My own private Nano...

As in "wrimo," not the Apple music player.

The item that came in while I was driving from Colorado to New York went out today. It looked deceptively simple, but by the time I got through marking up all the drawings (PDFs that were not really printable, as they represented images intended for 11 x 17 paper—or larger) and translating all the text, it had turned into something of a monster.

There's still work on the plate for delivery tomorrow and Wednesday.

* * *I saw quite a number of different mushrooms during yesterday's morning walk. This morning, it would appear as though almost all of the fruiting bodies have stopped growing. I saw no new mushrooms, and the "eggs" that I saw had not developed at all.


My mushroom handbooks are all in Colorado, so I'm not sure of the mushrooms in this first photo at all. (Besides, my recollection of them suggests they are much more vividly yellow than as depicted in the image).


There are at least two types of mushrooms in this photo: the small brown mushrooms and a very strange mushroom that looks like a miniature incarnation of Cthulhu, a variety of stinkhorn named Clathrus columnatus.


As far as I can tell, this photo shows a Phallus impudicus, known as the common stinkhorn. I could discern no particular aroma from the mushrooms (there were many of them, in various states of development and decomposition), but I did notice numerous visits by flying insects (notably horseflies).

* * *Galina called earlier to tell me she has left Colorado and is on her way to New York. My spirits have improved 100%!

* * *I have signed up for Nanowrimo a number of times over the years, and while there is no earthly reason to confine one's creative writing efforts to November, I figure I may as well give it another shot, unofficially.

Let's see how far I get this year.

Cheers...

Feeling positively productive!

I quit eMusic a while back, but was enticed to return, only to find the environment there has gotten worse. I don't recall if I mentioned it, but during my first membership stint, the site's management decided that—barring some kind of error in downloaded files (and I had my share)—you could download previously bought files for... only half their original cost.

What a deal! (Not!)

That development soured me on the site, but then it got to the point where there really wasn't much I wanted to download, so I quit.

Then, three months ago I joined up again, lured by a free month of membership, but it turns out that if you don't use your monthly allotment of downloads (I had signed up at the $11.99 per month level, which pays for roughly two albums), your balance disappears. (Said he who found this out the hard way.)

Unbelievable!

Besides watching one's money go bye-bye, the setup also means you can never buy anything that costs more than $11.99 without buying extra download packages, so earlier today, I squinched my account down to 13 cents and quit, this time for good.

* * *Mail is forwarded.

* * *Invoices for October are done and sent.

* * *I have begun to use the fitbit device, and after two days, I can report that I am still enthusiastic about logging my food consumption while it logs my steps, etc. My goal is to lose 20+ pounds by the end of March.

I'll revisit this in about 10 days, which ought to give me a better handle on my self-styled weight-loss program using the device.

Cheers...