Grafton Common in the snow
My morning at the Boston Red Sox Rolling Rally
Good morning Grafton, here’s your live Red Sox Rolling Rally coverage!
It’s Red Sox Rolling Rally Day and I am, hopefully, on Boylston Street right now with my 16-year-old son and 72-year-old father watching a bunch of guys with beards waving from Duck Boats. I promised the kid that I would take him if a championship parade was ever NOT on a school day and today, I finally get to keep that promise.
Part of the fun of my new job at the Lowell Sun is getting to test out all kinds of new digital toys. If all goes well, what you will see below is a whole mess of Tweets and Instagram posts from the parade, courtesy of an app called Rebel Mouse. And if all goes really well, the photos you see from me will magically post from my lovely Greater Grafton Camera to my iPhone, where I can throw them to Twitter and my editor back at The Sun via an Eye-Fi photo card in the camera and the DropBox app. Toys! They’re fun!
Unless they don’t work. Then I’m just going to have to do the photo thing the old-fashioned way. Sigh.
How to become a Coke can for Halloween
Yes, it’s a little late for this year, but you have 364 days to plan for Halloween 2014, right?
My extremely creative 13-year-old daughter likes to make her own Halloween costumes. I have an abundance of fleece from a long-ago trip to the outlet store at Malden Mills and, over the years, it’s found its way into countless scarves, blankets and craft projects.
This year, the leftover red stuff became a can of Coca-Cola. It’s actually rather ingenious.
First, she made a tube dress out of red fleece, leaving enough room for a couple layers of clothing underneath — we live in New England, after all, and it can get cold on Halloween night!
She banded the top and bottom with some silvery tape she found in her father’s workshop. I do hope she asked for permission first. She also crafted a pair of straps from the tape and added a silvery gray long-sleeved t-shirt to represent the top of the can.
I asked her how she did the lettering, figuring she had to have downloaded a template from somewhere, and she said she drew it free-hand onto some white fleece. She glued the entire thing down on the dress — it’s pretty stiff at this point and there were concerns it might not make it through the various Halloween-related activities for which she would be costumes. It held up, as you can see, with some re-gluing in between wearings.
I would have been satisfied with the dress as-is, but my daughter is a perfectionist. She grabbed some aluminum foil and shaped out a pop-top, which she then affixed to an old headband. Somewhere in England, Philip Treacy is taking note for the next royal wedding.
The result? Rather adorable. She was the hit of a Halloween party last week, with everyone marveling that she actually designed and made it herself.
I have to teach her how to use a sewing machine. She’s just a trip to Mood away from winning on “Project Runway!”
For Elyce and Dennis, happy anniversary (with foliage)
My dear friend Elyce, who I’ve known since I was 5, and her husband, Dennis, are celebrating their 22nd wedding anniversary on Saturday. I always remember the date because it was Columbus Day weekend, I had to fly to Dallas to be a bridesmaid, and I was almost fired from my job at the Gardner News for daring to request vacation time that wasn’t in the summer. We bridesmaids wore the most ’90s bridesmaid dresses of all time, emerald green with a lace overlay, a high-low skirt and big shoulders, and my now-husband didn’t recognize me when I walked out of the hair salon with my waist-length hair piled high to the sky (think Marge Simpson). Elyce’s veil included a sassy cowboy-inspired hat. It was TEXAS, y’all.
Elyce and Dennis honeymooned in New England, because one thing she always missed about living up here was the foliage (and seafood, Chinese food and pizza. There’s a whole list we have to accomplish every time she visits). I texted her a photo of the gorgeous yellow tree I park under at the Lowell Sun last week and decided today to take a walk on the Grafton Land Trust’s Webber property in North Grafton. I’ve barely touched my real camera since starting at the Sun, and I’ve really missed it.
Help Apple Tree Arts with Grafton Town House renovation
All right. My last two posts were about my car which, as of today, is totaled and unfixable. So let’s talk about something we can fix: the Grafton Town House, aka One Grafton Common.
Apple Tree Arts has spent the past few years working on a very extensive renovation project for the historic landmark on Grafton Common, which has served as Grafton’s town hall, Masonic lodge, business center and… the list goes on and on. Apple Tree Arts hopes to turn it into an arts center, utilizing the building’s Great Hall.
Check out their video on the building’s history and how you can help with its renovation!
This is what my car looks like after it’s rear-ended on the highway
By popular request, here’s what my car looks like now after Wednesday’s car accident. I went to the tow yard today to strip it of all my stuff, including the license plates.
I don’t know what it looks like underneath, but I’m told it’s not pretty. The muffler was wrenched off when I hit the median.
No front-end damage aside from the tire that blew when I was hit — I am really glad a certain police chief, a long time ago, made me do skid school!
