#8 Boston - No View Whatsoever July 30 2006

I know, I know, I promised to send this Friday night!! What is my excuse, you ask? Well, I did what the whole lot of you constantly tells me to do. I sat on my couch, watched a movie, and forgot about the rest of the world. At 9:30 PM I was ready to hit the sack, and focus on some rapid eye movements. I finally have a minute during this as usual jam-packed weekend to make good on my promise to write. Oscar is chirping in the kitchen, talking up a storm (he likes the hum of the dishwasher and considers it his God-given right to make a lot of noise when it is running), and the Dixie Chicks provide entertainment via the DVD player. It is a bit cooler out there today, meaning 85 and I know, I know, we are not nearly suffering as much as my poor friends in California who are trying to survive in triple-digit weather, but if you have to run 15 miles for marathon training, 85 is serious enough.

So, last weekend, it seems like ages away - gosh! You saw the pictures, did I look happy to you?? As you may have guessed, that was not my happy face, and I was not the little ray of sunshine I usually am. But who can blame me?? After a busy week at work, I was expecting the mountains of New Hampshire to be a bit more hospitable. My tolerance for rain after months and months of crappy weather has shrunk to almost zero and every drop of rain triggers the aforementioned fits. It started during the drive up to New Hampshire. I had taken Friday off in order to get my 10-mile marathon requirement done with before heading up north, and I was not even quite at Rick's house in Windham, NH, when the first deluge hit. And so it went all day on Friday, it was like Baskin Robbin's 31 flavors - a new weather pattern every few minutes, from "the-world-is-going-down-I-can't-see-shit" to "oooh, look how pretty, the sun is out to "where the bloody h... are the White Mountains? They were there last week!". It was entertaining at least.

We did summit a 4000-footer on Saturday, Mt Galehead (4024 ft) - my 10th for this year, and 15th overall. With this little achievement, one of my New Year's resolutions is fulfilled, and I could sit on my lazy butt for the rest of the year if I chose to do so (just kidding). The hike up Mt Galehead (http://www.hikethewhites.com/galehead.html) was enjoyable and moderate in its approach, and about half a mile before you hit the summit, the AMC's Galehead Hut invites for coffee, tea, and cake, and caters to the needs of weary hikers. (http://www.hikethewhites.com/galehead_hut.html). This is where you have somewhat of a view, because the amazingly unspectacular summit of Mt Galehead affords none. No view whatsoever. There is just the comforting thought that you bagged yet another mountain off the long list and you lived to tell about it. So far, so good, but then the trouble started, rain, rain and rain. Relentless, for the whole five miles of the downhill hike. Petra was not happy, to say the least. Despite the fact that I did have a waterproof windbreaker and boots, it was just yucky. The relentless pounding one experiences hiking down granite boulders started to hurt my back, I had PMS, and the world was just out to get me!!! My hiking boots now look like I did a little trip to a pig sty and I probably will have to make use of a hammer to get the dirt off once it is all dried up. Fun!!

The rain never stopped so we did opt for an early departure on Sunday and headed home. The viewing of Johnny Depp and the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel helped to right all the weekend wrongs that afternoon, and a lovely dinner at "Joe's American Bar and Grill", a Boston institution located on fashionable Newbury Street, made the tummy happy. Life was good after all.

Week days: work, work ,work and marathon training (just finished up week 10 out of 18); a nice social diversion was created by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company who every year delights Will's friends with free performances at the Boston Common. On Tuesday, Patrick, Ellen, Waleed, Paula and I attended "The Taming of the Shrew" - definitely a more enjoyable evening than last year's Hamlet (there was just too much screaming going on) and very nicely acted. The play was staged in "Bostonia", some scenes took place on Revere Beach; the actors featured heavy-duty New Jersey and Boston accents, and to be honest, the whole hoopla was a little raunchy, if you know what I mean. At some point, every sentence spoken became a double entendre. When one of Bianca's suitors said "before you touch my instrument" and mumbled something about his "fingering", the audience was pretty clear on the concept.

So, my friends, I have to go now. There are some errands to be done, and I have to get started on my citizenship application, which amazingly enough seems very straightforward and is giving me nowhere near the trouble the German government gave me for just changing my name back to my maiden name (I think I signed less paperwork for my mortgage). They topped it off last week, by charging me an additional incoming wire fee for the insane amount of money they wanted to officially "recognize" my American divorce and then complained that I had not wired enough money. Unbelievable!!

