things i learned while in boston/vermont last week:

• ‘the grass is green’ line in ‘paradise city’ might actually refer to weed. yes, i’ve only been listening to the song for 22 years and never made that connection until we heard it on the radio driving through vermont.
• my girlfriend is so attached to me that she will pull me down into snow and ice when she slips and falls on that same ice.
• you can go home again — i saw my best friend from 9th grade, who i hadn’t seen since 9th grade. aside from the different experiences over the last 18 years, nothing had changed. it’s comforting to see how this can work.
• the ben and jerry’s factory tour is not worth your time or money. it’s short, marketing saturated and doesn’t teach you much. also, it’s terrifying when you are the skinniest people in the tour group. no, wait, let’s say the only skinny people. also, the tour costs money and you basically get a tiny sample of an existing flavor and a 10 minute talk about the assembly line. (along with a 10 minute marketing movie and the joy of watching b&j commercials while you eat the ice cream you paid for.)
• waterbury is below burlington, so when driving up and you want to go to waterbury, you should stop there first. as opposed to driving up to burlington and then back down to waterbury. this was a fail on the navigator’s part.
• the mfa in boston might have amazing art, but they also take the award for worst display/presentation in any museum i have ever been in. the rooms, the lighting, the pieces they display — i could not have been more disappointed.
• the harvard museum of natural history has cool things, as long as you are into a quarter of the museum being filled with stuffed/mounted animals from the early part of the 20th century. the rest of the museum is pretty cool.
• when looking for vermont cheese on a farm, here is how you don’t do it: you check the farm’s website and they say they are closed for the winter. you call the farm and the recording says they are closed for the winter. the navigator really wants to go though, so you agree to drive by the farm, just to see. where you see a sign out that says ‘cheese .4 mile’ — which clearly overrides the first two communications about being closed. except your rented car doesn’t have an odometer that measures 1/10s of miles. so you drive a little too far down the road, get stuck behind a tractor and have nowhere to turn around once it becomes painfully obvious you have gone too far. at which point the farmer gets out of said tractor and asks why you are following him. and is nice, but clearly believes the website and phone should have been sufficient to keep us away until they actually had cheese to sell. the sign had been put up that day, clearly a bit prematurely.
• mud season in vermont isn’t too bad if the ground is totally frozen.
• one night in a bed and breakfast across the hall from a pastor is enough for tripp.
• i will still eat my weight in shanghai dumplings if allowed.
• colt 45 goes better with indian food than sam adams cream stout.
• there is an intersection in burlington that almost killed us. it’s a 5-way intersection — 2 normal streets intersecting and a one-way street coming in at a 45 degree angle. the driver (me) goes to make a right on red, finds himself about to somehow magically about to turn onto this one way street and panics. so he straightens and pulls through the entire intersection on red. no one honks, squeals or otherwise makes a fuss. and then realizes he just blew through a red light at an active intersection. slight aftermath panic ensues. and then much laughter.
• boston has a ton of bleach blondes. bad bleach blondes. maybe everywhere does, but it seems more obvious there.
• trader joes sells an excellent pint of frozen yogurt. that is slightly bitter — it really is frozen yogurt.
• fairfax, vt is boring, but it appeared that saint albans might really know how to party.
• my friend from 9th grade is building his own house. singlehandedly. while living in a finished apartment above his garage, with his wife. he has been doing this since july and is already up to wiring the house. even after being there and talking to him, i can’t fathom this. as much as i want to grow my own food and be self-sustaining, it has never occurred to me to build my own house.

there are more, i’m sure. but this is a good start at least.