a worcester retrospective

on saturday night the husband, our friend mike, and i were strolling down memory lane after we caught a quick meal at the new buddah hut restaurant (aka kuan yin II) and a sweet treat at the bean counter. the highland street neighborhood was where we spent most of our college years. the following is a nice little retrospective of all the apartments where the husband lived one point or another. actually, we were quite surprised because most of the triple deckers had been greatly improved upon since we lived in the ghetto. of course, as you'll see, some of them not so much...

this is where it all started. actually this is john street and happens to be the place where i first met the husband way back when i was still a bad girl skipping school and hanging around with older boys. who knew we would come this far? highlights included our first kiss and many other acts of mischief that i know nothing about. no seriously- this was not my hang out. anyway. the husband only lived here for a month while he waited for the next place to open up...

ah, hackfeld. this is the place where the husband and mike had their first lease. jaymo lived there as well and amy, heather and i were regular fixtures. as were waterfalls, mushrooms and 'the ralph'. oh also notable were the asian kids who lived upstairs and never walked- they only rolled on their computer chairs and vacuumed several times a day.

the next year the husband and mike moved into this place with aj and shanna. all i can say is that this place has undergone a serious face lift since 1999. many shenanigans went on at this place. highlights included suspicious fake closets, naked jumps, rules posted to the walls and throwing stuff out the 3rd floor window. ah, college.

this is house next door and is much better representation of what their apartment used to look like. when the boys lived next door, jose lived in this place. he was this awesome puerto rican dude with about 62 children. that is relevant because he rocked a puerto rican flag in his rear view and he drove a sea green taurus station wagon. he parked "his baby" on the street and washed constantly while blaring the local hip-hop station through the bumpin' system he had. my guess is that he did this to escape said children as he was out there at the crack of dawn until nightfall.

this is einhorn. to think that when the husband and mike first rented this place that heather and i were jealous is laughable. this has to be the biggest shit hole of them all. highlights were the landlord who went by the name of 'frank sketchy', the immense amount of crap on the porch, the shag carpet and broken toilet. this is the only house that hasn't changed a bit.

this is the institute house. heather and i lived here for a year and then they boys moved in. highlights included dinner out on that roof, the time our crazy downstairs neighbor, gary, almost burned the house down , the bat, the skunk, the lady with no neck, the time gary locked himself out when he was completely wasted. that gary was a riot.

ah- this is a famous corner. when we left institute road, mike and heather moved on to greener pastures but the husband and i had to move to the 'other side' of highland street. the classy side. this corner looks innocent enough but don't be fooled. excitement was always present here, like the time i literally walked into a drug deal or the time the husband witnessed some dude getting a blow job on the side of the road. what you don't see is that there is an elementary school directly across the street. like i said, classy.

this was bodoin street- sort of temporary housing if you will. we only spent a few short months here which was long enough. highlights included the closet that the husband lived in, his roommates moving out like 2 months after he moved in, me moving in, the two of us having only a bed and a bureau between us, the lady who played dido over and over again, and that time the sink broke and the water ran for DAYS because we couldn't figure out how to turn it off and the landlady wouldn't call us back.


finally. this is the last place we lived. home street. a cute basement apartment that i was so excited about getting into. of course it ended up being a cold and moldy basement apartment with a broken dishwasher and a dark bathroom. the owners lived upstairs and were lovely people but when we had the chance to leave this place i jumped. highlights included gray kitty, who would watch tv with us from the outside window sill.

and now i know you're jealous that you didn't get to live in worcester. i am a little sad that i didn't have a camera for most of these years and took almost no pictures.

the great tercel

so when I was in college, my dad bought me a car. we called it pinky. it was a pink (duh) lebaron which served me well on my travels from haverhill to worcester to visit my sweety on the weekends. and pinky was great until she cracked her engine block while i was driving home one afternoon. and well, when you only spend $175 on a car in the first place, one doesn't go around rebuilding the engine.

anyhoo- when pinky left me high and dry i was forced to spend my last $500 on a vehicle that could successfully get me from school to work and over to murph's apartment. so dad and i found a tercel that this lady in town was selling for $600. i think it was a 1987 and it was gray. this was fitting because we ended up calling this car....yup you guessed it....old smoky. why you ask? because on more than one occasion while i was waiting for the engine to warm up on the streets of good old worm town, a passerby tapped on my window looking concerned to tell me that my car was on fire. and on more than one occasion i had to reassure them that no- old smoky was not on fire it just burned oil....lots of it. (so now my secret is out that i did in fact have a big hand in pollution in the year 2000). actualy one time this older lady was very upset and i think she was ready to call the firehouse or pull me out of the car. i'm not sure which.

so I had a 1987 tercel and I had a friend who had a 1981 tercel (that thing was awesome). so i appointed myself the know-it-all of years the tercel was made and i flexed my muscle by pointing out old shitty tercels while in the car with murph and telling him what year they were made. as we would pass by i would see one, point and shout "1983!" or "1985!". don't be fooled, i had no idea what year any of them were made. i just did it to amuse murph while we were in the car, but don't tell him that.

the last straw came when old smoky started smoking on the interior as well. thats where i drew the line and dad bought blacky from a neighbor. the tercel and i had a good 6 months or so, though.

what sparked this post? i was behind and old tercel today on the way home. at first i wasn't thinking about it but as the traffic started to clear and i was to drive through the rotary near our house, i got the sudden urge to shout...."1989!"

live time travel

during one of my lunch time drives last week i was flipping through the radio channels and I was transported through time. i stopped on bcn for a while. now, wbcn is famous for two things: 1. low-brow college dude humor and 2. playing bad music from the 90's. (I listen for the low-brow humor). what they were playing transported me back in time....i alone by live. oh my- I would actually feel good if you had no idea what I was talking about but well, you probably do know this song. if for some reason you like this band, well, I can't appologize they were bad and they never wore shirts.

first I was transported back to a time in high school when my best friend and I would have all night beavis & butthead marathons that occasionally included drinking wild turkey. i distinctly recall a skit where beavis & butthead make awesome amounts of fun of the shirtless lead singer of live who also had a really long rat-tail/pony tail hair do. i believe they called him out as looking like one of those dolls that you pull the string on the back.....oh the low-brow.....

fast forward a few years to freshman year of college. I lived in a small house on campus with a slew of theater geeks. (i was unaware that my school would be crawling with theater geeks. could this fact have led me to transfer?) i lived on the second floor of this funky modern house. it was my first week of school, I was in my dorm room all by myself in the middle of the afternoon. it was september and the windows were open. out of the blue I hear super loud music coming through the floor and the open windows. live was being pipped through my house. then suddenly someone was singing along....but not just rockin' out like a wanna be front man....no this was full on musical style operatic singing. i could practically see the jazz hands through the floor. this singing went on for quite a while. i could tell it was a guy but wasn't sure of who it was, but man he kept on singing. i think he made it through the whole album. I found out later that this top notch performer was this chubby kid dave who lived downstairs. he thought he was quite good at singing and wondered why anyone wouldn't sing along to live as he thought they were "awesome". it seemed he didn't hear the difference between his voice and theirs. he was a weird kid. the husband met him and I'm sure he would back me up on this.

***
in other news i'll be in florida for the rest of the week. i will try to post but no promises unless I get a really sweet pic of me and the mouse....