Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) should clean up its act

The Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) should clean up its act with respect to the trash pickup services that it performs on and around Castle Island. While out for our typical early morning walk my wife, 7 month old daughter and I had the very unpleasant, but not unusual, experience of finding ourselves in the trail of a large, odorous garbage truck leaving a steady stream of unsanitary garbage juice in its wake. The trouble was, we had no where to go as the garbage truck was driving directly on the sidewalk that surrounds the sugar bowl area, instead of on streets that run in parallel. It seems that driving on the sidewalks may make the trash pickup a bit easier and maybe slightly faster for the pickup crew at the expense of pedestians like us. This runs counter to the stated mission of the DCR and is a practice that should be immediately discontinued. Furthermore, we observed the same pickup crew leaving a significant amount of trash on the ground that easily could have been picked up. Some of this was refuse that the crew dropped during its handling of the barrels that it was emptying, but apparently deemed unnessessary for declaring a job (well?) done. From our standpoint, this looked like a crew going through the motions, with little consideration for public interests / pedestrians and similarly little pride in the quality of the job it was doing. I hope we see improvement in the future.

quick update

- mia is about to crawl. for the past 2 days she's been getting up on hands and knees and rocking back and forth. anyday now she will be launching from there. time to childproof our place!
- we did the acquarium this week and she was def pretty into the fish tanks, though for half the price of admission we like the children's museum better
- for other newish parents, we bought mia some clothes at costco for the first time today. the have lord and taylor brands for prices that are 40% less than babies r us stuff if you can believe it. great value as usual there
- took advantage of restaurant week and had a fantastic lunch in the south end yesterday at aquataine....great stuff for $20
- stock market rally continues....how about dow 10k?
- finally the red sox seem to be putting the pieces back together. went to my first game of the season tues night. beckett and lester are rock solid. hoping for a sweep of the tigers and a trouncing of the yanks next time we see them!

i love to wear my daddy's hat

The "Times"

Newspaper subscription ran out today and we agree, no more home delivery. I went down a couple times to look for it before realizing that the subscription ran out. This seemed normal since the deliveries were routinely late on the weekends. When it rained, we always expected a soggy edition. It seems the news is always on time, dry, and in color on our 20 inch monitors. No need to fetch from the front steps either. I may miss the tangible edition, but then, touch screen tablets are already far from being in the category of bleeding edge technology, so I suspect that is next. However it arrives, we have more news today than ever before. Say what you will about the quality.