Rock on, Hyde Park (Get warmer, Chicago)

[evilhippo]

Every once in a while someone will find it necessary to ask me "Why don't you move out of Hyde Park?" People just don't seem to understand the charm of this neighborhood (when you ignore everything having to do with the University...) I never really had a good summation of why I feel so at home here. I pretend that it has to do with it being a

Comments

[apple_pathways]

Ah, I saw The Pale King the other day at the library, and thought of you. Once I'm finished with my current Existential Book Crisis, I'll have to give some Foster Wallace a try!

YAY, PLANT PICTURES! I'm so happy there's someone on my flist other than me posting pictures of vegetables! Everything looks great! The bungee cords sound like a good solution, and it should provide the extra benefit of making it difficult for the squirrels to climb down the ropes and onto your planters. It does look like you get a good bit of sun!

I wouldn't bother with the cilantro, unless you're a huge fan of it and just unbearably stubborn. (I...fall into those categories!) See, it bolts really quickly in hot weather and always flowers on me before I get much use out of the leaves. (Though if you let the plants go to flower, you can dry the seeds for your own coriander! Which...I don't know if you're at all interested in doing. :P I do the same with the dill

[evilhippo]

I have to give my copy back to the library this week, and I'm barely more than a quarter of the way through. I adore DFW, but man are his books a slow read. I was going to suggest The Pale King to you in your recommendation post, since so far it's actually been easier to read than Infinite Jest, but DFW books aren't really good to throw at other people (except for actually throwing them at other people. They're very good for that, due to size and weight)... they're more something you have to choose to subject yourself to. I've noiced most of his fans are all about making the whole thing make linear sense, but doing that gives me a headache. I just like the way the scenes and observations interplay.

I've got my fingers crossed that it'll end up being enough. The way things are arranged right now most of them will manage to get morning and afternoon sun, but the tomatoes, chards, and potato aren't getting anything other than late afternoon sun (3ish until dark), which isn't going to make them terribly happy in the long run. I'

[apple_pathways]

Is it a 'new book' that you're not allowed to renew?

My library has this shelf they call "Lucky Day" books: copies of the newest, most popular books that you're only allowed to check out for one week, no renewals, $1.00/day late fee. (Smart, that: I'd happily pay the regular $.20/day late fee to finish a book I was into.) It is such a tease! There are all of these wonderful books on there that I want to read, but I can rarely finish a book in under a week anymore. (Even if I do finish reading something in a few days, it's usually after it's been lying around my room for a month and a half first.) And it is ridiculous the books that end up on that shelf: The Pale King is on there. A couple months ago, I got Joyce Carol Oates' latest collection of short stories, Sourland, off the Lucky Day shelf. Now only is it about 400 pages, but JCO is not an author I can just burn through in a few days. There was one story about a recently-widowed woman who invites a man from the local food co-op, an immigrant grad student, over to her

[evilhippo]

Yeah, it just came out a couple of months ago. I actually had to wait for it on hold, and I can't renew it because someone else has a hold on it. The weird (completely neurotic and insane) thing is, I would just buy it if he was still alive, because I'm all about supporting people whose work I like, but I'm not as big on estates and publishing companies. Even if his editor seems like a good guy. Maybe I'll finish it when it's out in paperback. (Hopefully this'll happen before the UofC Seminary Co-op bookstore moves, because it's worth the trip to campus to see it in its basement on last time.)

That "Lucky Day" shelf sounds awesome... but I can't finish anything other than pulpy sci-fi/fantasy in a week, and those aren't exactly hard to get your hands on. The $1.00 fee is also very clever. I'm terrible about getting my library books back on time, and have decided to just think of the overdue fines as a use fee. I mean, usually I'm reading things no one else is after anyway, so the library profits, right

[zolac_no_miko]

Hahaha, dorky community newspaper is win! Love your porch garden, good luck battling those squirrels. ^_^

[evilhippo]

The whole place seems so much more cheerful now that I have plants out back. And I'm thinking the hot peppers were a subconscious attack on the squirrels... maybe one will make the mistake of trying to eat one. ^_^

[evilhippo]

P.S. I've run out of Batman. What do I do?

[zolac_no_miko]

I CAN GIVE YOU MORE! :DDD Umm, at some point. Maybe even tonight if we're all extremely lucky (you, me, and Batman).

[stupid_drawings]

Who cares where you live? Nice plants!

[evilhippo]

Most of the people who give me a hard time about Hyde Park went to the UofC with me and hated the neighborhood because none of the students ever get to leave it. I leave it every day and come back to chill, and it's great.

I'm proud of the plants already, and I had barely anything to do with them. I can't wait until I actually have a tomato curtain hanging down to my porch, though. That's going to be fun. (Provided that tomato perks up and stops being angry with me.)

[stupid_drawings]

Tomatoes are really hard to grow. I used to have better success with cherry tomatoes. I worked on a farm for a summer and their organic tomatoes all got blossom end rot. (I've had a lot of odd jobs)

[evilhippo]

Last time I grew them I got a plague of bugs, and then tomato blight. I think I got maybe one tomato. This is my first time growing my own cherries, though, which is weird because I love cherry tomatoes and really should've done them to begin with. Hopefully at least one of the two will hold up.

[jobey_in_error]

I've lived in two college towns for all of my adult life(and since for the past year I had an almost-real job and wasn't attending, I discovered that it can actually feel pretty alienating to live in a college town when you're not part of the thing that makes it tick... Isla Vista sounds much more homogeneous than Hyde Park).

Anyway, I mention this because... well, more power to you, if you like where you live you should enjoy, not worry, and not have to justify it to ANYONE. I do have one question about your love of Hyde Park, though: Do UC students not party??

Am very curious on this point.

Loverly plants, good luck with pests ;)

[evilhippo]

Ahahaha, the UofC and partying have an interesting relationship. We (and by we, I mean about 8 people in one of the freshman dorms five or so years ago) once threw a party that was so terrible it made the news. (For being racist, mostly, because everyone seemed to overlook the fact that it was also an objectively bad party. I mean, only 8 people attended it.) The off-campus scene isn't much better. There are only about 3 bars in the neighborhood, and two of them are pretty sketchy. Every once in a while the ultimate frisbee club will throw a very good apartment party, but it almost always gets shut down by the police. We have a reputation for sucking at partying, and we live up to it. Though I've heard rumor that it's getting better, now that we accept the common application

[jobey_in_error]

HA. Piss-poor partyers are a real blessing, truly. They're the living scourge of my current and ex neighborhoods. The place I'm living now is particularly epic. The majority of UC Santa Barbara undergrads are kids with way too much money and way too much time (hence my ability to call them kids when they are 2-5 years younger than me). We live in infamy