my linguistics professor Charles Meyer in the photos. We always giggle when we see the prescriptive linguists!!!!:

I had to go to Trader Joe’s today to replace all the food I ate during yesterday’s boring snow day. In the window of one of bars on Boylston street, I spotted a, well, let’s just see what I spotted for ourselves:

Yes, I realize that this is a famous movie plot device from “A Christmas Story.” I have never seen this movie, but I know that the father receives this particularly strange item in a box marked “Fra-gee-lay.”

Now I have some questions about the leg lamp that anyone who wants to can answer in the comments section:

1. How would I redo the decor in my living room to accommodate the arrival of such a priceless item? I mean I’d have to start with that excellent piece and redo the entire feng shui of my room to accommodate it of course.

2. What did they do with the remaining plastic body part of whatever the original lamp came off of?

3. Why didn’t they put anything Patriots related on there? Which leads to question four….

4. Did they steal it from Rob Gronkowski’s house? Will he come looking for it? Does it fit in with his general decorating aesthetic?

Yeah, that’s all the questions. I’d appreciate your grammatical responses in the comments sections. Thank you.

Out of ice? Want to make a real snow cone? Does your patbingsu need that extra special something, like real snow? Well, look no further than Boston, where we have snow. Snow to spare and then more snow and if that isn’t enough for you, we’re getting another shipment at the end of this week and early next week as well.

Yesterday in an amusing Facebook conversation, I asked how many cubic centimeters of snow a friend wanted who currently resides in a much hotter climate. He originates from a cold climate and misses the snow. I advised him that we’ve got plenty of white icy stuff for him, but he wants enough to cover his entire city. He was worried that our supply chain may not be able to withstand the stress of shipping so much snow to his particularly city. I advised him that our supply chain is fine with doing that.

In celebration of a day that included nearly tripping in the snow multiple times, a commute that took over two hours and included a cab ride where I got stuck in traffic and general snow related mayhem, here is some more snow. Misery loves company:

I hate snow days. I mean I guess in a way I like them, so that first statement isn’t exactly true. I mean I don’t want to get wet and trudge through the snow to get to work in the morning on the world’s greatest train. However, being locked inside all day long isn’t fun either. Say I lived in some place right next to a mountain and I could use my snow day to go skiing. Then I would love snow days.

Instead on snow days, I am trapped inside with not much to do. I have school work to do so that isn’t bad and there are plenty of TV series on Netflix that I have never watched. Which is how we come to the general theme of this blog entry.

Today I found a little darkly comic series on Netflix called “Lillyhammer” about a New York mobster that gets relocated to the Norwegian town after ratting out one of his fellow mobsters. Very good show, full of quirky characters in snowy landscape.

What if Allston were to transform into a Scandinavian thriller? Who would the characters be? What would take place? Would there be a murder and a cover up? Would it be something about a family? Well, I know what it would like when they went outside, that is for sure: