The Family Diary

What a GLORIOUS day it is! Almost 70 degrees farenheit! Sunny, windy and warm. Pretty exceptional day for this time of year in Boston, or anywhere north of NYC for that matter. Unfortunately, Nicola has rather a bad cold including a fever so she's not really been herself most of the day. She's taking a nap as I write this. Monica had pretty much the final rehearsal for her piece. The performances begin on Thursday so today was a tech/costume rehearsal. She's feeling pretty excited about this piece... says it's going to be good... I had my first week of work at the new job. I am so lucky. I work with great people, have a great assistant... all the elements are in place for me to build a really great looking website for ScanSoft that actually makes money by saving on support/operating costs and by selling products online. I'm shooting for a February launch date. It's looking like I have 66 days from start to finish for the project. Kind of ambitious but... well.. I'll be sure to post project updates here weekly... The site's been getting a little traffic, mostly from people I do know, but also from places I've never been and people I've never met!

Nicola and I did go out for a little walk today and discovered a couple of new stores in Roslindale Village, our little town center. It's so exciting to see the town 'gentrify'. I mean, it's sad for the locals and old-timers, I guess, but for ourselves and most of the neighbors that we know it's a great thing! I'm half tempted myself to drop everything and open some kind of little shop down there but I'm not willing to take the financial hit nor take on the responsibility. I like having paid vacations and a matched 401K...

10/17/98 Saturday morning...

It's gotten quite a bit colder here, but the sun is shining. I've been cooped up in the house, doing my best to fine tune this webserver as well as trying out a few other webserver applications on different port numbers. I'm almost at the point now where I'm ready to add a guestbook and a 'mailto' form on this site. The rest of the time, i do work! Thursday night Monica's Dad was in town on business so we all wen to legal seafood for dinner. Nicola was out way past her bedtime but was really well-behaved in spite of it. Monica will have rehearsal today down at the conservatory on her new Gershwin/Fitzgerald piece, and I'll probably take Nicola and our guests up to New Hampshire to do a little late in the season leaf peeping...

10/8/98- First entry...

It's fall in Boston. Rainy these last couple of days. Nicola is in Kindergarten and really seems to be loving it. She's also enjoying the company of our current guests (English Students): Edna- from Brazil, Ariana- from Venezuela and Noriko from Japan. Monica is into her second year of teaching at the Boston Conservatory. I will be beginning a new job in a week at ScanSoft, a division of Xerox that makes scanning and OCR software. I will be reporting to the VP of marketing and will be in charge of all of scansoft's web-space... I'm really looking forward to the challenge and opportunity that the job represents.

As far where we live, for those of you who don't know us, we live in Roslindale, MA, legally a part of Boston, but geographically, a little ways out of town. We're near West Roxbury, Jamaica Plan, and very close to the Arnold Arboretum. The nice thing about living in Roslindale is that from our house we can see the commuter rail (10 minutes to back bay) from here, we can walk to a great supermarket in roslindale village, there's a decent coffee bar and bakery, a great lebanese grocery (cheap olives, fresh dates!), and we can walk to the arboretum. Also, there is a real neighborhood feeling among the people who live on our street and the neighboring streets...