Outdoor Gardens, Indoor Gardens, and Banana Gardens

Mom posted recently about out trip to Tenerife and our accomodations in Puerto de la Cruz specifically, so of course I’m going to post about… our day-trip to a completely different town!

Icod de los Vinos is a scenic bus ride from Puerto, and an absolute delight. Or at least, the one block we spent any appreciable amount of time on was!

On that block were Parque del Drago, home to a tree at least eight hundred (and possibly a thousand) years old; Mariposario del Drago, a butterfly house; and Casa del Plátano, a museum all about the cultivation of bananas! And a restaurant attached to the park. Had we been staying in the area, it was the sort of restaurant that we’d have been back to multiple times.

Beyond the namesake and massive elder tree (and the restaurant), Parque del Drago had a number of other native species, a cave, and an herb garden, with signage about all of them. The mariposario had birds, as pictured above, and Casa del Plátano had chickens – a form of natural pest control – and gives you a banana upon entrance. “Your ticket,” they said, as they handed us each a fruit. If you eat your banana around the chickens, they will stare disconcertingly. Or at least, they did for me. (It’s worth noting that Casa del Plátano also grows bananas, and the chickens were outdoors. They were not unleashed inside a concrete museum. Or whatever the primary building materials might be.)

All told, the three of these were small enough to fit easily into a day, inexpensive enough we didn’t feel cheated for it, and delightfully complementary. Between thought-provoking nature, head-empty pretty nature, and the process by which humans interact with nature, I was having a good time. Did you know that a continuous stem of bananas is really heavy? I didn’t, and I’ll never take them for granted again.

Also, curry leaves are silver. Who knew?

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It’s My Nemesis: Good Intentions!

In this game, you’re harried not just by your opponents’ attempts to ruin you, but also this caveman’s attempts to help! It’s Groo: The Game, based on the Groo The Wanderer comics, and he’s not technically a caveman… which is probably a good thing. He’d be an insult to cavepeople’s intelligence.

Born to more of a medieval setting, Groo is the bumbling buffoon who will trample the new Town Hall you’re trying to build. As such, his good intentions are something to be weaponized, set on your opponents so that he’s far, far away from your work! Unfortunately, Groo’s movements are often dictated by the dice.

Rolling isn’t where your turn starts, but it’s where the explanation does. It’s your turn. You roll the dice. Most of them are resources, except the one that’s moving Groo; resources are spent on cards in your hand, to use them! Buildings, for instance, add Victory Points and special effects to your arsenal, while Troops allow you to defend and attack. When you have Troops at the beginning of your turn, you can use them before rolling and building, but that’s a Later Problem: first, the dice!

See, there’s a catch to the dice, in Groo: The Game. In Groo’s spirit of helping people, any dice you don’t use get passed to your opponent. And, if your first opponent doesn’t use them, on and on, til all the leftovers are used up! Or until they get back to you. Whichever’s first.

That game of “how much of what I can do can I do now?” continues with combat, in which attacking (committing Troops) begets defending (committing other Troops), and all Troops used in the fight are discarded. Can you afford to get rid of your defense? Can you afford to not? Every point by which there are more attacking Troops than defending is a Victory Point of Buildings the defender has to discard. And you only need seven points to win!

This one’s competitive and swingy and thematically a delight. I should check out the comics.

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RIP JOANN Fabric

Tragically, JOANN Fabric and Craft Stores are closing, that distant monolith of my childhood doomed to date me like memories of Blockbuster and PanAm date my elders. As the closing sales grow steeper, however, I have been introduced to things I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, like the plastic flowers and birds I’ve used to decorate curtain rods and light fixtures, at least one pack of stickers, and a good solid container for our cat toys to be stored in! So thank you to JOANN for that. I’ll remember it fondly… and keep the garlands out of cat-batting distance.

A corner where two walls meet the ceiling, with bronze curtains over one set of windows and light blue over another. Above the bronze curtains, a garland of plastic white roses stretches out and around the corner, meeting a garland of fake sunflowers over the blue.
A little yellow fake bird, attached to the arm of a protruding light fixture, such that the little bird sits upright. Its right eye is staring at the camera.
A false daisy is clipped onto a curtain rod, right where the wooden window frame beneath it begins. Together, they stand in stark contrast to the cool deep blue of the curtains, and robin's-egg blue of the wall.
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Garden of the Groves

A little while ago now, we found ourselves in Freeport, Grand Bahama, with one day to spend, a high-wind warning, and, consequently, a cancelled kayaking excursion. What to do?

It was not a particularly difficult decision to go to the local botanic gardens, as one does, and spend our day there. And it was a day well-spent! The gardens were gorgeous, naturally, bright and colorful in a way that Illinois in mid-early March was not. They had multiple water features, which ducks and turtles took full advantage of, and a couple of garden cats, lounging in the sun. And parrots! One of the parrots said “Hello!!” and bobbed along to music.

Mostly, what we found was it was quiet. Some of that was circumstance – the same wind advisory that nixed our kayaking cut garden-and-something excursions, leaving it super empty – and part of that was the space. With several, meandering paths that all loop back towards the central space eventually, and bushes and tall flowers obscuring the rest of the paths from view, it managed to both be relatively compact – we saw everything – and private. And there are swings, which was a nice bit of nostalgia.

Of course, I can’t talk about Garden of the Groves without mentioning the shops there. Local artists have vendor space, in a row over by one of the ponds, selling magnets, jewelry, etc. Not all of the shops were open – again, cancelled excursions, and consequent shortage of customers – but the ones that were open all had something we wanted, at reasonable enough prices that we got something from each! They took an already lovely, peaceful day, and made it just that bit better. And it was my perception that the shopkeepers were attentive without pressuring, which I definitely appreciated.

