top 50 words about the co-op?

I love tag clouds, and I love Haymarket. Therefore I've generated a tag cloud based on word frequency in this blog about Haymarket, infrequently though it is I write. These three sentences and names are excluded.

'em although around asked board co-op community conversation cooks dinner discuss door email enough ever everyone food friend german haymarket house kitchen life living meals monkey morning mrs musical nelson night paper people plan play projects really returned room someone story sunday term think told visit week woman work years

created at TagCrowd.com

the doorway

Last night our side basement door mysteriously got too big for its frame. We're not talking the swollen effect of humidity, I mean by a quarter inch side-to-side it wouldn't close, when a few hours earlier it had been fine. The frame seemed completely tight and connected even though it had changed size.

I wondered if there had been another earthquake, and Allie worried whether the house had shifted so dramatically in an hour and it meant we shouldn't stay in it. Corrigan suggested this was beyond his physics knowledge, that it indicated a gap in the time-space continuum. We looked at the little foyer structure over the stairs and between 5 of us could not identify which dodgy details had always been there unnoticed until we got suspicious, and what might look different. (This was all after 10:30 at night so the light was against us.)

Then I thought, "Wonder if Andrew Cone's moving crew hauling random furniture in and out of our driveway where he'd "stored" it has anything to do with this?"
I called Ben and asked, did you hit the entryway alcove doorframe with a large piece of furniture, or, say, Andrew's truck?

There was silence.

"Because the door doesn't close anymore," I prodded.

"Um, yeah, there was something," Ben said. "When we couldn't start Andrew's truck, two of us were pushing it out of the driveway, and the drivers' side door was open and it hit the east side of the entryway. But that was only the strength of two people pushing."

And the weight of a truck, Allie pointed out when I relayed the news.

So I decided to take a piece of lumber and hold it against the east side of the door frame, and hit it with a sledgehammer. The frame jumped a bit. Several knocks later - probably much appreciated by sleeping neighbors - the door was able to close.

I was glad to have the seemingly instinctual knowledge to use a piece of lumber to distribute the power of the sledge hammer, and somewhat disconcerted that 1. our entryway can shift on its foundation like that 2. someone ran a car into the house and didn't check for damage. (I made Ben promise to change his policy next time.)

That's Haymarket: The house is out of square; was it an earthquake, or Andrew Cone?

heart of fertilizer

Corrigan, Sophia T and I were toiling in the soil on the sunshiny Sunday. Frequently the promoter of using mulch (since I am the weeder otherwise) I eyed the lawn of the neighboring apartment building. A shave was due and the nitrogen rich grass clippings would make our veggies happy.

When the short frenchman walked his dog back to the apartment gate, I called out, "Hello! What do you guys do with your lawn clippings?"

"What do I look like?" he snarled. "The janiteur?"

"Um, no, I just thought maybe, well I thought you looked informed about landscaping..."

He didn't even hold my gaze during my reply, just marched on.

Admittedly I had made a mistake, for I really thought he was the caretaker of the property. But his answer smelled worse than fancy cheese, and I wished I could retort to his needless rudeness in witty and fluent french.

All I could think of was "couers d'merde" which I hoped meant "heart of shit" but presumably a made-up insult would accomplish neither witty vengeance nor linguistic competence, and certainly not a useful reply like, "The landscaper mows on Saturdays, you might ask him."