Morning commute (annual commencement edition)

It's not raining this morning, not even dimpling the surfaces of eager puddles, certainly not like yesterday's pouring rain and driving wind. But when I got outside, I could feel droplets. It's... misting heavily. Almost mizzling, perhaps, but not quite.

My steps turned automatically towards Harvard, the usual morning route, but I remembered in time I'd have to circle the Yard (my memory being helped along by a robed grad student coming out of a house just in front of me, giving me plenty of time to think about robe colors*). I got to the science center in time to see the start of the grad student march (into the Yard, I assume), taking some circuitous route rather than the gate that was right there. For an extremely exclusive institution, they have a lot of grad students finishing. There was someone playing the bagpipes in the Yard. Most of the time it was pleasant, until something happened that turned it sour-sounding (I'm sure the weather wasn't helping, but, wow, the bad parts were really bad). Students were handing out plastic-wrapped complimentary copies of the Crimson to anyone walking by. There were still a lot of spectating people who hadn't found the right entrance yet, plus some grad students running late, including the one dashing off the train as I started down the stairs. Not surprisingly, in the Square there are lots of cops around to deal with traffic and anything else that might happen, and a lot more flower sellers, too.

Amazingly, the trains were not only running conveniently, but weren't wholly packed, either.



* Harvard has such nice colors. I remember Elka, z"l, joking about choosing her next institution based on the colors she'd get to wear for graduation. I'd just be happy if my next robe turned out to be the traditional black; I've not had that yet. (High school was green (M) or white (F), college was blue (and flimsy), grad school was bright red (and flimsy, plus the hood was black lined with baby blue; not my finest fashion moment).)

Office Pride

Tea today is in honor of Pride Week, and I'm impressed with the abilities of my coworkers to decorate with office supplies. To wit: there's a big piece of foam-core stuff hanging on one wall, now with chains of rainbow paper clips looping along, a little rainbow of binder clips hanging off a tack, and a big abstract design of carefully sorted thumbtacks (the translucent-topped ones looking rather like Lite-Brite pieces). hanging on the wall and along one side of the filing cabinets. The side of the filing cabinet with draweres has more paper-clip swags, and the other sides are fringed with colored square stickies. The top of the filing cabinets is lined with rainbows of file folders stapled together.

(And I know that someone's made a cake topped with rainbow rows of M&Ms.)

[Food]

Some other recent experiments: ( yogurt cake, )

( not-chili, )

( and chai bread with chocolate swirl. )

Also, I couldn't resist trying a goat yogurt when I found kosher ones the other day at Bread and Wa Whole Foods. For the record, it was Redwood Hill Farm's blueberry, which was nice, except that there's a tang to it that my brain keeps saying "goat cheese" about (not surprisingly), so having a sweet flavor didn't work with that. It was pretty pricey; I'm unlikely to get it again unless there's a need to avoid cow milk. (I keep hoping the water buffalo yogurt will be certified kosher, but no luck so far.)