Have a nice rest of your weekend, and talk to you soon.

pet:)

#7 Boston - Bursting with Filth, July 23, 2006

The Swan River Restaurant in Chadham at Cape Cod is a nice place, mind you, but their menu is literally unreadable. They picked a bit of an unusual type font, slanted to the right, and the result is that you cannot read a darn thing, and what they, in a very creative attempt, metaphorically described as “bustling with fish” was read by yours truly as “bursting with filth”, which is not a confidence-building statement, if you catch my drift.

The swordfish was good though, and restored some of that confidence and filled that little tummy of mine, so all was good.

Yes, this past Friday a whole horde of us congregated at New England’s prime vacation land, the Cape – known to outsiders as Cape Cod. (To us it is the Cape, just as San Francisco is “the city” and not Frisco, God No, or even San Fran….. grrrrhhh).

The lovely Miss Denise Schubert and I hightailed it out there a bit early on Friday, Rick’s family was kind enough to offer us lodging at the Chuck House (his grandfather built the place in the 1970s), located very picturesquely at John Joseph’s Pond. Lovely place, I have to say – of course the minute I left Boston craziness set in, and my confused little mind, renamed everything associated with John Joseph (we still don’t know who he was) John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, and at some point the whole gang of us was driving in a van singing the Jingleheimer song. It definitely was a moment to remember!!!



Friday night I did my long run for the week and accompanied by Rick on his bike, I crept along 13 miles of the Cape Cod Rail Trail. It was quite a nice jog; we saw at least three little rabbits and one of my favorite botanical stars, the Indian Pipe. Quite a cool plant, no chlorophyll, looks like little white lanterns coming out of the ground….

Most of the guests arrived Friday night – Joanne and Marc, accompanied by their dog Hailey, Chris Gibbs from my running group, Will, aka Guillermo the “Grill Master” and his friend Roman. After stuffing ourselves with homemade burgers and potato salad, a pretty spirited game of Taboo required a good dose of fantasy and craziness – if you would guess “toilet” after hearing - “It has a hole, you can get quite comfy on it” or if you would get to straightjacket from “It’s really tight, you can’t breathe” – there are pillows on the walls” – you might just be our kind of guy/gal….



Saturday after a breakfast deliciously arranged by the charming Miss Denise Schubert featuring Challah French Toast, the sun-hungry bunch hoofed it to the beach, Coast Guard Beach to be exact – gotta dip your toes in the Atlantic Ocean, right?? It was very beachy, sandy, and actually pretty enjoyable – but some of us headed home soon, to do some canoeing on the newly christened John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt Pond (guess who got really sick on the calmest water ever?? I am such a lost cause…), dogs were jumping off the dock, everyone was relaxing - it was a lot of fun. After a game of horseshoes during which Marc showed off his skill of throwing stuff up in trees, and the aforementioned dinner at the Swan River Restaurant, it was time to go to school - to Sundae School to be exact for some yummy tummy ice cream (not that there was any room left in my stomach). This is quite the place, and I feel bad for the poor neighbors, who have to tolerate cars on their lawns and ice-cream-hungry beach revelers by the droves until the wee hours of the night…. With that much food in my body and the ensuing diabetic coma, the following game of Guesstures (sort of a high-speed game of Charades) was of particular note. I had to act out the word “jockstrap” and kept pointing at Chris and Rick’s private parts, which I am sure they appreciated. Rick, in his attempt to portray a phone book started off on a crazy sprint to the kitchen and kicked poor Phoebe’s water bowl all over the place. There were just the four of us, and I wondered how any of the other people in the house were able to sleep even a wink, but at least we were entertaining.



Sunday morning - chocolate chip pancakes, eggs, and then Denise and I sped back to Boston to see the Oakland A’s, Petra’s old home team, beat the crap out of the Sox. It was not pretty, but a game at Fenway Park is always lovely, no matter what (even though a pint of beer made me want to take a little nap, right then and there…)



The week was a little gaga - even I have to admit that. First we had a heat wave in Boston – it was awful – every season this year has been majorly screwed up – lousy winter, sorry excuse for a spring, and a soggy excuse for a summer (just returned from a rain-soaked hike and am still bitter about it; if I wanted to move to Seattle, I would have done so, right???!!!) Tuesday was the highlight with about 100 degrees by mid-afternoon. Coupled with the usual tropical humidity, how much more fun can this summer be? I had to do a little training that night, and at 7PM the thermometer still showed 90 degrees, but there was no choice – thunderstorms were announced for later, so I just headed out and moved like molasses in January, snails were passing me, I swear. The weather during the Toronto Marathon is supposed to be much cooler, an average of 55-60 degrees, so with all this hot weather training, this maybe a very good strategy….



