I'm super way busy this week. The kids have been sick, I've been interviewing, and I've had a lot of photo stuff to do. So I apologize for not getting as much out there. I have a ton of stuff when I get the time including my trip to the Hard Rock Café last night, our new piano, and so forth. Alex is doing OK, just a bit fussy, and Katherine is sick. We have a birthday party tomorrow, so it's going to be a busy weekend as well. Till later...

 

By the way, I have no idea what is going on with the weather. We got a few inches, but the forecasts I've seen range from wet and not much snow to up to 10 inches. Really, nobody has a clue what is going to happen here, except that it's probably going to be messy tomorrow one way or the other.

This is from the Channel 5 (WCVB) website, edited slightly (but not the snow parts).

 

Friday: cloudy. A chance of snow in the morning, then snow in the afternoon.

Friday Night: snow likely in the evening, then snow and freezing rain likely after midnight.

Saturday: snow and freezing rain likely in the morning, then snow and rain likely in the afternoon.

Saturday Night: mostly cloudy. Snow likely in the evening, then a chance of snow after midnight. Light snow accumulation possible.

 

Do you think it might snow? And I just love that last bit about "light ... accumulation."

 

I had to run over to Staples to get a new laser printer cartridge, and as I was driving up over Medford Square on Route 16, I looked over to check out the river, and this is what I saw. Yuck.

 

I haven't been by this site in about a week, so I'm not sure if it's related to the rain or not, but it's gotta be from the outflow pipe. There could be a couple of things happening. First, it could just be gunk from the city streets getting picked up and dumped by storm drains. But, it could also be sewage outflow. There are many cross-connected sewage/storm drains. They were originally set up so that in the event of a heavy rain, the sewage system would overflow into the storm drain system, which then dumps the sewage rather conveniently into the nearest river. Let me emphasize that I don't know if that is what happened today. I'm not sure it really rained enough. But I drove over and took a shot of the outflow anyway. Yuck.

 

By the way, if you look really hard in the photo above, you will see a tree branch sticking out of the water and ice in the lower right side. This is the branch that a large family of turtles likes to sun itself on in the warmer months. I hate to think of what they have to live in when it rains really hard.

 

Katherine had her first bought of coughing before I even went to bed - around 10:30 or so. It wasn't that bad, but Kara ran a steam shower and took her in the bathroom for 20 minutes or so anyway. Around when I was coming to bed, about 12:15, she was starting up again, so I did the steam shower this time. Except I ran out of hot water before the coughing stopped. So I put her back in bed, and ended up sleeping first in her bed, then in the trundle bed. We finally got up around 5:15 or so, when she started coughing again and Alex was upset about something and crying.

 

What a night. I slept a little during Katherine's morning shows, but I'm going back down for a nap now.

My extended family (and it's complicated, believe me), are probably all wondering why I'm not telling stories about my kids, and what all this Medford crap is about. (No one except my dad lives in the area, but he does live in Medford.)

 

We had a very rough weekend. With the second child, I find that we're more anxious to return to some semblance of normal life even though an infant's needs run counter to it. Case in point. Kara had a chance to go out on Saturday with some friends, and so I cancelled a visit to a club to take pictures of DiggerDawg to stay at home with both Alex and Katherine. The only hitch to this plan was nursing. But Kara has been pumping, and we've tried the bottle before, so we figured that if he got hungry enough, he'd eat.

 

It all started out OK. I was able to get Katherine to bed without too much trouble. Alex was fussy. I nursed him several times with the bottle, and he was sucking on it for comfort mostly (which is a good sign, by the way), and he even drank a bit. But it really didn't cut it. Soon, he was crying. I was able to get him to sleep about six times, but every time he awoke at the slightest disturbance, and started crying again. After trying his car seat, his rocker, his crib, and our bed, I finally called Kara to bail me out. She was on her way home at that point. And of course, he nursed with her and fell soundly asleep for the rest of the night.

 

All this left me an emotional wreck. It's easy to tell yourself that your baby's crying is not on account of you, and that you have to be positive and comforting. But it's another thing to do it for a few hours. After this experience, Kara and I concluded that he's still really young, and we have to be careful about pushing things too far too fast.

 

Sunday was a really fussy day too. Kara has done a great job of changing her diet to minimize foods that cause gas and acid and so forth, but he was still a pill all weekend long.

My source for the CVS story has added a few additions/corrections. First, the sidewalk on Governor's Avenue where the accident happened had been shoveled. It appears that the fall occurred between the construction lot and the Medford Historical Society due to water run-off that had frozen. My source checked the site a day after the accident, and it had been shoveled and sanded.

 

But nothing has changed with respect to CVS. In fact, one crafty citizen looked up the property on an online assessors database, and found that the property is owned by Berkshire-Medford LLC, who has apparently leased it to CVS. Berkshire-Medford LLC is an Arizona company. The assessors database lists a 12,000 square foot "outbuilding" described as "paving-asphalt" that appears to be the parking lot.

 

So it really looks like CVS is responsible for shoveling the sidewalk there, since the sidewalk adjoins their property. Here's the actual municipal code sent to me by a kind reader: