Well, the pillbug scourge appears to be over, and my vegetables are actually growing up big and strong. Hooray!


Garlic! I pulled one but left the others in the ground to age a bit more. This head is currently hanging in my kitchen curing. I cannot wait to eat the homegrown garlic.


Purple bush beans! This is the one (ONE) plant that didn't get killed by pillbugs. But it has beans on it and I will eat them. SOON.


The scallions are our one complete success so far. (Ok the scallions and the plums are our two successes, but I didn't technically plant the plum tree or do anything to achieve plums, so...yeah.) They're all a good three feet tall, and are abundant and totally delicious.


The rest of the heads of garlic look like this. Garlic garlic garlic! I want to plant a lot more garlic next year.


I stuck an onion that had sprouted in our cabinet into the garden, because why not? It grew some enormous 4-foot stalks, sprouted blossoms, and burst into gigantic flowers. Even if I can't eat the root, I get to stick my face in an onion flower or two every day.

And of course the tomatoes are starting to shoot up. Pictures of that one to follow in August or so, when they start getting terrifyingly large.


Anagrabble is kind of difficult to explain in words! It's a Scrabble variant using anagrams, but our version doesn't match any versions I can find online. You need a set (or more) of Scrabble tiles, at least two players, and a tabletop instead of the Scrabble board.

Start by turning all the tiles face down on your table. Then begin turning tiles over, one at a time, to create a pool of letters in play. Any player can turn tiles over at any time, but it's best to go VERY SLOWLY after the first few are available, so players have a chance to process the new additions.

Once there are enough letters turned up to make words, players can begin calling them by saying a word and arranging it in front of them. Words must be four letters or more, with no proper names and no foreign language words (although you can make exceptions for agreed-on loan words if you want) allowed.

After players have claimed words, they become available to steal. You steal other players' words (or vary your own & make them more difficult to steal) by adding an additional letter or letters in play to make a different word. The new words don't have to be anagrams--they can't literally be, since we're adding extra letters--but they're based on letter rearrangement. So if a player had claimed the word "part" and there was an S in play, another player could steal the word "traps". Or they could add an L to "pays" to create "plays". It's fine to steal a word back and forth over and over, but it becomes harder and harder to do so as the word grows.

Players can't steal a word by keeping it intact and just adding a letter or letters to its beginning or end--they must change the letters in some way. So you couldn't steal "clap" by changing it to "claps" because the letters in "clap" are all still in the same order. In other words: no substrings.

Players can make new words or steal others at any time until all the tiles are used up. After you're done, count up the points on your tiles; the most points clearly win.

So that's Anagrabble, and it is great. Hooray!