Blooming where?

Just back from Game Night in the more obscure burbs. (So far, no one I've mentioned the name to has known that northern Illinois had a "Bloomingdale".) The place was crazy big; my first thought on seeing it was, "That's a lot to mow" and that was before we were shown the back forty. There's an entire pond on the property!

Getting out there went pretty smoothly despite the lack of anything resembling a direct route. You have to zig and zag up and down three different expressways, but at least the last mile is easy: one turn off a major thoroughfare and you're there. When the conversation flagged, the driver pulled out his iPod and treated us to Tim Minchin.

I played three games, two for the second time (Guillotine, Hex Hex) and one for the first (Quelf). Catchphrase was going in the den, but thanks to the sprawling split-level architecture, we hardly knew anyone else was in the house as we huddled around a card table in the master bedroom. We lost a couple people after Hex Hex--the rules were just a tad too "complicated" for the less-serious gamers--so we decided to go with a real "party game".

Quelf is Cranium-like in its combination of different challenges, but I think it tries too hard to be wacky. It's like they were aiming for the feel of a balls-out adolescent truth-or-dare session, but grafting on enough rules to encourage lawyering, which doesn't make for a happy marriage. Bizarrely, I made it through almost entirely unscathed while others were forced to sit on the floor or under furniture or observe various crazy taboos and geasa.

It ended up being one of those games which ends with exhalations of relief rather than paroxysms of joy; not sure how willing I'd be to play it again, even after 2+ drinks. I especially felt bad for the young woman who spent the evening in various stages of isolation from the rest of the players. "Please don't go back and tell all your friends that we're misogynists!" I begged her on her way out.

Plants don't talk back

I know that a lot of people who don't garden out of dietary necessity do it to relax, but so far this year it's been anything but for me. Between Streets and San demolishing our corner and ComEd failing to communicate over the new gas lines, we're holding back on doing anything out front lest it be ruined. This is spilling over into our plots in back because one of them has the firebush from the street corner stuck in it until we're sure it's safe to replant it. Impatience got the better of me today and I finally planted some mache there--the seeds I bought last winter for early spring planting. If I'd put them in the ground back when I thought I'd be able to, I'd have a crop already.

I was all suited up for some serious digging because today was supposed to be the afternoon where the Landscape Committee tackled the parkway project. But the truth is there is no "committee", there is only Scooter and Mr Moonshine who do what they want and inform us afterwards. At the last condo meeting, I'd suggested Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Having not heard anything definite about scheduling, I went out about one this afternoon to find Scooter fucinishing up the project.

The goal was to end up with a serpentine retaining wall. We had the bricks laid out for the sweaty work of digging the trench and laying them. Scooter dug it to half the depth he should've and didn't angle it correctly, so instead of leaning into the slope (using gravity to help hold them in place), the bricks are leaning toward the street (where gravity and pressure from the soil behind them will eventually push them over). I tried to explain this to him in so many words but he refused to believe there was anything wrong with his handiwork.

Whatever. Next time he complains that he's the only person who does anything around here, I'll tell him he can shove it. What else do you expect when you actively undermine all efforts to involve other people and refuse their input? That's been the pattern since before we bought in here and our attempts to change it are going nowhere, so fuck trying to seek consensus and cooperation.

At least I was able to plow the annoyance into finishing the soup I started on Wednesday. My first time cooking with parsley root and I think I like it. A lot of the produce at Devon looked uncharacteristically shabby, so no parsnips, but I think I found the one decent-looking yellow squash and some good shallots of size. We'll see how it all comes together later in the week; monshu apparently forgot about the enriched stock in the fridge because he went out and bought another city ham to do vetsmama-style.