This activist honey bear featured prominently in the last college apartment I shared with my friend Sarah--a fine (firetrap if you ask my mom) place we affectionately dubbed the Pearl Palace. His message seemed ever-relevant on my recent trip to see Sarah in Boston the weekend after the election.

I could not resist snapping some pics of Sarah and Ed's adorable apartment when I woke up Saturday morning. Everywhere you look is an interesting little vignette or a lovely piece of art. Plus, who can resist an affectionate multi-toed cat named Unicorn? No one. Clearly.

And then, because this is Boston, where things go on, we went to check out a new community center of sorts that Harvard opened recently. A ceramics class was in progress, and they let us wonder through and check things out.

What better to follow that then a fancy-pants grilled cheese (goat cheese, arugula, fig jam, yum) and beers?

I also could not resist a street selfie here, a la Vivian Maier. If you've not seen this woman's work, you must check it out. She took huge numbers of photos for years while working as a nanny in Chicago and printed very few herself; her work was discovered posthumously and is absolutely amazing, as explained in this documentary.

Sometimes small town life makes me forget how big the world is. Luckily, even a short weekend trip is enough to remedy that.