Neat site

For those of you who like The Hunger Site, I've discovered another site that's similar, only better. It's freerice.com. First of all, it's a lot more interesting than just a button you can click; it's a game, or a quiz, depending on how you look at it. When you go to the site, you'll be presented with a multiple-choice vocabulary question. Get it right, and you donate 10 grains of rice to a hungry person somewhere in the world. That may not sound like much, but the nice thing is that unlike the Hunger Site, which limits you to one click per day, freerice.com lets you keep playing as long as you like. The questions get harder as you go until you miss one, and then it bumps you down a level or two. So you get to learn new words and help the hungry at the same time. How neat is that? (And if you aren't that into learning fancy words, you can try one of the other subjects, such as geography, chemical symbols, or famous paintings.)

So far, the best I've ever done with the vocabulary quiz is level 53 (out of a possible 60). I usually get to somewhere around level 50 and then I start running into words I don't recognize. For someone who doesn't encounter unfamiliar words that often, it's a rather humbling experience. So I guess I just have to keep playing until I've learned them all. :-)

Monsoon time

You know that old expression, "It never rains but it pours?"

Well, my work life, after a prolonged drought, is now going through a monsoon. See, there was this health book I was supposed to start working on way back in November. When Thanksgiving came and went, they told me the project would be delayed until the new year. Come January, they told me it would probably start up in March... and so on, with the start date being pushed up by two months each time I asked.

Until now. Last month they got back to me and announced that they were now ready to get started--and oh yeah, they wanted me to write the entire book. All 21 chapters. Including second and third drafts. In six months. Because after eight months of delays on their end, there obviously wasn't a minute to waste.

So after spending the better part of the past year doing no work at all for money, I can expect to spend the next six months doing pretty much nothing else.

So, to anyone who actually reads this blog: I hope you'll understand if I don't get around to posting here too often.

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Squashed!

I see that my last entry, about two weeks ago, described the "teeny-weeny" zucchini that I had just spotted in the garden. Ha, it is to laugh. Take a look at this monster zucchini I harvested today. By the time August 8 rolls around, I may be all set to celebrate Zucchini-Sneaking Day.


And the pumpkin also shows signs of getting out of hand. Yesterday the Troll had to rig up a little sling from a piece of panty hose to to hold the largest of the pumpkins so that its weight wouldn't pull down the whole trellis.

I think perhaps I cucurbit off more than I can chew.

How Does Your Garden Grow, part 2

Two, three, four, tell us what the garden bore...

It was an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow-flowered green zucchini that I saw for the first time today! (Well, yesterday, actually.) First one of the season, and there are more blossoms where that came from.

The string beans are also flowering, and I can detect the first tiny beans forming. There are also tiny, incipient fruits on one of the Sun Gold tomato vines. There was one tiny pepper on the Yellow Cheese plant, but it has unfortunately split open while it was still fingernail-sized. Not sure what caused that--all the rain we've been having, perhaps?

The snow peas are still producing, which throws out all my calculations, since my plan was to plant the winter squash in the same spot after I'd finished harvesting the peas. But since it means more snow peas, I can't really complain. We've already had two meals' worth, plus the ones that got eaten raw right off the vine.

We finally got the trellis on our fourth bed put up yesterday, so I was able to string up the pumpkin vine that had been intruding on my onions. The corn is also growing rapidly--well past my knees already--so I have hopes of having fresh sweet corn to feed to the in-laws when they come to visit in a month.

The one crop that's nearing its end is the lettuce. It's interesting how I can now clearly distinguish the heads that I actually planted this year from the ones that reseeded themselves from last year. Last year I planted a generic Bibb variety from the rack at the drugstore, and those plants are now starting to bolt. But this year's plants are a bolt-resistant variety called Tom Thumb, and they still look like proper round heads of lettuce. So we should get a few more salads out of this garden before the dog days arrive.

Third Place? I Don't Know

On my recent trip to Pittsburgh, I read an article in Acela, the Amtrak on-board magazine, called "The Race for Third Place." (It appears to have been picked up from the airline magazine Arrive, because I found a copy of it here.) It was about how the recession is posing a special challenge for businesses that have been trying to market themselves as "third places"--that is, places where people spend significant amounts of time other than home and work. A "third place" could be a bar, a library, a coffee shop, a health club, a church, or a shopping mall--anyplace where people go just to "hang out," rather than going in, conducting their business, and leaving.

The existence of places like this is one of the things that holds communities together. That's why I like living in a town that has both bars and churches, even though I never spend any time at either type of place. It's why I mourned the passing of the local sweetshop, with its bona fide old-fashioned soda fountain, even though I only actually went there a few times a year. And it's why I was disappointed when the "comic cafe" across the river, once a great hangout where you could enjoy an ice cream or browse through comics or both (just so long as you didn't actually handle food and comics at the same time), moved to a new venue, where the comic shop was upstairs and the cafe downstairs, with no seating at all in the comic area (presumably because they didn't want to encourage folks to sit down and look at the merchandise) and so little in the cafe that you would feel guilty about lingering for even a minute after finishing your food. (I lost all interest in going there after that, and the Troll switched to buying his comics from another store, one that sold games as well as comics and actually encouraged hanging out.)

But it occurred to me as I read the article that, although I recognize the importance of places like these, I don't really have a "third place" myself. Sure, I like to go to a coffeehouse once in a while, but I'm not a regular at any particular coffeehouse. I take ample advantage of our local library, but I don't really hang out there--I mostly just go in, browse through the books and videos, choose one or don't choose one, and leave. I don't sit down with the book I've found and read it right there. In fact, because I work at home, I really don't even have a second place, let alone a third one.

So why, if I understand the value of having a place to hang out, don't I have one? I think it's because for me a "third place" would have to be someplace I could spend significant amounts of time without spending significant amounts of money. That lets out the coffeehouses, because $3 or $4 a drink starts running into money when you make a daily habit of it. And it lets out the library, because you can't eat or drink at all in there, and I like to have something to sip while I read. So the closest thing I have to a "third place" is the local park, where I like to go for walks in the summer, and where I can sometimes perch on a park bench and work on a crossword and drink my own coffee that I made at home, without having to pay $4 for it. But the thing is, when I go and hang out at the park, I'm hanging out by myself. I might see a few joggers passing through, or a mom with her kids, but I don't usually interact with anybody. It isn't really a place where I could go to meet people, or even just to be around people.

I wonder why in a town like mine, which does such a good job in so many ways of maintaining strong community ties, there are no real public spaces for people to connect with their neighbors?

Puzzled

Something makes me think I'm not doing these correctly.

Just a hunch, that's all.