This Christmas, Norma Moreira and her husband are sharing their home with 45 wise men.
Moreira, who immigrated to the United States from Ecuador in 1996, has been acquiring Nativity scenes for the past two decades. With her collection now standing at 58 (15 of which contain the three wise men), images of a [...]
The Dowbrigade uses an icebreaking exercise with groups of recently arrived students in which one of the categories for discussion is “One thing you really want to do before you leave Boston”. When our turn came we always list visiting the Harbor Islands, something we have yet to do 37 years after we first came [...]
The call came in on Sunday morning, interrupting the time honored ritual of newspapers, coffee and pastries in bed. The unfamiliar female voice asked in halting, heavily accented English, “Is you Michol?” It turned out to be a friend of a distant cousin of Norma Yvonne, who claimed she knew us when we lived [...]
Every May, without fail, the Dowbrigade drifts into a fragrant nostalgic reverie when the lilacs come into bloom. We grew up in upstate New York, near Rochester’s Highland Park, which together with the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, claim to be the largest collections in the world, and in our neighborhood every house had [...]
WATERTOWN – The newest addition to Pleasant Street certainly doesn’t stink.
What was once a tourist attraction in Worcester is now heading through the pipelines to Watertown. The American Sanitary Plumbing Museum, aka “the toilet museum,” is moving to the West End with a promise to “bowl” people over.
The largest plumbing contractor in New England, J.C. [...]
Boy, have we ever gotten behind in our postings. But, thats what vacations are for, we guess. Currently in Baños, Ecuador, nested in the skirts of Mt. Tunguragua, an active vocano which is currently acting up; booming and smoking and spraying mile-high plumes of smoke into the air. We have been told [...]
Can you spot the real Dowbrigade? On Halloween (which would have been game 7 of the World Series that wasn’t) we were confronted, at the ungodly hour of 9 AM, by an apparition that would curdle the hair of any sane teacher – a dozen Dowbrigades! Luckily the Dowbrigade has little of either hair or [...]
As if we weren’t worried enough about our personal security, what with radioactive waste and deadly pathogens in the vicinity (see previous post), as we went to park at our local sports bar for lunch, right around the corner from our home (see church in background), we were confronted by a scene out of a [...]
Several large properties in the East End of Watertown, including a nearly 12-acre swath of land at Greenough Boulevard and Arsenal Street that was once used to burn depleted uranium from a Watertown Arsenal nuclear reactor, are undergoing close scrutiny to determine how badly contaminated they are and who is responsible for cleaning them up.
The [...]
The Dowbrigade’s local supermarket has been undergoing a major makeover, and it was as if, had we been a pre-super hunter gatherer, the bison herd had suddenly disappeared.
Despite completely reoutfitting and reorganizing the entire store, they managed to stay open 24-7 throughout, doing most of the dangerous, disruptive work late at night. For [...]
This has become a regular point of contention between the Dowbrigade and his main feline spiritual advisor, Chiqui. Rather than walk on our face (always a risky proposition) Chiqui sits calmly and prudently a few inches to one side and gently paws somewhere in the nose-mouth region. What he means is A) fix my breakfast [...]
Three weeks just fly by, when one is engaged in engrossing and challenging work in a novel environment. Teaching Torts and Contracts and Remedies in a posh precinct of London so full of museums it seems to serve as a warehouse of Empire has kept your reporter almost too busy to blog.
But it has passed [...]