Plants + Zombies vs People

The Pirate and I have been playing the video game "Plants vs Zombies" lately. So much so that I finally declared a one-week moratorium on the game, just so that we could catch up with sleep and chores and regain our children's affections.

But yesterday, during Day Without Electricity, I felt like I was back at it again - fighting a neverending battle wherein every time I thought I was getting ahead, something else popped up to thwart me.

Let me back up.

In Plants vs Zombies, you have a lawn that's a grid of available spaces, and a selection of plants to put into those spaces. Some plants shoot projectiles. Some are big and hard to destroy. Some blow up. It's up to you to decide, given the array of zombies you'll be faced with in any given round, which plants to deploy.

Out by our chicken coop, we've got blackberries. They were there when we moved in, just a few struggling canes coming up from near the creek. We were enchanted at first. We didn't have the chicken coop yet, and we had a 20-foot expanse between our house and the blackberries that they could take over. Even the next year when we were building the coop they hadn't come far enough up the creek bank to be annoying.

But now, they're not only choking the path to the chicken yard and overrunning the trees on the creek bank, they've become infested with raccoons. Raccoons are, in my mind, like zombies. They come out at night and relentlessly attack your household, worming their way in any way they can. I have no doubt that if you held still long enough, a raccoon would, in fact, eat your brain. The blackberries are also infested with rats, but rats aren't quite as threatening as raccoons. First of all, one good whack with a shovel and you can dispatch a rat. Do that to a raccoon and there's a good chance that you're going to be grappling for control of the shovel. Second, raccoons don't have the decency to act afraid of you. Surprise a raccoon and they'll reluctantly get out of your way, giving you a bad look on their way out. The Pirate has even tried shooting one with our paintball gun, which is enough to scare off a good-sized dog, and he got no response.

So yesterday, I'm out there in the heat wearing long pants, boots, and long sleeves, wielding both a small saw and pruning shears, cutting the blackberry canes a few feet at a time and loading them into the wheelbarrows. They're fighting back with their enormous thorns, and they've got the Undead Blackberries thrown into the fight. Undead Blackberries are canes where part of the cane has shriveled and died, making the thorns less flexible and more prone to punch through your thick leather gloves. The thick leather gloves are hard to punch through, but anything that does is firmly held in place against your skin. Everything's a tradeoff.

And the whole time, I'm expecting to be surprised by one of the little zombies, coming out of a hole as it realizes that I'm defoliating its hiding spot. Which of my badass weapons do I use to defeat it? My pruning shears? I can perhaps reach in and cut off its tiny sharp poison-saliva bearing teeth one at a time? Or maybe I can use my little folding branch saw to...very slowly saw off its head or one of its limbs provided it cooperates and sits very still until I'm done.

I'd love to declare a moratorium on this game too, but somehow, I don't think that'll go over well with the Pirate. So, it's back to the game for me!