City Living

The Best Sightseeing Fitchburg has to Offer (aka Allow Me to Demonstrate How Bored I Am)

Posted on by Ross Gariepy

Every time I’m back in Fitchburg visiting my family, I tend to fall into the same routine: catch up with people over dinner and drinks every night, but during the day when they’re at work, sit on a couch and be BORED OUT OF MY GODDAMNED MIND.

Want some proof?  I just got excited because on the Today Show they had a larger-than-normal rabbit on the set…and he was eating a piece of the carpet!  And yesterday afternoon, I watched three episodes of Sex and the City, bringing my lifetime total of episodes watched to three (fine, I’m lying it was five episodes yesterday.  And by the way, no one ever told me that show was essentially softcore porn, right down to the cheesy porn music that gets played throughout entire episodes).  I also read a People magazine cover to cover for the first time.

What always happens is my days in the ‘Burg end up totally revolving around food.  Even though my parents always stock the fridge plenty for my arrival, I still get take-out several times a day because driving somewhere to get food will at least waste an extra 15 minutes.

So I started thinking…what would a tourist do with his time in Fitchburg? Trick question, I know.  A tourist would never come to Fitchburg unless he was in Boston or Worcester and needed to score some “suburban heroin.”  I actually googled “Fitchburg tourist attractions” earlier today, and one of the top results was the local Dairy Queen…

But as it turns out, when I was leaving Massachusetts seven years ago to move to San Francisco, a friend gave me a Fitchburg T-shirt as a going away gift.  This particular shirt had seven Fitchburg landmarks on it, apparently representing the main tourist attractions of this great city.  So what I thought I’d do today is try to go see these landmarks…assuming, of course, that the lines to see them aren’t super long.  Could I waste a few hours today sightseeing in Fitchburg?  Let’s see.

Curious what the T-shirt looks like and what the landmarks are?  Here you go:

OK, I just returned from seeing almost all those landmarks on the shirt. And even after trying to spend as much time at each place as possible, I was away from my house for exactly 17 minutes.  It’s overcast and threatening rain today so maybe that’s what’s keeping all the tourists away from these amazing sights.

I know the different things on that shirt are a bit unclear, so let me explain.  Of course there are the typical landmarks that any city would put on their t-shirts: City Hall, the Public Library, a monument honoring local people who died in wars.  But here are some pictures of the more obscure landmarks:

1). A statue of two naked boys in the middle of a fountain:

There was no explanation for the significance of this fountain, no plaque, nothing.  All I can tell you is that a very crazy man named “Mickey” used to spend a lot of time near this fountain screaming at these two boys.  He was always wearing a ton of sunscreen on his nose, and rumor has it he used to be a millionaire, lost all his money, and then went nuts.  He may even be Fitchburg’s most famous resident.

2). A church:

I actually don’t know for sure that the church on the t-shirt is this exact church, but either way, there is no historical significance to any of the churches nearby that I can figure out.  I think they just needed to fill out the shirt with more items.

3). A bank:

The bank is my favorite part.  On the shirt, it’s a picture of Fitchburg Savings Bank…because banks are always on the top of the list for city landmarks and tourist attractions.  Except now, in 2012, Fitchburg Savings Bank is gone and this new bank, RBT, has replaced it.  How could they do that to such a meaningful landmark?  Was there a heated City Council meeting where the Historical Society argued that they can’t replace Fitchburg Savings due to its historical significance?  What will they do with the new Fitchburg t-shirts?  Pretend FSB is still there?  Replace the picture of the bank with a picture of one of the many broken-down bridges in this town?  If I knew where my friend got the original Fitchburg shirt, you can bet your ass I’d be there right now seeing if there is an updated Fitchburg shirt (at least that would help waste another 10 minutes of my day).

If you don’t think I’m coming back later today or early tomorrow with another Fitchburg post, then you really don’t understand just how bored I am.

Road Trip LA: apartment hunting, celebrity staring contests, mind-boggling traffic

Posted on by Ross Gariepy

So I spent the weekend in LA looking for apartments and doing a general tour of the city.  It seemed like a good idea considering I’m moving to LA on June 1st and have only been there twice.  The first time I was there, it was for a total of 10 hours.  Five of those hours were spent inside a bar, and the other five were spent inside the Staples Center watching Game 5 of the Celtics/Lakers NBA Finals.  The second time I actually stayed over night, but all the waking hours I was there were spent in a parking lot competing in a grilled cheese cooking competition.  Safe to say this trip was needed to actually learn a little bit about the city.

Here are some random thoughts, observations and lessons learned from the weekend:

-It dawned on me that many of my friends and most of my family have probably never been to LA, or at least haven’t spent any significant time in that city.  I called my mom on Sunday to update her about apartment hunting, and I told her there were a few apartments we didn’t even bother going into because just driving around the neighborhood convinced us we would never live in that particular area.  When I told her this, I could hear the overwhelming concern for my safety in her voice as she responded, “Oh good, that’s great.  Yeah, don’t even think of living in those places.”  It seems a little backwards that your mom would be rooting for you not to find an apartment, but that’s the way it goes.  And then I realized that when my mom pictures LA, this is what she sees:

-A word of advice if you’re in LA and your girlfriend is convinced she sees a celebrity: don’t tell her she’s wrong, even if you’re 100% sure it’s not who she thinks it is.  This will save you from the embarrassment of your girlfriend having a 15-minute staring contest with that celebrity as she tries to convince you that it’s her.  We were at a comedy show on Sunday night and moments before the show started, a few people walked in and took the remaining seats.  My girlfriend immediately says, “That’s Mandy Moore.”  My instinct is to laugh because there’s no way Mandy Moore is coming to this no-name comedy show.  My girlfriend says it’s gotta be Mandy because she’s looking back at us, knowing we’ve figured it out.  I was convinced this random girl was just uncomfortable with the fact that two strangers were staring at her.  For the rest of the show, I made jokes about Fake Mandy, and nearly had my girlfriend convinced that it probably wasn’t her.  When the show ended, of course we had to stand around right outside the entrance to wait for Maybe-Mandy, and when she walked out and I heard another couple behind me say, “Yep, that’s her,” I knew I was screwed.  Turns out Mandy Moore likes free comedy shows on Easter Sunday.  Now my girlfriend will be checking Mandy’s twitter posts for the next 10 days to see if she mentions the “girl that was staring at her nonstop at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade show.”  I also realize anytime we see Mandy Moore on TV for the rest of our lives, I will get the whole, “remember when you couldn’t spot Mandy Moore from 30 feet away” treatment.

-I’m sure LA didn’t invent this, but it was the first time I’ve ever seen anything like it so LA’s getting the credit.  We found a wine bar on Saturday night where you purchase a credit card-like device, load money onto it and insert it into a machine that automatically pours tastings of different wines into your glass.  Each tasting costs $1.50-$4.00 depending on the wine, and you load $15, $20 or $50 onto your card.  The four of us that went to this place blew through $60 before we each got a full glass for another $9-12 each.  If it had been a normal bar, we probably would have spent a total of $40.  Great idea for the bar; great unique experience for the alcoholics patrons.

These devices make it even easier to spend $50 on wine over a 20-minute period

-The strangest thing that happened on the trip: when we were walking to the car on Sunday night after the comedy show, a passerby asked us if we wanted to buy a Taser.  I brushed it off as a random guy asking us a very random question, but the girlfriend immediately went into minor-panic mode.  “Why does he think we need a Taser?  Is this area dangerous?  How far away is the car?”  Luckily I was able to do an ocular scan of the area, assessed it as clear to pass, and we moved on without a problem.

-If there’s one common criticism that I heard about LA before this trip, I think you can all guess what it was: the traffic.  After spending a long weekend down there–a weekend that included Easter where you’d expect less traffic on Sunday–I can tell you that the traffic is absurd, outrageous, disastrous and mind-boggling.  In fairness, I currently spend an average of seven minutes in my car per week so any amount of traffic or being stuck in a car seems awful to me.  On this trip, we spent nine hours in the car on Friday (driving from SF to LA and driving around the city once we got there), seven hours in the car on Saturday (apartment hunting), another nine hours driving around on Sunday (apartment hunting and site seeing), and finally 11 more hours on Monday (a few hours driving around in the morning and then a sanity-testing eight hour drive back to SF).  Never has it seemed so important to make sure my new apartment is going to be walking distance to where I work.

