Things to Recommend doing in Boston

• taking public transportation and walking everywhere, even in a cold, driving rain that left my feet and jeans so wet that I took my shoes off under the table at dinner Saturday night. I love not having to drive. More to the point, I love not having to be in a car to get anywhere. Plus good street musicians, including a dread-haired young guy playing the accordion in the T-station at Harvard Square and another guy playing guitar and singing plaintively who reminded me of Glen Hansard from Once.
• the Gardner museum. Especially the Rembrandt self-portrait and the two portraits of Isabella Stewart Gardner, including a John Singer Sargent that was gorgeous. But what Sargent portrait isn't? If I'd been a wealthy patroness at the turn of the century, I would have demanded that I sit for Sargent.
• spending time with my daughters and friend. We laughed and ate and laughed and talked and walked and ate some more. Perfect.
• going to a Celtics-Bulls game on Friday night. Even if the Bulls got creamed. I am not exaggerating: they have never played worse. It looked like a game of Hot Potato gone bad. Ben Wallace, where have you let them trade you to? And why?
• Dinner at King Fung Garden in Chinatown. Think restaurant the size of the booth where you pay for valet parking, and I was warned to use the bathroom at the T-station, because they apparently will do anything to keep you from using the one on-site. Great great food, about five tables big, and in the middle of dinner, a crowd of extremely cute children came dashing through the restaurant looking for their dad in the kitchen. Mmm, scallion pancakes.
• The food was a big theme of the weekend, as is usual in our family vacations. Dinner Saturday at a tapas place called Dali,(you do want to make reservations at 5:30 - there were at least 15 people waiting in the rain for them to open the door, and by 6 pm every table in the place was packed and there was a crowd waiting at the bar to get a table), then to Christine's in Inman Square for coconut almond chip ice cream. Tea at the hotel. A trip to the supermarket to load up my older daughter's pantry: purchase of very good molasses brown sugar.
• Not much knitting accomplished, despite the hours sitting in wait in airports. I love the Shaefer silk-wool laceweight sent to me by Joan, but still haven't found the right use for it. I thought that combining it with Misti Alpaca in a deep eggplant color and using it for the Wing of the Moth shawl was the ticket. No good. Then I tried jury-rigging Icarus from memory. Nope. Then I tried a stockinette swatch. Still no. I think that this yarn wants to be woven, so the goal now is to finish the pillowcases on the loom and weave something large and rectangular and lacey out of the Shaefer.