I tried to learn bridge from my sweet little old grandmother.  We were playing a semi-open hand, just to sloooowly go over the ropes, and I guess she ended up getting dealt some kind of absurdly phenomenal hand.  So as much as she wanted to be leading a good-spirited tutorial, her cards were so good that she couldn't…

STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT!!
::sobs::
::runs away::
/Devils fan

Blokus is fantastic.  Even this inveterate strategy-hater loves Blokus.

I've always made a point of calling our sunroom "the conservatory" for that very same reason!  (We're short on a lot more than just the ballroom, though…)

Scrawler, you are totally my kind of gamer.  I have a regular Game Night date with some friends, and we just do party games all the time, because by the time dinner's been served and the kids have gone to bed, we're all just looking to chill and socialize and laugh.  Strategy games are way too much work.  (Also, I get…

I suppose, in hindsight, we should be happy so many of the choices led to quick deaths, since we only had so many fingers to work with.

Being a morbid kid I really loved how gruesome the death illustrations were, but aside from that, these books hit my narrow vein of Type A really hard.  I was generally pretty passive and easy-going, but I just could not deal at all with making the "wrong" choices in the CYOAs.  I remember thinking that surely there…

An awesome thing about using libraries to consume pop culture media is tha their collection development can be driven by customer requests.  My sister is a librarian, and she's reported that a significant number of our music requests have led to the library purchasing five copies of each CD.  So everyone's a winner —…

2012 was the year where I finally figured out how to find new music that I actually liked (because seriously, who even knew you could harness the powers of the internet for that sort of thing??), so 2013 is the year I'm going to see lots of music live and in person.  I hope.  Or maybe 2013 will be the year I think…

I watched the first four seasons of The Wire with my mother and sister a few years ago (we haven't caught up with season five yet), and now we're watching Law & Order.  Clay Davis has popped up a few times playing minor characters, and every time we see him all three of us chorus, "Sheeeeeeeeeeit."

While crazy doomsday preppers definitely suck, the POP! of a can sealing does kind of make up for that.  A little bit. 

It's a giant, heavy pot emblazoned with all kinds of danger-orange stickers (that say in several languages "DO NOT REMOVE") with explanations of all the way the pot is a lethal object.  "Failure to follow operating instructions will result in serious bodily harm" and whatnot.  The way it works is that it seals all the…

Dill and cilantro bolt like motherfuckers.  But if you leave the cilantro in and just let it go to seed, eventually you'll get volunteer cilantro everywhere.  My garden's a tidy little fenced-in space with eight raised beds and pea gravel over the paths between them, only the pea gravel is now carpeted with a lawn of…

@avclub-2ac233bc53744593f485e5752aaa692a:disqus August truly is the March of summertime.

I can't remember ever actively believing 100% in Santa (I also have an older sister…), but I do recall being 7 or 8 and going into an old-fashioned candy store in my neighborhood on Christmas Eve.  The old guy who worked the counter there told me that he'd heard confirmed Rudolph sightings already (it was an overcast…

Oh, and I meant to add that I've got arugula and some Asian greens still going in my garden too.  It's so fantastic to be getting fresh salads in the middle of wintertime!

I grow everything from seed, because I like to try all kinds of varieties of things that the garden centers around here don't carry.  (Seed Savers Exchange is just massive, massive garden porn.)  I've generally had zero luck with direct-sowing things, but we've got a whole seed-starting set-up at my house.  It used to…

Or put in raised beds!  I'm the biggest raised-bed gardening cheerleader; we put them in to make our front-yard veggie garden a bit neater and less "destroying our neighbors' property value", and as it turns out they're the greatest thing ever for the lazy gardener.  There's so much less weeding in a raised bed than…

That sucks — lack of sun is kind of the one thing you can't correct for.

You better believe it!  Thanks for recognizing him — he's been mistaken for Dick Cheney a few times here.