🤑 August freebies you NEED to know

It’s Monday, Boston.

💏 Do you have dating fatigue? Having trouble getting over a breakup? Wondering how your relationship could be better? Love Letters’ Meredith Goldstein is ready to read (and offer good advice). You can submit your anonymous question using this form — or by emailing [email protected].

👀 What’s on tap today:

• It’s gonna be COLD cold

• Logan close call

• A perfect P-Town day

Up first...

AUGUST FREEBIES

Your monthly free-for-all

There are a lot of freebies in Boston. You just have to know where to look. So once a month, we do it for you.

Here’s what’s on deck for August:

🚲 Bluebike for free every Monday. Blue Cross Blue Shield is celebrating National Wellness Month by sponsoring free Bluebikes Adventure Passes every Monday in August. Each code gives you unlimited two-hour rides over a 24-hour period. And to sweeten the deal, they’re also hosting a free spin class led by Rev’d instructor Alyssa Pannozzi on August 28 in Christopher Columbus Park. It’s first come, first served!

🏓 Play a free round of pickleball at Harpoon Brewery. Tuesday, August 8 is National Pickleball Day, so Harpoon Brewery is opening up its brand spankin’ new pickleball courts to the public from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Reps from Franklin Sports will be there demo-ing new paddles and equipment, and there will be plenty of live music, giveaways, and food and bev for purchase. You can RSVP to play here.

🤌 Spend your weekends feasting in the North End. These multi-day festivals honoring Italian saints go HARD in August, with one every. Single. Weekend. The streets are decked out in red, white, and green, and there’s music, dancing, parades, and loads of Italian street food. The Madonna Della Cava Feast is this weekend, followed by the Fisherman’s Feast, Saint Rocco's Feast, and Saint Lucy's Feast. The season wraps up August 24-27 with the granddaddy of them all: Saint Anthony’s Feast.

🍿 Squeeze in the last outdoor movies of the summer. You can watch the Princess Diaries and Spider-Man: No Way Home in the Pru’s South Garden; Raiders of the Lost Ark at Boynton Yards (they have free snacks!); a Shrek and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off double-feature at Cambridge Crossing; Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery at Christopher Columbus Park; Goonies and Back to the Future at The Hatch Shell on the Esplanade; and more!

🎨 Get crafty on the cheap. Community Arts Cambridge is hosting a paint your pet class, where you’ll learn all the painting tricks and techniques. Just bring a pet pic — no actual animals allowed. And on Sundays this month, Tiny Turns Paperie and Remnant Brewing have teamed up to create a series of craft nights covering everything from fiber arts (think knitting and needlepointing), to bullet journaling, and more.

🛍️ Window shopping is always free at these markets. FarmFest is back at the Boston Public Market celebrating New England bounties with sunflower giveaways, a corn-shucking contest, and more; the Black-Owned Bos. Market in the Seaport returns with food from ZaZ Restaurant (so good); women makers will be spotlighted at the Boston Women’s Market; and the Moonlight Market on the Greenway will showcase local vendors and a lineup of food trucks.

🏌️ Bonus: The Moonlight Market is offering nine holes of free glow-in-the-dark mini golf.

CITY

Quick & dirty headlines

🏊 Love that dirty water? Doesn’t mean you can swim in it. Water quality report cards for the Charles, Mystic, and Neponset rivers dropped last week, and they all kind of passed with mostly As and Bs. But each had some trouble spots thanks to a mixture of sewage overflows and a presence of bacteria. While the EPA said these scores have vastly improved, Boston still doesn’t have swimmable urban rivers (yet). But local watershed associations want to change that and are urging officials to clean up the rivers and reduce toxic runoff.

🥶 The BRRR is back this winter. The Farmers’ Almanac just released its winter weather predictions, and the message for New Englanders is clear: It’s gonna be COLD cold. Unlike last year’s relatively snowless winter (we’ve had some of the steepest snow cover losses globally), we're allegedly in for quite the opposite with tons of rain/sleet and snowstorms. But given how early this report drops, many local meteorologists feel the same way about these predictions as I do about daily horoscopes: “Fun” but “worthless.”

✈️ Remember when two planes had a “close call” at Logan? Yeah, they weren’t exaggerating. To recap, a private jet took off without permission at Logan in February and nearly hit a JetBlue plane that was trying to land. And a photo from inside the JetBlue cockpit captured just how close the “close call” actually was. Luckily, the JetBlue plane was able to pull up to avoid a collision. And while we may never fully know why the private plane took off without clearance, the pilot did admit Boston’s cold temps affected him and he “had a stuffed nose.”

👀 Keep your eyes peeled for some incoming restaurants. It looks like Colette Bakery, a Medford and Melrose haven for French baguettes and pastries, is adding a third shop in the South End; the folks behind Somerville’s Field & Vine are hiring for a new restaurant with a wood-fired oven called June Bug in Union Square; and a new location of the North Shore-based Pomona Cafe & Wine Bar known for its coffee and cocktails will be bringing another cafe to JP.

QUICK QUESTION!

👃 Do you think cold temps and a stuffy nose is a good excuse for taking off at Logan without permission?

ONE LAST THING

Beat Cape traffic by boat

Summer on the Cape is great. Summer traffic on the Cape? Not so much.

So Boston-based creator Iona McGowan waved to the backup of cars from the comfort of the Provincetown fast ferry, and spent what she thinks is the perfect P-Town day sans car.

She highlights everything from drag brunches with queens from Ru Paul’s Drag Race, pasteis de natas, a scenic biking trail, and a topless dune tour (the Jeep kind).

You can see her full itinerary in this IG video.

😋 Thanks for reading! Can confirm those pasteis de natas are absolutely delightful.

☠️ The results are in: 40% of respondents from last week’s poll have “Risk” as their middle name and want to try the City Hall Plaza death slide. Several readers wrote: “That looks fun” after watching this video of a Boston cop flying down it like a sack of potatoes.

💃 Keep up with us @BostonBSide on IG, TikTok, and Twitter. Send comments and suggestions to [email protected].