I’ve never made it to the top of the Gardening skill track in the Sims, but I’m pretty sure that the top proficiency is “Meg’s Granny” skill level. At this proficiency level, you use a stick to stake an amaryllis, and the stick grows. True story.

Unfortunately, I didn’t exactly inherit that. I still love picking out plants, I love the heavy moist air in greenhouses, the smell of potting soil and mulch, and all the trays of pale-green seedlings. After careful consideration of all the potted flowers, I settled on an orchid, beautiful and delicate, with the added benefit that they crack me up, in a etymology kind of way.

“These are guaranteed easy orchids!” the checkout girl said. Picture someone who gives 115% effort, and who wears extra pieces of flair.

“Well, easy for some people.” I said.

“No, I mean, there’s a store guarantee. For a year! Just bring back the dead plant and the receipt!”

“Are you absolutely sure?  Hardy plants turn into withered brown stalks around me. I buy plants as a symbol of boundless optimism in the face of insurmountable odds.”

“For a replacement if we have another in stock, or a giftcard for the full value so you can buy a new flower!”

I have high hopes for my pretty new flower, but I also have the receipt in an envelope marked orchid insurance.

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Orchid Insurance

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It’s really all Sanchaita’s fault.

When I was visiting my sister Bethie, her friend Sanchaita invited us to dinner. She cooked the most amazing chickpea curry — as part of a feast of other amazing dishes, I should add — and when I asked what kind of magic and rainbows went into it, she said it was just chana masala, with a shrug like that was nothing special.

Well, I started with a packet of chana masala from Patel Brothers on Maynard Street, and it really does include all the sunshine and rainbows and Indian restaurant flavors! My previous chickpea curries tasted a lot like chickpeas that had been boiled with some curry powder. (Shut up. It was much better than my artichokes or that time I tried to boil water.)

Once I was in the store, though I realized that I could buy paneer, and packets of pakora mix or dosai mix, and all kinds of other instant exotic tastes. Then I got adventurous and tried new recipes, and I’m pretty impressed with my not-from-a-packet dal.  I even added some new spices to our herb garden.

It was only when we were outside feeding stale naan to the turtles that I realized I just might have an Indian food problem.

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Chana Masala

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Resorting To Danger, by Her Interactive, is the second in the Nancy Drew Dossier series, following Lights, Camera, Curses!. This time, Nancy is investigating a series of bombs at the Redondo, a rejuvenation clinic for the stars. The bombs are more mess than death, containing pie filling or ladybugs, but Nancy’s still got to defuse the bombs and find the mad bomber without alarming the wealthy celeb patrons in for a facial or mud bath.

Since the Redondo is home to a group of zany characters with the same kind of accents, wild backstories, and over-the-top personalities I loved in Lights…, there’s no shortage of motives. Resorting To Danger offers multiple endings to the mystery, so no matter who you pick as the bomber, you’re right! This added some replay value, and I did choose a different villian the second time through for a different well-developed ending, but I also felt a tiny bit short-changed because there was no “right” suspect to uncover. I know, I know, I’m usually a huge fan of open-ended games, the more sandbox-y the better, and it feels strange to not to be completely thrilled by this multiple-choice ending. I think it’s because the Nancy Drew games remind me of reading the novels and solving the cases along with Nancy, and knowing that I’d automatically be right felt like too much of a good thing.

Like Lights…, Resorting to Danger involved a hidden-objects mystery with a collection of different minigames. I liked mixing up potions in the lab, fixing contraptions and eavesdropping in the salon. The game is never frustrating since players gain hints through successful gameplay so you always have more hints that you could need. And I absolutely loved that HER included a science-themed puzzle in a game for girls, but I actually found Helfdan’s molecule puzzle an underwhelming match-three. The poetic riddles throughout the game more than made up for it.

The eccentric previous owner of the Redondo estate, Hippocrites Bell, left a garden full of ancient statuary and a puzzle based on the statues’ attributes that anyone trying to get into the underground shelter is required to solve. Each statue has an item that belongs to a different statue, but the attributes weren’t quite the ones I expected.

