J at the Christmas party

Although J had been more fussy than usual during the day yesterday, when we took him over to a neighbor's Christmas party, he was wide awake and happy. I carried him in a bjorn carrier facing outwards, so he could enjoy looking around and meeting people. He was so excited, kicking and waving his arms, that he threw up a little, but after that he was fine. He loved all the attention, shamelessly making eye contact and smiling at everyone who cooed at him, for the whole two hours we were there. At this point at least, he is far more sociable than his parents. After all that excitement, he slept soundly for five hours.

J's first real mushroom hunt

A couple times earlier, we went to places where we thought there might be mushrooms, but no luck. On Tuesday, we went up in the East Bay hills to one of our favorite chanterelle spots, but there was only one old chanterelle. We found several oldish Boletus truncatus before J made us go back to the car to change his diaper. I went back out by myself while L fed J in the car, and found a decent batch of Amanita calyptrata (or lanei, depending on who you believe), which was nice since I had found only one or two of this delicious mushroom in the last couple seasons.

Today, we went to another East Bay hills spot where I found a very nice bloom of A. calyptrata a few years ago. There were a nice bunch waiting for me there, so, more tonight. Also, from a stump we passed by, I plucked a beautiful cluster of Armillaria mellea, honey mushrooms.

My vision, which has been pretty good, is finally deteriorating somewhat. I reflected on the hunt today that I looked forward to J becoming a new sharper pair of eyes on the mushroom hunts.

Dancing with the babe

This is, not so surprisingly, the first time in my life that I've said, "Hey, baby!", to a literal baby. So now the calmer of all those groovy dancefloor moves are now being used to soothe J to sleep. For a soundtrack, I like streaming audio from SomaFM, especially the Spacestation or Cliqhop channels, or KFJC (depending on show). L seems partial to baroque, though, and to my surprise the Musical Offering actually worked quite well. J himself, as far as I can tell, doesn't care much about the music itself, just the motion it inspires.

More on the unity of religions

I came across a pretty nice quote by Cheri Huber in SFGate's Finding My Religion column:

Through seeing the [spiritual] transformation that's possible in my life I grew to love all spiritual practices and religions.

[Question:] All of them?

Yes, because at their heart, at their core is the same desire to be one with that which animates us, that which gives us life.

This is pretty much what I have seen as well, in a vision I had in the desert at Burning Man 2003. (No, I was completely sober!) Meeting a woman who had been in the hospital for leukemia for the previous two years made me intensely aware of how incredibly fleeting life is but how lucky we are for it, and I had to ride out to the open playa to be with all that this brought up. I saw a giant sun, and there was only this giant sun, on which were little "solar flares" that instantaneously winked in and out of existence. Even though these "flares" vanished before I could mentally "turn to look at them," I knew that they were all the possible charactistics with which you might describe someone, good, bad, indifferent, in all extremes and everything in between. I saw that the whole ranges of human behavior were only manifestations of this one sun, the "source" or "reality" behind everything. At the time I thought of it as "just the fact of being alive" or "just wanting things to be better", but it is clearly the same thing to which Ms. Huber refers, the "thing" beside which there is nothing else. All religions are, and can only be, intimations of this one truth in some form or other. More mundanely, all human activity can be seen as largely inchoate grasping toward this source, trying to acquire and control it without realizing that we are it.

Moving up in the world

By about 12 feet, that is. We're all moving to the flat upstairs from where we used to live. Overall, this is promising in terms of getting more sunlight, but for now there are the disruptions of not having easy phone and internet access, and having all our stuff in places where we're not exactly sure where it is or how to make use of it. I'll send out an email with our new address and phone number when we get it, but, in the meantime, the old ones will work for us.

J Moves Onward (Backward?)

Okay, just to let you non-parents know the kind of things you're reduced to when dealing with a newborn, J pooped. Especially since we'd been used to his pooping three or more times a day when fresh out of the oven, we were growing alarmed by his not pooping for 2.5 days or so, even though the books warned that rate of pooping would decrease over time. However, now, he just let out the biggest, goopiest poop I've ever seen from him. The thing is, I'd love to have a shirt or pair of pants that cooked-pumpkiny color of brownish orange (dyed, not stained).

Escape to Portland

When we received the announcement from an Oregon winery I like a lot for their harvest celebration last Saturday, L, tired of being in the house with me and J so much, suggested we go. I shrugged and said, "Okay." We took Amtrak's Coast Starlight up to Portland, stayed a few days there, and took the train back. The first night we had to stay in a regular hotel, but the next days we stayed at the Hosteling International hostel in NW Portland. It was new and superb, highly recommended.

