brown paper packages

Mother dear sent me a package! It wasn't exactly wrapped up with string, but it did have a festive winter sticker, so that's pretty close. Coming home to find a package on your doorstep must be one of the best things in the world, and it's even better when the package is a surprise. Of course, I had a nosey little kitty right in the middle of everything, but that's what I get for opening my mail on the floor.

And just what did she send?

An autumn candleholder, which she made!

You can find instructions for this project on Martha Stewart's website.

She also sent me some dark chocolate with hazelnuts. Awesome. It's the perfect gift for the first real chilly snow day of the season. And because unexpected packages put me in such a great mood, here's a little sneak peek of the project I've been working on...

What is it?!

craft-in-action

I'm trying to get all my little craft duckies in a row before the beginning of December, when I will officially enter panic mode. Most of the supplies have been collected. Most of the project ideas have been at least partially thought out. Now I just need to start taking craft action, or continue to take craft action. One project is almost complete, but I've spent hours trying to understand the inexplicable logic of my printer. I don't get what's happening. I keep changing settings but the printer stubbornly prints the same exact settings from whatever maniacal print job it has stored in its brain. I finally outwitted the printer by doing something seemingly illogical in the human world, but apparently, the printer loves it. So, craft crisis averted, I guess.


Again, I can't really divulge details because the sisters and mother dear will browse the blog before Christmas (Second Christmas, that is), but I'm guessing you won't lose any sleep over it. (If you even care. And maybe you don't. It's not like I've taken a survey or anything.) There will be a total craft explosion about the third week in January. I promise.


A couple other random things that I've been up to.


1) I washed my aloe vera and my peace lily last night (something you need to do every once in while to keep them dust-free) while watching BBC's Life in Cold Blood. Have you seen it? If not, you're missing out. I saw a python eat a deer and learned that constrictors have the ability to push their windpipes outside of their mouths while eating (because their mouths are all full of freshly-suffocated deer, of course). Imagine a prolapsed rectum (or prolapsed anything, really) poking out from the corner of a python's mouth and you've got a pretty good idea what you're missing. That's supposed to entice you to watch the program, by the way.


2) I made some granola last week--with honey. (This reminds me to remind you that when you make granola with honey {rather than maple syrup}, it tends to burn more quickly. Set the oven a bit lower and ramp up your stirring duties {I'm telling you this because I posted a recipe for granola a while back and suggested honey, but forgot to add the honey caveat.}.) I suppose we don't need to go into the exact chain of events, but I spilled a bowlful all over myself and my bed a couple mornings ago. Why do I mention this? Because it started snowing for real today. Yes, it's winter. And winter weather means snow and ice. It also means that I'm pretty likely to take a spill (Who am I kidding? Half a dozen spills at least.) at some point. I just thought I'd bring it up because it'll happen. I'm a total klutz. Spilling granola and soy milk all over myself is not something new.

Last winter was decent.
But the following pictures are from an afternoon snowstorm two years ago. I'm terrified that Nature is in a 2008 state-of-mind this year.

That's my truck. Just wait.

Pretty bad. But does it get worse?

It sure does.

I am not excited.

Fungus among us!

Here's the thing about me, mushrooms, and their kin. I think they're awesome. But, I also think they're disgusting. I guess I'd just forgotten this fact between my walk on Friday and six minutes ago when I opened my library book (The Kingdom Fungi: The Biology of Mushrooms, Molds, and Lichens) to browse the photos in the hopes some of the specimens of the Spokane woods might appear in the pages. Yeah, I made it like 4 seconds before remembering Cordyceps (which I first learned about watching Planet Earth with Rachel and Dan {an experiment in wonderment and terror}. And if you're not familiar with the parasite Cordyceps, watch this video and then prepare to never go outside again. Also, I dare you not to almost puke.). I should have anticipated what I would find inside a book with a terrifying penis fungus on the front cover and a fungus commonly called starfish stinkhorn on the back. There, I've said it. 

Seems innocent enough, right? Wrong! 

You probably know (or if you don't, you should) that I'm not a squeamish individual. Any light squeamishness I encounter is usually replaced by curiosity and a pleasant feeling of disgust. It's just how I roll. But this book forces me to confront one of the things I fear the most: something yucky growing inside my body. I'm all for good bacteria keeping my gut organs in order, but I don't want anything bursting (a word, which in the context of fungus, cannot be beneficial for anything but the fungus) from my body and fruiting (which is what a fungus likes to do before it pops its spore top).


And for the record, I opened The Kingdom Fungi again, like 2 minutes ago, and I had to close it because it gave me a physical chill. I shuddered. For real. How am I going to fill my brain with all this fungus knowledge when I can't keep the book open for more than 47 seconds at a stretch? It's a dilemma.

But I do want to mention that the fact this book scares the crap out of me does not, in any way, detract from my respect for Steven L. Stephenson, the author (who appears, from his book jacket picture, to be a very nice, fungus-forward man) and conductor of slime mold research on six continents including "the polar regions of both the Arctic and Subantarctic." And I realize that the previous sentence (and, honestly, the author's name) might seem like an exercise in facetiousness on my part, but I meant it in all sincerity, truly.


