Uncreative Destruction of Harvard Square

Creative destruction = Joseph Schumpeter’s account of capitalism’s dynamism based on innovation and the destruction and abandonment of the old.
I’m just the 10,001st person to complain about it in print, but Harvard Square has become an outdoor mall.  What’s distressing is not just the loss of all the old book stores, record stores, cafes and [...]

Renys Disappearing Wife mystery

R.H. Reny, the founder of Maine department store chain Renys, died last week.
We got really into the Ellsworth Renys a couple years ago.  My favorite items (this was the year the girls were three) were coloring books marked down to 99 cents.  They have a little of everything, clothes, food, drug store stuff, all cheap.  [...]

Mount Desert Island Consumerism

A visit to Mt Desert Island is obviously all about Acadia National Park, the ocean, lakes, hiking trails, etc.   But I thought it would be fun, as we near the conclusion of a long stay, to comment on some of the consumer options available here.
Terrible crap in Bar Harbor.  Needless to say, you have to [...]

On the road

I feel guilty about our mini-van’s gas-guzzler qualities.  But for 17 driving hours on the road with two kids and two cats, it definitely has some big advantages over a car.  (The trip took three gas fill-ups — about $100.)
The cats did well.  They were in two separate cat containers.  I think they missed one [...]

Visit to Louisville

We took an economical, two day one night spring break trip to Louisville.  Stayed in the historic Galt Hotel on the riverfront which in the 19th century hosted such guests as “Jefferson Davis, Stephen Douglas, Edwin Booth, Charles Dickens, P.T. Barnum, Tom Thumb, and presidents Lincoln, Grant, Taylor, Hayes and Buchanan.”  And now us.  We [...]

More on San Miguel de Allende

San Miguel de Allende is a beautiful and somewhat strange town.  It’s filled with narrow, cobblestone streets and has something of the feel of an Italian hill town.  My aunt lives in a beautiful house way up on a hill — to climb her actual street you really have to gird your muscles and get [...]

Freddy/ Mexico City

We were going to depart San Miguel the way we’d come: some combination of buses and cabs.  San Miguel de Allende is about a 3 1/2 hour drive from Mexico City and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to get there.  In retrospect, given how tiring the trip was overall, it probably would’ve [...]

Las Posadas in San Miguel de Allende

We are in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, for the holidays, staying in my aunt’s house.
Christmas is a big deal here.  There are pinatas and other holiday decorations all over the town.  And there’s a neat tradition of nightly Posadas over the 9 (?) nights up to Xmas.  There’s one big one for the town [...]

Adirondacks

Our final stop on this summer tour was to visit our friends Melissa and Steve in the Adirondacks, an area I don’t know well at all. They recently acquired a pretty amazing place, a former 9-bedroom hotel from the late nineteenth century on a peninsula on Raquette Lake, the site of one of the [...]

Maine: More Foraging

After writing the last post, we did get some fishing action: the easy kind, mackerel off a pier. We went to the very pretty (aptly named) Pretty Marsh harbor dock. As one of the other people fishing pointed out to us, the mackerel were feeding, swarming in schools. You’d see what looked [...]