Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

OK, much simpler and less adventurous than that title might imply: I spent the weekend in Arlington.

Train both ways. On the trip up, I decided not to sit in the quiet car (as I usually do), and wound up sharing an area (table and facing seats, total of four) with a woman and child (4 or 5, I think). She made a significant effort to keep him quiet, far more of one than some of the adults on cell phones made. We talked a little. At one point, the child noticed a loose bit of plastic curtain-holder on the inside wall of the train, and batted it toward me. I could see his mother starting to say something to him, as I batted it back. We played for a while. He used his hand, and after a bit I switched to using my pen hockey-stick style. The kid got a bit bouncy by the time we were in Massachusetts—Stamford to Boston is a long time to ask a child to sit mostly still and quiet—but by the time he wanted to climb over the seats, we were past Route 128 and there was nobody in the other side of his seat. Also near the end of the ride, he asked his mother how many days in a month, and she said "about 30," and he said no, he wanted to know how many hours, and as she looked puzzled, I said "720" and, when she was impressed, said "It's a knack, some of us have it." (From my viewpoint, it's easy, because I know the 12 times table, and you stash the zeros in a corner until you're done with the calculation, but "it's a knack" is shorter and I really didn't need to boast.) Nonetheless, I rode in the quiet car on the way back this evening; I'm not always in the mood to talk to strangers, much less to hear one side of their conversations.

It is definitely spring. We saw crocuses and dwarf iris on Mass Ave in Arlington and Somerville, and when I got off the subway in Manhattan this evening, I stepped into the very beginning of a spring thunderstorm. Walking up Isham Street, I could smell the good, damp soil. Spring.

I have checked off another of the shopping list items I'd been carrying for months, in this case a water bottle for the gym: in an exercise/sports supply store near the sushi place we go to in Porter Square, I got a bright blue stainless steel bottle. I would have settled for plastic, but I haven't seen a plastic bottle with the right kind of lid and in an appropriate size. It wasn't until I got it home and looked at the label that I discovered that washing it in a dishwasher is "not recommended", but since I will be using it for water and rarely iced tea, I'm not expecting to have to do a lot of washing.