-The drive from LA back to SF was just crazy.  And if being stuck in traffic for eight hours isn’t enough, I had to endure the maddening signs on route 5 that count down how many miles away  San Francisco is.  I don’t mind these signs every now and then when I’m driving, but I swear to god that freeway has a sign every six miles.  “San Francisco 282 miles…San Francisco 276 miles…San Francisco 270 miles…San Francisco, you’re six miles closer than the last time you saw this sign.”  It’s enough to make someone go on a killing spree.  Who is it helping that you taunt us with mile markers every few miles for 300 miles??

-I don’t know if anyone else does this, but in order to pass the time on this drive, I started creating fake rivalries with other drivers.  So my girlfriend was rightfully confused as she’s on the computer, doing some work, and she hears me going, “Haha, not this time white Toyota, get back in line behind me.”  I tried to convince her that there were three other cars near me and all of us were having a friendly competition to pass the time.  I was only able to convince her that I had lost my mind.

So there you go…my first trip to LA caused me to lose my mind.  June 1st can’t get here quick enough.

The Great Quake of 2012

Posted on by Ross Gariepy
San Francisco will be in recovery mode for a long time

Dear Bay Area,

Hi, Rmurdera here.  We need to have a talk.  I think we all need to come to an agreement on when an earthquake is newsworthy.  I don’t mind that the morning news mentions every time there’s a little jolt while we’re all sleeping, but to treat these minor tremors like high priority, press-stopping news is really fucking annoying.

Here’s the deal I’m willing to make: when an earthquake causes death, serious injury or property damage over $45, we can scrap the regular news for hours upon hours of “breaking news: special earthquake coverage.”  But in return, whenever an earthquake can be best described as “a 10 second jolt that didn’t knock anything over,” we’re gonna have the news anchor come on TV and say, “this just in: a 4.0 magnitude earthquake hit just now.  It was centered in El Cerrito…no harm was done.  Let’s continue on with actual news.”  And that’s it.

Otherwise we have a situation like what I witnessed this morning.  I woke up at 5:30 to the 10 seconds of shaking.  It seemed similar to the other 200 quakes I’ve felt in six years of living in San Francisco so I thought no big deal.  I go back to sleep until about 6:45.  When I woke up and turned on the news, I thought for a second that I had slept through a history-making quake.  We’re talking breaking news, geologist experts on the phone every five minutes explaining what happened, all of the station’s reporters being sent to random towns throughout the bay area to collect stories of all the horror that residents witnessed when the shaking started (“wow, so this bottle of soda slid right off your counter?”).  My god, it was such a huge tragedy here that one poor woman lost a whole container of lemonade mix when it fell off her shelf! (I’m not even exaggerating…KRON4 spent 10 minutes where the reporter scrolled through the station’s facebook page on her phone relaying what residents were experiencing, and sure enough, the biggest incident was the lemonade falling over…oh the humanity!)

By the way, the Red Cross has setup a website for anyone who wants to help out the people who have been affected by the falling lemonade and soda: The Great Quake of 2012 Fund

Not only did this earthquake not cause any damage, but just today there have technically been 12 earthquakes in the SF Bay Area.  Check it out for yourself: earthquake list for San Francisco.  Let’s say anything under a 6.0 doesn’t get wall-to-wall news coverage anymore.  Let’s save that for the real disasters.

Speaking of the real disasters, I don’t know if other Bay Area residents feel like me, but I’m screwed when the big one comes.  All these little shakes have conditioned me to ignore an earthquake as if it’s a rain shower.  When the 9.0 hits later this year, you can find my body under a pile of rubble, iphone in hand, mid-tweeting “hahaha, another little shake to scare the masses.”