One of the common assignments in classics is to be given an unfamiliar piece of art and to be asked to identify the story and characters from their iconography, so I think I had a rigid expectation of what each deity needed.  When it turned out that the snake did NOT go with Athena, the bow was NOT for Apollo, etc., I felt a bit frustrated.  When I used the clues given and not my classics degree, the attributes chosen by the developers were connected to the statues (some more loosely that others) but as I gave the statues their new attributes, I could hear my old Greek art and archeology teacher scolding me.

I did like the choice of a puppy for Artemis, and the pig for Homer, so clearly someone at HER studied classics and/or really likes stories where powerful women change men into animals.

(Speaking of classics tripping me up, when I saw the name Hipparchus on a statue, my first thought was NOT the astronomer but the brother of Hippias, and I wondered for a moment what sort of implement an Athenian co-tyrant would be holding. I really should consider getting out more.)

I loved the little references to Lights… in this game. They were so well done, it was a little laugh for players of the first game to hear about Eva or to see the black cat with Molly’s name on it, but players who hadn’t played the first one weren’t missing any vital clues. There were also fun references to characters from the novels, like Hannah the housekeeper.

Overall, Resorting to Danger is another hidden-objects mystery in another charming setting with a new cast of wild characters.

Get Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting to Danger here

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Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger

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Last weekend, Stick and I went out to pick strawberries.  We ended up at Buckwheat Farm, where we filled a tray and our mouths with hot red berries. It was summer-day perfection.  After half a tray, we started to get hot and sweaty, and the Nintendo games back home in the air-conditioning were starting to look better and better. We were about to pack up and go when we overheard that family next to us, who happened to have brought along the International Strawberry Expert.

The International Strawberry Expert scolded his kids for not picking carefully enough, for leaving properly-red berries on the vine, for failing to spread out, for letting pinkish berries get into the picking basket, for not treating the leaves with enough delicacy. Hilarious! (Unless, of course, your dad happens to be the International Strawberry Expert, in which case, it’s probably not so funny.)

We got home, still laughing over the International Strawberry Expert, and inspired by our day out in the country, we looked at our own potted plants. Contrary to expectations, Stick and I haven’t killed our plants yet. We have noticed a new flaw in our gardening plan. We’ve planted carrots, radishes and spring onions, mostly based on the belief that these will be easy to grow, but all three of our balcony-pot crops grow underground.

“How will we know when they’re radishes?” I asked Stick.

“Don’t they pop up over the soil?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, they do on Harvest Moon!”

Hmm…. looks like a job for the an International Radish Expert!

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Harvest Moonlighting

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I once had an English professor who told us that foreshadowing, symbolism and irony are literary terms, and by definition, can not happen in real life. It is our desire to see our life as a coherent story, he believed, that made us look for such things in hindsight. I disagree, but then, I think I’m the protagonist.

I recently learned that the city of Cary, NC was originally named Bradford’s Ordinary, which seems to disprove Professor Harris’s theory. Ordinary is just too apt. I often feel like life here is generic, flavorless American, a landscape of interchangeable strips malls and industrial parks and the highways leading there, the lifestyle I wanted to escape by moving to China.

But summer has arrived, unlike any summer I’ve seen, with long, lingering twilights. The light fades so slowly I only realize it’s nighttime by the appearance of lightning bugs.

Reading about North Carolina’s extra-long growing season doesn’t describe the gardens here, bursting with larger versions of familiar flowers of Massachussetts and New Jersey. In patches between concrete convenience, I find wild vines with glossy green leaves and delicate white Southern flowers, or huge blossoms with almost tropical petals and sweet, heavy scent.  Even our balcony basil and mint are touched with the wild growth here.

