Well that was a nice little interlude

So I know, I dropped off the face of the planet. This is because I fell face first into dissertation recovery for a week. So what have I been up to? Hmm, well, sleeping for one. Then last Saturday Russell and I went out and met some of the Seattle homebrewers. They are a fun, if somewhat disorganized bunch. Sunday I convinced Russell to come to the Cascades for a hike (it didn't take much convincing, he wanted to try his hand at mushrooming) so we grabbed a mushroom guidebook and headed out. We hit the Mason Lakes trail. It was a lovely day.




We did find a few mushrooms, we keyed a couple out, to the point we could determine they were not, in fact, chanterelles (hint, this is very easy, not a whole lot looks like a chanterelle because they have blunt, false, decurrent gills, so determining something is not a chanterelle isn't difficult). We took some photos to key out a few more at home.

I regained control of my messy house. For a few days anyway...

I baked. It turns out that blue huckleberries substitute really well for blueberries in muffins.


(The cup of coffee is because coffee is necessary for baking at 7 am).

We went blackberry picking in Discovery Park. If you ever want blackberries, this is totally better than the store (except you have to wash the spiders out of the berries yourself).
That's the haul. That is two of the really large Glad tupperware's full, filled in around 1.5 hours of casual picking and wandering for a total of just under 8lbs of blackberries. That's a lot of berries, and we plan on heading out for more in the near future.

In the mean time I have also (finally) started writing my talk, and thinking ahead to my defense. It's now one week away (scary!) and some of those days are travel days for me, but I should be ready by Friday.