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Mmm, Garbage

Because what everyone has been desperately waiting for the opportunity to do is rifle through the trash and eat it, right? No? Ah, well, it makes more sense for a raccoon. In Trash Pandas, you have two objectives: succeed in the press-your-luck dice part of the game, which earns you the right to gain and stash cards, and then play and stash cards to have the most points at the end of the game. The card and dice mechanics dance together well!

In a lot of ways, the card mechanics are also a press-your-luck vibe, because cards you stash are scored by who has the most of a kind, and stashed cards are usually secret! Do you use the card for its ability or its point value? Can you afford to expend it? Is it worth the risk?

Of course, some cards have no point value. You’re unlikely to stash/eat the Kittehs and Doggos, because their only purpose is to block attempts to steal from you! And Blammos are a flat one point each, but they also let you re-roll your last die. Decisions, decisions.

Mechanics aside, this one really leans into the garbage theme! Ew, you say. Hilarious, I’d contend. The Nanners have mushrooms growing on them. The “Mmm Pie!” has a D6. All of it looks like a biohazard and a half. The artist(s) must’ve had a blast!

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The Gift of La Viña

I’m honestly very tempted to make wine. I’m not interested in drinking it, and I think making it could be fun. And then I’d gift the bottles to Mom, who actually would drink it! Flawless system. In La Viña, the “gift” is actually the vineyard – shocking for anyone who speaks Spanish, I know – and should come with an asterisk: you and your fellow players all might inherit this vineyard, but to prevent fragmentation, only one of you gets to! So you have to prove yourself as grape- and wine-savvy to win the prize.

The general premise is that you’re moving through the vineyard, collecting grapes, and each time you exit the vineyard you can sell them to wineries – some wineries want blends, which are at least half one variety of grapes, and others want one type exclusively. Grapes have values, wineries have minimums, and you can only make deliveries with one basket at a time, which can only hold so many grapes. It’s a juggling act! Grapes sold, you get prestige, which is both currency and victory condition!

The game ends when someone has used all their barrel tokens, given to wineries each time you make a sale, and everyone else gets to finish their last pass of the vineyard. Barrels vary by number of players, as do a lot of things – basket upgrades for purchase, tools to be found, even the length of the vineyard! Which determines the amount of available grapes on a given pass, while the tools (picked up with some grapes) give you better access to cards that might be inconveniently placed. All of which makes for a very carefully weighted vine-to-wine experience!

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Wiley Treehouse Gardens

Last week, I talked about the joy of various online niches, and this week’s a subset of that: it’s very cool to see the different subsets of nature photography! One of them is Michael Nordeman Photography, which I’ve already talked about, and another is Wiley Treehouse Gardens, with a variety of outdoor plants in the Pacific Northwest and indoor varieties, especially succulents. This was the first plant blog I found on Tumblr, and it’s easily still one of my favorites! Plus, they traveled to Madagascar a while back, so somewhere in that tag are lemurs.

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Venusaur Propaganda

May I just say once again I adore the variety of niches I’ve acquired? So particular is the joy of learning someone else has and is willing to share an extremely specific passion. In this case, Venusaur!

In short, this Tumblr user has taken it upon themself to draw every other Pokémon somehow interacting with Venusaur, for an eventual total of one thousand and twenty-five. A task I can’t fully imagine, but they’ve taken to it with gusto! And as I’ve only had partial and sporadic experiences with Pokémon, “I like the art style and the characters’ expressiveness” has incidentally taught me a lot. Mostly that in the right context, every single one of them can be cute!

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What Happens After You Drop The Dishes?

Have you ever read Shel Silverstein’s “How Not To Have To Dry The Dishes”? It goes about how you’d expect. I remember encountering it during our fourth grade class poetry show, at just the right age to both empathize with the “consent of the governed” of it, and have a vague crisis of conscience. After all, the story goes, to not have to dry the dishes, something has to break.

I was also nine for this story, and had yet to encounter the notion that dishes could be fixed.

All of which is to say that Broken and Beautiful is a game about kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer. Or silver, or platinum, but notably something shiny and obvious, marking breakage as a part of something’s story, and not the end of the bloody world.

In terms of the game, it’s gorgeously simple: get pottery! Break pottery! Fix pottery, at a cost. When you’re done collecting, score! It’s what I’m inclined to call “mechanically compact” – nearly every feature serves multiple purposes. Your candidate cards to choose from, on a given turn, are a quantity of (two per player) plus one, giving you extra options and, per the one left over, defining what type of dishes this turn are going to break. If the last card available is a cup, everyone’s cups shatter! Each different card type has a given cost to fix, which is also the gold you can sell it for when you first acquire it – no deciding later that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. And given that broken items are worthless, come the end of the game, you may want to! When an item is fixed, however, it’s not only untouchable – it will never break again – it’s worth more points than it was unbroken! (It puts me in the mind of wood glue, something else that feels like poetry and isn’t quite the point. I’ll drop the link.) Flip the card over, and bask in the improvements.

‘But Cassandra,’ you might ask, ‘if the back of the card is largely identical to the front, how does the deck work?’ It’s easy! The top card’s not a secret. In fact, that top card type will also break each turn, regardless of what you do. You see what I mean? Efficient.

When there are no longer enough cards left for a proper draft, the game ends, and each type of item is scored differently. Some have different stacking bonuses with others of their type; cups’ scores are multiplied when paired with saucers; teapots gain value by what else is of the same pattern/set. And then there’s serving trays and storage boxes, wooden items that cannot break, one of which scores a flat rate and the other per your remaining gold ingots! You can see, then, why I’ve never been able to predict which of us will win a game until we stop to score. With nine distinct scoring methods – who on Earth can?

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