Evenings bring lightning flashes on the horizon from distant thunderstorms. Summer storms arrive, they come with the intensity and suddenness of the Kate Chopin story, a golden sunny day turning to wind-tossed trees and heavy, fat raindrops in minutes, and clearing just as quickly.

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Bradford’s Ordinary

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Oliver Twist
8111-137 Creedmoor Rd
Raleigh, NC 27613

Last week was Triangle Restaurant Week, when an assortment of local restaurants run a special set menu. We were meeting up with Lynn and some of her friends.

I ended up narrowing our dining choices to between Oliver Twist and Red Room, but the humor value of a restaurant naming itself after the Dickensian orphan famous for wanting more gruel, won out. What can I say? As an English major and bibliophile, that’s right up there with Gatsby Gardens and Gatsby hair products for men.

The interior was gorgeous. With it’s strip-mall location, Twist has a challenge with the utter lack of windows and natural light, but they succeeded with dark wood furniture, red drapes, cushions and a stylish wine bar feel.  (A bit like the wine cellar at Alla Osteria)

Our wines and martinis were all tasty, our waitress was friendly, and I can’t emphasize enough just how pretty the place is. Our food was all stylishly plated and looked like a food magazine. But the food tasted… fine. It wasn’t bad, but for a splurge restaurant like this, I expected better. There was nothing I couldn’t prepare myself (with my meat the slightest bit overdone and my asparagus just the slightest bit underdone, it was uncannily like I did cook it myself!), so the markup for gorgeous plating was just too high.

Also, the food arrived in the way Stick and I call “Chinese style”, which means there was a huge wait between when the first plates and last plates came out. This works in a traditional Chinese restaurant because everyone’s eating from the same dishes, no one is watching their food get cold as they wait politely for their date’s dinner to arrive. But, in a Western restaurant, it’s really annoying.

I still had a great time, because the drinks and company (thanks to Lynn’s “devious friend matchmaking scheme”) were both fantastic, and the food was fine. I think Stick and I would go back for a bottle of wine, or a cocktail from the extensive martini list.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Oliver Twist

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My friend Lynn works in a flower shop. She called about a week ago to tell me she was on her way over with a present, a little potted lavender, because when I said I always kill my plants, she took it as a challenge. Lavender, she promised, require occasional watering and they like to be completely bone dry before watering. I’d do fine, she promised.

My aura of plant death is extra embarrassing because the women in my family who aren’t me all have green thumbs. I didn’t get the Mackay green thumb, I got the lesser-known Doom Thumb. I think it’s recessive. It’s not that I don’t like flowers, it’s just that I can’t keep up with all the required maintenance. All that remembering to water. And not letting them freeze to death.

Sometimes people ask when Stick and I plan to have children, and I remind them that I can’t be responsible for a geranium.

But now I have this pretty potted lavender, and I haven’t killed it yet. It smells nice, and it has pretty purple flowers, and if we have one thing that needs care and attention, why not have two? This is the sort of logic probably employed by crazy cat ladies.

So Stick and I picked up a couple other herbs, because I dare you to walk past the smells of mint and basil and not want them. We thought we’d take them out of their sad little supermarket pots and put them in bigger ones. Since we were getting so garden-y, we decided to give a couple of seed packets a try, too. We set up a little balcony garden, with pots of dirt where we hope to soon have plants.

Today we had the first yellow-green tips of our tiny sprouting scallions!

Or carrots. I’m not entirely sure which is which, we mixed up the pots. I’m not very good at gardening.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

And Whatever It Is Farmers Raise

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I have a review of the new Faerie Solitaire up on ThumbGods.

I’m a bit late posting this because every time I went to get another screenshot or check a fact, I got sucked into playing a few hands of Faerie Solitaire.

Faerie Solitaire from SubSoap is a new casual game, mixing a cute fantasy story with basic solitaire. I’ve said before that the best games have simple rules, with many variations and strategies. In Faerie Solitaire, you are given a foundation card, and you can either play one card higher or one card lower than the foundation card. A played card becomes the new foundation card, and you do it again. You could easily teach a child to look for a number one higher or one lower than the selected card.