Wednesday the Running Partners (the hospital’s jogging group) said Goodbye to our most wonderful friend John Young, who is heading to Robert Wood Johnson Medical School next week, and will have to do his running without us for a while. After our 7-mile jaunt, we all headed over to the Esplanade and the Hatch Shell where the Boston Landmark Orchestra was giving a free classical concert – Mozart was on the menu, and one of my favorite classical pieces, the Requiem was superbly performed that night and we had a nice picnic to send off young John to his fate and become the world’s most gifted surgeon.



Thursday was the day from hell – not in a bad way, just busy as can be. Let me demonstrate – Get up at 6:30 AM, be at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for the monthly Phase I meeting at 7:30 AM. Leave at 9 AM, drive Ella home; work from home, preparing the bi-weekly Oncology Newsletter I send out to all our physicians. 11:30 AM lunch break, go for a quick jog of 4 miles (marathon training), then head out to the Dana Farber again for some more meetings in the afternoon. After work head to South Boston to volunteer for the Jim Kane Sugarbowl 5-Miler, an annual road race put on by my other running group, the L-Street Running Club. After volunteering I had to zip to Somerville to the First Congregational Church on College Avenue for a performance of one-acters – my colleague and friend Renee is part of the Theatre@First troupe, who performs there regularly (Congrats to Renee for a wonderful performance!! Love ya!). All this hoopla also included a serious jog in heels from the spot where I parked the car (which was half the distance home to Cambridge, I swear) to the performance site, and made me look slightly deranged as I arrived exactly five minutes prior to the start. Patrick and Ellen I think at this point had given up on me, even though it had been my idea to go there in the first place.



In addition, I have been plagued by a serious backache all week. My motto pretty much has been “suck it up and run through it” – I have been continuing with the marathon trai ning pretty steadily (Week 9 just ended), but once in a while a handful of Tylenol has come in handy to make me look less than I swallowed a 2 x 4.



OK, I am done for now. I am sitting up here in Franconia and it is raining non-stop out there, the sight of rain is driving me mad - just a wee bit- and I will have to go now, a nice cold beer is waiting somewhere - I am sure.



Toodles!



Pet:)

#6 Boston - Go Petta! July 15, 2006

Considering it was 80 degrees at 8 AM In the morning and almost 100% humidity, it was a miracle I did remember my own name, but it was just not right that my race bib said "Petta" on it, and I would run through the Quincy Marina with onlookers shouting "Go Petta, Go!" So, I asked Stephanie to muster up all of her creative powers and turn "t" #2 into an R and return my somewhat distorted identity to me. The road race was the Iron Girl 10 K in Quincy, MA (http://www.irongirl.com/boston/index-boston.html), a well organized little venue, where 4000 girls duked it out on this sweltering Sunday morning. It was like Bikram Yoga Running, steambath jogging, and I think I gotta get me one of those white trash baseball hats with a little fan on it, I swear. I was huffing like a professional asthmatic and Steph kept asking repeatedly if I was alright (which I was). Breakfast was waiting past the finish line and that was all I kept thinking about, not the fact that after the race I had to go home and ran another 10 K (6 miles) to stay in line with my marathon training schedule. The race was completed by us at a very nice net pace of 9:12 minutes/mile, but I slowed way down for part 2 of the ordeal. By that time Boston was baking in 85 degree heat and not a breeze in sight along the Charles River Esplanade. (For the finish photo go to: www.asiorders.com and enter Photo ID : 11327-046-012.

As a matter of fact this whole past week was all about Sports - World Cup, Tour de France, Road Race, Marathon Training - you name it, we were there!! Aside from a little outing with my Barcelona Friends Miriam and Lidia to the most wonderful "Upper Crust" pizzeria, appropriately located in the somewhat upper crusty Beacon Hill (http://www.theuppercrustpizzeria.com/), there is little else I did. A little shopping, a little laundry (including a little episode where true to Petra fashion I put the coins into the wrong washer, wondered (under protest, accusing the laundromat owners of two-timing me) why my laundry was not done, and made another Cambridge resident very happy by washing hers twice - it was very clean, we both agreed....), lots of lolling around on the couch, and inspired from my visit to my friends Ulli and Gerald in Oklahoma started on a cooking spree, making my own olive bread and basking in domestic bliss.

As to sports, sports and sports, the Tour de France was the first stop for the athletically inclined during these past 7 days; Friday night Pauline, Ulandt and I cheered on in whoever was not involved in the recent doping scandal in the world's most prestigious road race, and elected sprinter Robbie McEwen our new favorite (http://www.mcewenrobbie.com/). After the doping scandal at the beginning of the tour where more than 50 riders were eliminated, it is everyone's guess where this year's event is headed. Considering that I have not sat on my bike in probably a year and a half, I make a great judge and my motivation for the sport knows no bounds.

