The gnomeless garden....

This is the garden that Paul tends to, sings to, sleeps with day and night......

Everytime you get things that should stay on ice, the grocery stores sends you with a small amount of dry ice. The other day, we decided to make a dry ice bomb. Now, none of us had ever witnessed the magnitude of a dry ice bomb before. In 11th grade, my chemistry teacher made pseudo-bombs with pringles cans, but it was nothing like this.

Well, as you can imagine by my preface (and probably your own brain--which somehow none of us considered using), we blew up the bottle, creating a very very loud noise. Yep.....don't think the neighbors were so happy. Let me remind you that we live in the center of a happening city.

A few days later we got a notice in our mailbox (which Paul checks daily, though most things are for our landlord). We couldn't read it, but as each roommate trickled in, we got excited and anxious learning more and more about what it said. We finally had a Japanese friend read it, and she thought it was not a angry- nor alarming-sounding note, which, by the way, read something like: Please come to the office and see so-and-so, we have to show you something. Of course, our friend doesn't really speak English, so we assumed much could've been lost in translation. As you can imagine from our pictures and the relative behavior and response to foreign people (they're always very paranoid and suspicious of us especially, but about everything and everyone), we do have lots of cameras around our apartment building. Anyhow, we assumed imediately, they wanted our landlord to view the tapes of us and our dry ice bomb and us running away. For days, we sweated uneasily as we anticipated facing the sweet landlord, being evicted, looking for a new place, the possibility of having to meet new roommates, etc. After many days of waiting for our landlord, the apartment staff to be available for her, the cancelled meetings on all ends, having to read our stinking landlord's joking-notes (heehee), almost finding out our fate, we received a note from our landlord. It was addressed to Paul and me. It said, we weren't allowed to have plants on our balcony. Apparently, the balcony is "common-space". Our landlord thought it was silly, so she just moved them out of sight to the ground, and gladly kept that from the manager or the apartment. He had to show her her lease statement that said clearly, that you weren't allowed to use the common space for plants.....


I hope to add more pictures soon as our crops are ever increasing in quantity and development.