Saturday, we drove out to the winery in Carlton. The countryside gets rural quickly, and is quite lovely, with gently rolling hills of fields, orchards, farm buildings. We had a great time at the tasting, with the proprietor / winemaker's wife holding J for a while, indulging ourselves in buying a half case on futures of their best 2005 wine. Scott is very enthusiastic about this wine (and about the 2005 vintage in general), calling it his "favorite wine he's made," and with good reason. It's delicate, subtle, and complex, but with plenty of strength and tannin to hold it together for a long time. When I described to the other winemaker (Kelly) that the wine was being to reticent for me to tell what it had to offer, she suggested that I put my hand over the top of the glass and shake it up and down to aerate it. It would never have occurred to me to be so violent, but it did work very well to open up the wine. Getting home was more problematic, as J would be put into the carseat only to start wailing a mile or two later. We'd pull off and think we had him settled down only to repeat the scene. But we eventually made it home just fine.

Sunday, we walked several blocks to a very lovely classical Chinese garden, recognizing along the way, an elegant urban park that had been a setting in an otherwise terrible movie.

The train rides were fun and pleasant. Or at least I had fun figuring out how to work the bunk beds in the cramped rooms, and sleeping in them for a few hours at a stretch. J liked the train a lot. As people pointed out to us, all we had to do to rock him was just to hold him. He liked the scenery going by, even if he likely couldn't actually focus that far away.

But we've been back for a few days, and are working on moving all our stuff to the flat upstairs. (Mail will always still reach us at our present address.)

Social Weekend

After keeping pretty much to ourselves since J was born, we saw lots of friends this weekend. At one point, we had three other adults, none related to us, in our living room. Three weeks ago, we'd never have guessed it could happen. It all worked out great. Thanks, everyone who came over! (and, thanks, of course, to J, who's a great sport about all this)

I do not like Blue Bottle Coffee

for a couple reasons. First, they seem to focus on making an ever-so-smooth-and-subtle blend, while I seem to prefer a more idiosyncratic coffee with particular characteristics that jump out at you. Maybe I should try some of their single-origin coffees..? Except that the one time I tried their Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, it was terrible. The beans were of irregular size and misshapen. My father, who grows coffee in Kona, Hawaii, said, "It looks like our 'number three' - our trash," and the coffee had the strong flavor of artichoke stem.

The other thing I don't like is that they often don't roast their coffee as dark as I seem to prefer. This leaves a light-caramel flavor which I find a bit simple and cheap. I recently got their Bella Donovan, a Mocha-Java type blend which they call one of their darker roasts, and, because of this issue, I tried gently roasting it more in a small skillet. This improved it considerably to my taste.

Oh well, I'll just have to get to Cole Coffee in Oakland when I can. Someone recommended Sweet Maria's, also in Oakland, so maybe it bears investigation.

Escape from the bedroom

A couple days ago, L, J, and I with trepidation made our first venture forth since we brought J home nine days before that. (He's two weeks old today, and doing great.) We went across the Bay to run a couple errands and indulge ourselves: cakes at Crixa, fresh fruit from the Bowl, ribs from Flint's. J handled all this very well although, of course, much of our timing was on his schedule - stopping when he needed to eat, moving when he slept. We were worried he might have a meltdown on the bridge, when there wouldn't be much we could do for him stuck in his car seat, but everything was fine. I'm really looking forward to taking him on mushroom hunts this fall. The rain so far was only 1/3 inch, but maybe that will be enough for some Agaricus augustus to spring up.

The whole GOP meltdown

At least I hope that's what it is. As pretty much everyone is pointing out, there's the National Intelligence Estimate which says that Iraq has set the US back on the "War on Terror", there are the "revelations" in Woodward's new book, and finally, there's the Foley scandal dragging down Speaker Hastert and associated other Republican House leadership. On one hand, all this couldn't happen to more deserving people, but, on the other, I'm dismayed that it's the Foley scandal which is really threatening to turn the House and maybe the Senate to Democrats in the midterm elections in a month. Okay, sure, Foley's behavior and the Republican leadership's covering it up is reprehensible, and I agree that it perfectly highlights how the "party of values" really only cares about power and money and not actually principles and governing. However, what about the real disasters of the Bush admin: invasion of Iraq, loss of New Orleans, Abrahamof / DeLay money laundering, gutting environmental and labor law, regressive tax policy and enforcement, Medicare "reform", inaction on global warming, creating and then doing everything it can to lose the "Global War on Terror"... really the list could go on for pages (no pun intended) -- basically caring about nothing except funneling money to people who are already very wealthy and who will recycle some of that money into the Republican Party coffers. Really, while I'm glad that the Foley scandal dramatizes these character qualities for the public at large, is this really what it takes???

The biggest mystery to me, still, is what took people so long. Why wasn't it evident from day one (or before, as it was to Paul Krugman) that telling the truth is the exception for the Bush admin? Or, if the political class and journalists knew, why didn't they care about the obvious ideological blindness and incompetency of this crew?