Now, the World Cup - I have never been so surprised as I have been this year on the interest and enthusiasm for soccer here in the US. Generally it is a sport that mostly girls play when they are little, but this year's World Cup was unbelievable. Hordes of people in airports gathered around TV screens to catch a glimpse and even Boston got in on the action. Mayor Mennino stepped in and for the final between Italy and France on Sunday a monstrosity of a TV screen was set up at City Hall Plaza and a pro-Italy crowd of more than 6000 gathered in blistering heat to celebrate the occasion. Soccer fans draped in Italian flags roamed the streets of Boston, in particular the Italian section of town, the North End, celebrating their team's victory after penalty kicks. What a zoo!!!

More sports: Monday night - Yoga class with Pauline; Tuesday night - 3-mile run with Lynda Banzi in the now for Boston typical tropical heat; Wednesday night - running group at the hospital in biggest drencher of them all - 6.5 miles in the most gushing, cloudbursting, tidal torrent I have ever been in; Thursday lunch 3 miles; and yesterday my long run for the week, 13 miles down here at the Cape. No wonder I sleep well.

The news item of the week though was the scandal around Boston's out-of-bounds-expensive, corruption-infested freeway project, the Big Dig. On early Thursday morning an entire section of the Ted Williams Tunnel came down, and killed a passenger in a car. The governor is screaming, the mayor is screaming, everyone wants everyone else to resign, an investigation found 240 more faulty bolts, the tunnel won't open for weeks and we're all afraid to drive down there.

I am writing to you from the luxuriously comfortable porch of my friend Rick's home at Cape Cod (http://www.capecod.com/Photos.asp), where a posse of friends has gathered this weekend to have some fun on the beach, on the pond and on the trails. More on that next week. Tomorrow I will head home to see a ballgame between the Boston Red Sox and my old home team, the Oakland Athletics at Fenway Park.

It is now time to zip down to the pond for some canoeing and swimming -- the water is warmer than the pretty cold Atlantic Ocean into which I dipped my feet this morning, and the new bathing suit needs to be exposed to some fine water.

Enjoy the sun! Talk to you next week!.

Petra

#5 Boston - Seersucker is Back! July 8, 2006

Let me tell you my friends - in certain regions of the country bold-colored seersucker is making a dramatic comeback - and I am not talking the somewhat classy seersucker suits Harry Truman made popular in his day. Certain individuals at Tulsa International Airport seemed very fond of this fabric, and there was no holding back when it came to their daring choice of patterns. It's bad enough that the stuff always looks as if you slept in it and have just rolled out of bed (I have since learned that the puckered surface of the fabric is a result of weaving fibers together that shrink differently). According to the website www.worldwidewords.org "a seersucker suit evokes a world-weary foreign correspondent in some tropical clime, suffering from heat and excess alcohol. Originally, in the eighteenth century, seersucker was striped Indian cotton.... the original name, the Persian shir o shakar, literally “milk and sugar”, in reference to what we would now call its candy stripes." Alas, the airport in Tulsa did not conjure up any images of tropical magic and I missed out on any inebriated foreign correspondents - my vote for the best outfit of the day though went to the guy with a ratty old green t-shirt saying "An awkward morning beats a boring night" - Amen to that!

Tales from the Sooner State - what can I tell you? It was hot and it was dry. The air conditioner replaced the dehumidifier, and as always the pace of life slowed down enough to give my restless self a bit of a breather.

