Back in grade ten (my worst year of high school), I started playing Dungeons and Dragons with some fellow misfits from CS 12. During the very first session, and if I recall correctly during the very first battle, our dungeonmaster Graham saw fit to unleash a shambling mound upon us.

Those of you not familiar with the D&D Monster Manual will probably have the same reaction I did that day: “a what?” Letting google answer the question, you’ll then understand my followup reaction to the answer: “a giant animated pile of rotting vegetation is beating up on me? What kind of medieval fantasy game is this?”

In retrospect, I think it was less of an unleashing so much as a bad roll off a random encounter table. Graham definitely wasn’t a mean guy, but neither was he very imaginative.

I’m surprised now that I was still interested in the game after that afternoon, where a nine hit die pile of weeds quickly laid waste to our party. Graham was soft in some ways - he’d given us each “rings of reincarnation”, which we went through instantly - but hard in others. In particular, he grimly enforced the “lightning causes shambling mounds to grow bigger” rule. It was really a no-win situation from the start. Nonetheless I still continued to play after that, and it was the habitual truancy for these sessions which eventually led me to nearly fail Comp Sci 12.

Anyways, I was reminded of this incident because of yard work today. If looking outside isn’t enough of a reminder, the increased commentary on yard work among friends’ blogs is certainly a harbinger of spring. When Rosalind visited a couple of weekends ago she commented on the moss growing in the back yard. Moss had taken over a large portion of the area, a result of living in a wet climate with poor drainage and acidic soil. So we went a trip to Home Depot where we picked up a jug of iron sulfate moss killing compound. She liberally applied it to the yard and within half a day the moss turned black (and, I imagine, made a squeaking, shriveling dying noise). Today was the first day I could rake it all out, and soon discovered a six inch thick layer of moss taking over a third of a lawn makes for a lot of raking. By end of it I felt like I could animate my own shambling mound - two hit die’s worth, at least.

Normal people herald spring with evocative haikus. I herald it instead with the relationship between yard work and hack and slash role playing games:

A bolt of lightning
Blasts the moss in my back yard..
Help! A shambling mound!

“Bought you these - you like?”

“Uh, thanks Mom - but you should know

That’s not quite Pocky”

On Sunday, picked up Mom at Seatac on her way back from New York, then shipped her back to Vancouver on Thursday. She had wrapped up a cross country vacation by staying for six weeks there with various of my cousins, so I got to hear about their lives over the last week. The decade older than me/married with 2.5 children/minivan owning lives, that is.

Mom: “You know, none of those families seemed really content to me.”

It was interesting to hear about their lives, not because they’re kin, but because they’re part of that group of people, one half generation removed, that I grew up in the shadow of, and am still being constantly compared to: paragons of virtue, filial piety, etc. It’s a little (guiltily) reassuring to hear about things like difficult in-laws, job loss (and how to hide it from your parents), health breakdowns, marital unhappiness, and the travails of child rearing - the sticky issues that didn’t come up when role models were being set up.

Then again it’s hard to have a meaningful conversation with a parent who mentions she went out of her way to visit the Soup Kitchen Nazi, only to find it closed. This coming from a woman who I swear has never seen a single episode of Seinfeld.