Getting started...

I woke up, as I usually do, at around 3 am, and was sorely tempted to just turn over and go to sleep again, but I was curious as to whether the nasty weather (more rain) that had been hanging around when I went to sleep was still in evidence. I looked out the window and saw a star-filled sky, and then a big, bright meteor flashed across my field of view, so I took that as in invitation to come out and play.

The intensity of the display seemed a bit muted compared with the night before, but what it lacked in quantity it made up in the brightness of the blazing trails of superheated air that result when particles of space debris slam into atmosphere at super-high speed. As always, I had my camera on a tripod, but my sky-viewing and shutter-pressing was routinely distracted by a phenomenon best described as the "roving" barking of dogs.

By this I mean I would hear a dog's vigorous bark from over across the street, at the old Flick house, and then, after a few minutes, I'd hear our neighbor David's dogs barking, after which things would grow silent for a couple of minutes until another dog, belonging to a neighbor at the end of the road that dead-ends at the trail up to the water tank, started barking as well.

It seemed to make sense, to my city-bred mind, that something was moving out there, as it was like following a trail of bubbles generated by something you cannot see breaking at the surface of a body of water.

Given the speed with which the barking propagated, I'd guess the source to be one or more deer moving over the terrain. No threat there. Then again, the domesticated canines could be complaining about trespassers in the form of one or more coyotes, who are generally taciturn as they move (although when they decide to sing, it's very disconcerting, to say the least). Or the traveler could be a bear.

In either of the latter two cases, an unarmed human is at a disadvantage (and indeed, an armed human can be at something of a disadvantage, too, because weapons tend to inhibit the very handy and instinctive reaction to flee when confronted with danger), and as the night was about as pitch dark as a moonless, star-and-Milky-Way-filled Colorado sky can be, I chose discretion over an open sky and moved my observation post back onto the verandah, facing generally northwest.

My camera caught no trails, but I had a grand time anyway.

Cheers...

On books...

In checking the books that are actually on my shelf in the room next door, I was confused to find a copy of Nevsky's Demon staring at me, which must mean that I bought the book before the lot was recalled by Avon.

Which means that Nevsky's Revenge is somewhere else in this house, maybe, because I recall reading the very first Nevsky book and the joy I experienced at the time.

It then occurred to me that, mayhaps, Demon might be of some value, seeing as how (presumably) most of the books were destroyed.

Uh-uh, at least not according to Amazon, where copies are freely available for pennies.

In other book news, my brand spanking new copy of The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) arrived yesterday, raising the question of just how, exactly, does one go about making sure a text conforms to the specifications set forth therein? (I plan to spend some hours the weekend just scanning the pages to get an idea of what kinds of things to look out for.)

In any event, my old copy of "Chicago" is at least 40 years old, which fact probably does not mandate buying a new edition (I have, after all, gotten along fine without even the old volume at hand for some time), but the fact I can't put my hands on it trumps any such questions. If nothing else, the new book is quite a bit thicker than my old 10th edition, that's for sure.

The weather is gorgeous, and my every fiber screams to go out somewhere and wallow in the sunshine (and maybe go find a mushroom or two). So I'll make a deal with myself: once I get 2500 source words done, I'll take an extended break until later in the day.

But I better get a fire lit, else there won't be any "later" to extend to.

Cheers...

Bolete! (or should I say болит!)?

Around 1 pm, Galina and I decided to carpe some of that diem, so we took off in search of... well... just getting out of the house. We ended up going up to Site Romeo, which is up at the top of the world on the Wolf Creek Pass. If I had any doubts as to whether mushroom season is on around these parts, they were dispelled quickly. Neither I nor Galina have ever seen so many mushrooms.


Usually, when you see the kind of big mushrooms shown in the picture above, they're old and wormy, but I was pleasantly surprised to find hardly any damage of any kind on these bad boys, the largest of which weighed in at 4.8 pounds.


Usually, mushrooming from a moving car is about as productive as painting watercolors while skydiving, but today we had no problem at all spotting mushrooms in the landscape. (This, despite the fact that we ran across huge numbers of little mushroom "stumps," attesting to the fact that we're not the only mushroom hunters in the area.)

I even managed to run across some "Hawk's Wing (Sarcodon imbricatus) in the course of the day, and it seems like forever since I've seen a specimen of mushroom. Some folks don't much care for it, but I like it fried, and I find it adds body to soup.



There were so many mushrooms out there, I really tuckered myself out to the point where everything pretty much hurts (that's where the Russian "болит" comes in, carrying water as a pun, as the pronounced word sounds a bit like "bolete" and means "it hurts" in Russian). Near the end of our time on the mountain, I had to take hold of myself so as not to try to harvest everything in sight.

After returning home, I set about drying the large boletes and the Hawk's Wings (can't find the dehydrator, so I'm using fishing line) and cleaning the small boletes, but there hasn't been enough time to process the medium-sized boletes (which are in interim storage in a paper bag in the fridge). Dinner was a couple of boletes fried with onion and chicken breast over leftover buckwheat. Heaven!

I had intended to take it relatively easy over the weekend, so I guess I just swapped today for one of those days. I'll have to go hit the translations and editing hard either tomorrow or Sunday, and then keep going at 110% through the middle of next week.

Deadlines loom, but heck, today was fun.

Cheers...

FMI: Crossposted to mycology.