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Well, for the third Saturday in a row, I went for one of my early morning drives looking for signs of mushrooms before going in to open the store. Unlike previous forays, I drove up to the Wolf Creek pass and got off onto the road that leads up to Lobo Point. Despite the fact the sun was up, I was in the shadows until I got to the top of the mountains.
It was cold and the road was heavily "washboarded" (a series of shallow ridges running across the road), which made driving unpleasant. I got out a couple of times and walked through the forest and saw nothing. On the way back, I picked up some rocks that will go into a retaining wall that we'll build next year on the northwest side of the house.
After doing my usual thing at the store, I left around 11 am and did a second drive, up Piedra Road and back along Plumtaw (which turns into Fourmile Road, which explains the fact that Fourmile appears to be a lot longer than four miles!). I saw one small group of shaggy manes, but it is probably noteworthy to mention that conditions were so dry, they never had a chance to self-digest. Their gills had turned black, and one mushroom had managed to open its "parasol," but they all dehydrated in short order.
It would appear that the showers that scattered themselves over the area recently were inadequate to trigger widespread fruiting of fungus. I don't think I'm going to go out again until it's rained for several days straight.
* * * It occurred to me that, in doing online research for my current translation (for a national laboratory), I might be raising flags in any network monitoring software that The Powers That Be might have deployed. I did a heck of a lot of research into some arcane explosives that apparently have uses in materials science, not to mention several queries to find out about stuff like uranium tritide (a compound of uranium and tritium, which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen). Some of the things I was researching are pretty new to me; one technique uses explosives to create ceramic powders whose grain size makes soot particles look like boulders. Presumably, such stuff has a use.
Anyway, I'm about a page short of where I wanted to be at the end of the day, but my mind is frazzled at this point. There are six or seven pages left, and I think I'll do better to get a good night's sleep and then return to the face of the salt mine tomorrow with a refreshed outlook. Once I finish with this file, I'll go back and finish the others that were on my plate on Thursday and Friday.
Of course, it probably didn't help my productivity any to have sat with Galina after dinner to watch The Maltese Falcon. We tuned in at about the time that Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is in Brigid O'Shaughnessey's (Mary Astor's) apartment, delivering the line "Now, you're not going to go around arranging things and poking the fire again, are you?" and watched it through to the end. I can't help it, I'm a sucker for the genre.
Cheers...
It was cold and the road was heavily "washboarded" (a series of shallow ridges running across the road), which made driving unpleasant. I got out a couple of times and walked through the forest and saw nothing. On the way back, I picked up some rocks that will go into a retaining wall that we'll build next year on the northwest side of the house.
After doing my usual thing at the store, I left around 11 am and did a second drive, up Piedra Road and back along Plumtaw (which turns into Fourmile Road, which explains the fact that Fourmile appears to be a lot longer than four miles!). I saw one small group of shaggy manes, but it is probably noteworthy to mention that conditions were so dry, they never had a chance to self-digest. Their gills had turned black, and one mushroom had managed to open its "parasol," but they all dehydrated in short order.
It would appear that the showers that scattered themselves over the area recently were inadequate to trigger widespread fruiting of fungus. I don't think I'm going to go out again until it's rained for several days straight.
Anyway, I'm about a page short of where I wanted to be at the end of the day, but my mind is frazzled at this point. There are six or seven pages left, and I think I'll do better to get a good night's sleep and then return to the face of the salt mine tomorrow with a refreshed outlook. Once I finish with this file, I'll go back and finish the others that were on my plate on Thursday and Friday.
Of course, it probably didn't help my productivity any to have sat with Galina after dinner to watch The Maltese Falcon. We tuned in at about the time that Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is in Brigid O'Shaughnessey's (Mary Astor's) apartment, delivering the line "Now, you're not going to go around arranging things and poking the fire again, are you?" and watched it through to the end. I can't help it, I'm a sucker for the genre.
Cheers...