Also, I feel like I should tell you that the scientific name for the largest group of slime molds is Myxomycetes. If I knew how to pronounce it, I think it would sound lovely. (Wait! Internet can tell me how to pronounce it! "Mix-o-my-seats." That totally makes sense. That's something I could have sounded out.  Why didn't I?)

And now, the fungi.

Maybe you're thinking: Oh, David the Gnome could have lived under this. 
But he couldn't, actually.
He rode a fox named Swift, and was, in all reality, too big for a fungus house.

This fungus should be called the ghost nipple.

Always in the leaf litter, up to no good.

Intricate and beautiful. But would I touch it? No. No. Never.

I saw this mushroom and thought, suppurating, and took this picture.

I happened to see a picture of this in the book.
It is called, fittingly, the coral fungus.

These are pixie-cup lichens. I know that much at least. Hey, remember when Sarah first enters the labyrinth, all the little eyeball
wall clingers follow her and go "ooh-h-ee-ee-oh-h-h" and so on? And this is so off topic, but are you aware of all the fan-fiction
 trailers for Labyrinth on youtube? I hope you just clicked on that link to watch some!

There are a couple other things I want to mention while we're on the subject of fungi. First: It's almost the end of the fungus post and I've opened up The Kingdom Fungi more times than I thought possible--enough times, in fact, to realize that there is a chapter on fossil fungi with pictures. Things are looking up. And second: The opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle (A recommendation from Dan, by the way. {Two unrelated mentions in one post? Seems unlikely, yet here it is.}) has a mushroom mention. It is also one of my favorite opening paragraphs ever (or at least in the last two years). Which brings me to my two-pronged attack for ending this post without being in mortal fear of mushrooms.


1) from We Have Always Lived in the Castle
"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."


2) And because I filled this post with so many words I'm not down with at all, I'm going to end it with several words I enjoy quite a lot.


Cellar. Labyrinth. Crocodilian.


Yes, labyrinth is one of my favorite words. But I think you'd agree that even independent of the movie, it is a really awesome word. And there's one more word that I love and always think about, but I've forgotten it at the moment. How can that happen?

Cordyceps. That's how.

The day the music died.

My iPod broke today.  Well, really Monika's dogs ate my iPod.  I had it in a case with some candy that she had given me, and they ate the candy and the iPod.

RIP

In more magical news, we visited the magical kingdom on Friday.

Meet Olive.  She was a player in the great iPod breaking in the year of our Lord two-thousand and ten.

Monika insists that Olive was only a "supporting artist" and that Lucca was the real star.

.

a walk in the Spokane woods

I had a little time before work at the Museum this morning, so I went for a walk in the woods. The purpose of this walk was two-fold.
1) It seems wise to go outside before the average daily temperature is 16 degrees. 2) We've had a couple good windstorms and I wanted to collect downed branches, pine cones, and other miscellaneous forest treasures for the little nature wreath I'm planning to make. Of course, it started to snow as soon as I put my shoes on, but it didn't last long...and about midway through the walk, I even caught a glimpse of my shadow! Exciting, I know. There haven't been too many shadow-glimpsing days of late.

You have to cross under the T.J. Meenach Bridge (built 1993) to access the trail. The traffic above you makes a nice
 ssshusssh noise when it goes over. This is the Spokane River, by the way. Not too high at the moment.

This picture makes me feel like I'm in a Gothic novel. You know I'm OK with that, right?



You'll encounter this along the trail. Kids come here to break bottles and burn things. Like kids do.
And by kids, I'm guess I mean teenagers.



Graffiti. Another thing kids like.

Look, it's a hook that once held a door. And various fascinating lichen! Kids are probably not so into that.
Not that I know what kids like. Kids these days, am I right?



Anyway, it feels cool and secret, which is probably why kids like it. That's why I like it.
Hey, maybe we're not so different after all! But then, I also like this place because it
 seems like you might get murdered here. Like in 1878, by a woodsman and his brother.



This is when my shadow appeared!

I wish I could have collected some of these for my wreath.
Alas, they would wither away inside my apartment.



There are downed trees all along the trail. Once, there was a tree across the trail, with a
little hatchet attached to the trunk. The hatchet was there so that everyone who walked
or ran the trail could hack away at the tree. Maya and I always took a few swings
before climbing over. This isn't the hatchet tree, you understand.  



By the time I made it back to the truck, the storm clouds had started rolling in.
Although, I don't think it ever really stormed today. My shadow crept back into hiding.

OK, so the other thing I did on this walk was take a lot of pictures of various types of fungus. I mean, a lot. I probably spent more time checking out interesting things in the undergrowth than I actually did walking. This trail is truly mushroom-rich. I love it! And I just checked out a book called The Kingdom Fungi: The Biology of Mushrooms, Molds, and Lichens. Now, I'm going to try to identify some fungi--dream come true!

Be our guest!

We've waited almost 22 years to do this again...

Tomorrow I fly to Bob Hope airport (seriously?) and by 6:00 p.m. Monika and I will be reenacting this pose in Disneyland!!!