The Washington Irving Trail Museum (http://www.cowboy.net/non-profit/irving/), located just a few miles outside of Stillwater, Oklahoma, celebrates American author, poet, writer Washington Irving, best known for his stories " Sleepy Hollow" (the legend of the headless horseman) and "Rip van Winkle". Named after George Washington, this famous novelist zipped all over the place and wrote books about his exploits, and the reason for this little shack of a museum is that in 1835 he documented a journey from Fort Gibson to the Cross Timbers in what is now Oklahoma with his book "A tour of the prairies". The museum itself is definitely a find, a true gem - curiosity shop meets museum - we felt as we had discovered the attic of an old house filled with treasures to explore. The collection is impressive - despite its unassuming exterior the place is an abundance of riches. Not all of them relate to Oklahoma's or Native American History, but you can find anything from the Campo del Cielo Meteorite (a 4.5 billion years old, 37-pound rock found in 1576 in South America), to the Salem Witch Trial Death Warrant for Rebecca Nurse who was hanged in 1692, election posters for Abe Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, a Jesse Jackson "Wanted-Dead-or-Alive" Poster, a full-blown exhibit on barbed wire and how it shaped the development of the American West, a European style viewing coffin (the pioneers feared disease, that way you could take a last look at the diseased without catching anything), a mummified cat - you name it. Oklahoma history was depicted in descriptions of David Payne and the Boomer movement, which drove the settlement of unassigned lands in the Sooner State; legendary cowboy Billy McGinty, who rode with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the Spanish American war; Otto Gray and the Oklahoma Cowboy Band; the Oklahoma Land Run of 1893; stories of outlaws, in particular the famous gunfight in 1893 at Ingalls where the Daltons and the Doolins gave each other a serious beating. And of course the legend of Cimarron Rose, a rather unassuming woman who had a weak spot for an outlaw named Bitter Creek and in an unconventional romantic gesture gave him a rifle with an inlay saying "The Rose of the Cimarron". Apparently the woman was the wife of an Oklahoma politician, a respected Christian woman, good mother and wife, yadayadayada.... well, apparently life at home was not exciting enough for the little missus, eh?

And artifacts, artifacts, artifacts - iron knuckles used in the Tulsa Race Riots; newsletters written in Cherokee Alphabet; hackamore bits for breaking horses; Geronimo's stick ball racket; Kon-soo-koh, an Indian dice game; fire starting sticks, a brass-tack decorated Sioux rifle, Indian bows and arrows, scalp lockes...... What a great glimpse of the Wild West!











Moving on to Modern Architecture - another one of our excursions led us to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to visit Price Tower, the only skyscraper ever built by Frank Lloyd Wright (http://www.pricetower.org/about-ptac/). It is quite an impressive building, and so not what you expect in Northern Oklahoma. It houses an art center, a gallery, businesses, a small hotel and the tour still features some of the original apartments built on the top floors. The building itself is modeled after the structure of a tree (Wright called it "the tree that escaped the crowded forest") and narrows quite substantially on top; all structural elements adhere to the Lloyd Wright preference for triangular shapes and the detail work is quite stunning. The building concept was originally designed for an apartment tower for the vestry of St Mark's in the Bowery in New York, but never materialized, so Oklahoma it was! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Tower).

The gallery in the Price Tower featured an exhibit by renowned Egyptian industrial designer Karim Rashid - http://www.karimrashid.com/ . Funky, colorful, fun - Rashid designs anything from furniture, water kettles, mouse pads to restaurants. His most famous design is the stackable "Umbra Oh Chair" which made Time Magazine call him "The poet of plastic" in 2001. Pretty cool stuff!

Of course no trip to Stillwater, Oklahoma is complete without a trip to Wall's Bargain Center, the best shopping experience anywhere in the US and the one that made Ulli's daughters dub us "the crazy shopping ladies". This time pretty much a whole day was allocated to this adrenaline-powered outing (with a lunch break) and needless to say I came back with an entire new wardrobe. For the blog newbies among you, Wall's is located on the outskirts of Stillwater in a shopping mall that does not inspire confidence at first sight. Wall's is kind of like a Marshall's or TJ Max on steroids, and you have to investigate your way through huge piles of clothes, house wares, shoes, CDs - but it does have the best deals ever - whole lots of designer ware is shipped here courtesy of Macy's, Bergdorf's., Neiman Marcus. Everything was 75 percent off, and at the register they knock off an additional 20%. Once you have bought Tommy Hilfiger tops for 8$, Franco Sarto shoes for $16 and a Ralph Lauren bathing suit for a few bucks, there is no going back! You will never shop anywhere else!

The 4th of July holiday was rained out, big thunderstorms roamed the skies of Oklahoma - BBQ was moved indoors, the dreaded World Cup game between Germany and Italy was watched on HDTV, and we toasted the Boston fireworks on TV with a nice bottle of champagne. Life was good!

Boston welcomed me back into its damp arms with more rain, but the last couple of days the sun has come out to cheer us up a little and I am hoping the weather will hold for tomorrow's Iron Girl 10 K Road Race. Marathon Training is continuing nicely, it took place indoors mostly in Oklahoma (except for a 3-mile run in 90-degree heat around Boomer Lake, where I promptly took a spill and kissed the concrete) and now with the help of some new running shoes, I am ready for new challenges. The mileage per week is increasing, and tomorrow after the road race, I will have to add another 10 K to stick to my schedule.

Friends, be well, stay dry - write soon, I'd love to hear your tales of summer!

pet:)