…

sometimes find it annoying when there’s a lot of game to be unlocked. In some cases, it seems like a tacit acknowledgement from the developers that some parts of the game are good and some parts are lame, and to make the game longer, you’ve got to grind through the lame to get to the good bits. When I reviewed GardenParty World, I talked about not enjoying games with the game mechanic of working at a dull minigame to earn spending points. GardenParty World is hardly the only offender here, I was also frustrated by unlocking the chance to play indentical levels in Fashion Solitaire. But Faerie Solitaire had a system of power-ups and unlockable features that kept me excited about the next add-on without leaving me feeling like the developers had greyed out most of the game.

Read the rest at Thumb Gods » Game Review: Faerie Solitaire

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Faerie Solitaire Review

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The new online kids’ game Garden Party is almost ready, and Victoria from Asylum was nice enough to send me an email introducing me to the beta.

I checked out the game, which is billed as a safe, multiplayer world for kids. Garden Party is a collection of minigames, which can be played interactively or alone, at which you win the local Garden Party currency, Orbs. The concepts of the games were cute, and able to be played interactively or solo, but I’m not really the target demographic, so I found them a bit repetitive and simplistic. I didn’t really like the ratio of orbs to mingames, as I felt forced to play boring minigames to make the cash for the fun part of Garden Party, the garden. I don’t really need a game for the opportunity to do something not-so-fun to make money to do fun things… I think that’s called having a job.

The garden really is the best part of Garden Party. Each player has their own garden and treehouse to decorate as you’d like. Players purchase seeds, which need to be planted and watered, and then grow into everything you could need, from cartoony flowers (I grew bubble flowers and glitter star flowers) to animal costumes to treehouse furnishings and fashion accessories. You can unlock your garden to invite guests or for gardening contests.

Of course, I spent most of my orbs on accessories seeds! These flowers can grow mohawks, colored shades, eyepatches, pirate hats, crowns…. there’s are enough accessories and clothing changes to make avatars look different. Garden Party had an excellent balance of enough customization and options to make a crowd of individual ‘toons looking different, but kept within a defined game aesthetic. Did I mention how cute everything is?

And costumes! You need a duck costume to swim (sorry Hugo!), a bee costume to buzz around and a spaceship costume to blast off. These costumes grow from seeds, or you can buy them from other players. In costume, you can play different minigames.

The minigames are competitive without ever being close to violent. In one game, players compete to color a picture. From a parenting standpoint, Garden Party is safe for wee ones without the annoying text protection of Wizard 101. (Assuming, of course, that your little one isn’t going to use the mail function to tell bad guys where they live and what time Mommy isn’t home. If they are likely to do that, you can turn off messaging until you’ve taught them about stranger safety.)

I had another slight problem. It’s a browser game that doesn’t use the whole screen. Don’t tell anyone this, but I often increase the text size when I read blogs.  (Because I am old. And apparently going blind, as well.) So I think that my avatar looked cute in her purple dress, black boots and green glasses, but I couldn’t see it very clearly. The size didn’t really interfere with my ability to play, I just wish it had been bigger.

Overall, this is a pretty game. It’s very good for kids because the controls are intuitive, with a good mix of simple games and open-ended gardening, and also a good balance of activities you can do alone or with others. I suppose saying I liked it isn’t a very good way to prove than I’m no longer in grade school and not British, either!

(Just want to make it clear that this is not a paid or a sponsored review in any way. Opinions here are my own. You all knew that, right?)

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Garden Party World

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Barbie just introduced me to N., a Stephen King story, about a psychiatrist and his patient, who might be saving the world or just garden-variety insane. The story is intriguing and it’s been turned into a series of short, comic book-style videos (adapted by one of the Eli Stone guys, too). It’s completely addictive, each segment is so short that you’re left panting to see what happens next.

Warning: The series isn’t complete yet! Be prepared for a cliffhanger!

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

N.

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