My thoughts often return to a former co-worker with whom I carpooled for a while. I tried to tell him before the invasion of Iraq that there were no "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (in quotes because this rubric includes chem and bio weapons as well as nuclear, for no reason that I can understand) in Iraq (thanks, Scott Ritter), that there was no Iraq / Al Qaeda connection (thanks, Czech head of intel and other sources), that the Aluminum tubes were for missiles and not centrifuges (thanks, Oak Ridge National Lab), etc. I tried to tell him I. F. Stone's (not that I know much about him) saying that "All you really have to understand is two words: 'Governments lie.'." I was so obnoxious that he left the carpool, but to no avail. He'd keep saying things like "I think they believe they're doing what's best for the country." And this is someone who self-identified as liberal, who read the Washington Post and the Economist (maybe, you say, that's the problem). I keep wondering what he thinks now, four years later, when all this and more is now conventional wisdom (except for approximately a third of the country!). Does he wish he'd paid more attention to the news, or does he dismiss as coincidence the things I told him then? Does he even remember what I, admittedly rather incoherently, tried to tell him at the time, or does he still go around with his head in the sand, doing nothing and hoping for the best?

Anyway, I hope the Democrats can do something useful when they're back in power, but, judging how they've handled things the last six years, I'm not that optimistic about them, either. I guess I have to take the uncertain success of Democrats over the certain failures of Republicans. I am heartened, though, by things like this.

newest addition

L delivered our son J (name inspired by the street on which we live) on Sept 24th, early morning. They arrived home the following Wednesday night, a week ago. He's regained his birth weight plus a little more, and is a real delight. He's about the most adorable thing we've ever seen. I figure we'd better enjoy the time now while he's cute and innocent and it's pretty easy to satisfy his needs. In some sense of propriety or something, we were hoping he'd arrive after our first wedding anniversary, which was a couple days ago, but we've no complaints.

Religions and the current world

Karen Armstrong gets it. Read the whole thing. Will update with second part when it's posted.

Part II

analysis article

In what looks like it will be a continuing attempt to more widely dissiminate articles which contain analysis not often seen in mainstream US media, here is an article in the London Review of Books by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. They are political science professors of international relations in the "realist" tradition, which interprets the actions of nations through the lens of self-interest, discounting moral or cooperative influences. Readers here may recall that Mearsheimer's book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics has had a great influence on me.

The Israel Lobby by John Mearscheimer and Stephen Walt in the London Review of Books.

This is based on a longer report, links to which are at the bottom of what is already a rather lengthy article. A summary of the summary can be found here.

recently seen quotes

"Power is the capacity not to have to learn." -Karl Deutsch

"Desires achieved increase thirst like salt water." -bumper sticker

Movies

L and I have been going on what, for us, is quite the movie marathon. It started with Hero, which I thought would be just escapist fun for me. But L, who has generally put the kibosh on Asian martial arts movies, actually loved it, too. Then, last weekend: we rented My Neighbor Totoro and Tampopo, the latter a movie we both fondly remembered but hadn't seen in a long time. In addition, we actually went to two movies in theaters. We finally saw Syriana and, again to my surprise, L liked it a lot. (I want to see it again on video.) Then, at a friend's invitation, we went to see Street Fight at the Roxie. Again L liked it. And we got to go to the Mission, an area we make it out to all too infrequently considering how much we like it and how accessible it is.

Iraq as VietNam

Okay, so this is lazy blogging. I'm simply linking to an article by Lt. Gen. William E. Odom titled Iraq Through the Prism of VietNam, with no extra commentary from me. I'm doing this just because I think it's the kind of analysis and perspective which should be read more widely. However, I can't think of anyone in particular to whom I could usefully forward the link: anyone who'd care would probably already believe stuff like this and anyone who wouldn't care, well, probably still wouldn't. Posting it just allows me to vent a little bit of the frustration I felt pre-April, 2003, when I was reading pieces making similar points and was unable to change anyone's mind. Thanks. (Link to this article via Josh Marshall's blog, although unfortunately I have to count Josh as one of those who didn't see such things at the time.)

(untitled)

Two Friends

A certain person came to the Friend's door
and knocked.

"Who's there?"

"It's me."

The Friend answered, "Go away. There's no place
for raw meat at this table."

The individual went wandering for a year.
Nothing but the fire of separation
can change hypocrisy and ego. The person returned
completely cooked,
walked up and down in front of the Friend's house,
gently knocked.

"Who is it?"

"You."

"Please come in, my self,
there's no place in this house for two."

-Rumi, Barks trans. (excerpt)

Not Cynical, Exactly

In the personals ad that L answered, I asked something about how my meditation practice might inform an understanding of international relations. Could an understanding of human nature gleaned from meditation be applied to an area in which nations generally behave in rather naked self-interest? I was, at the time, slightly hopeful that I might gain some insight which could be applied for the betterment of the world. However, instead of my being able to use my meditation practice, my practice has "converted" me.

First, having looked more at the grasping nature of the "small self" with which we do most everything, I no longer think there's such a large dichotomy between interpersonal relationships and international ones. Pretty much, we do what we like and avoid what we don't like, and we get as much of what we like as we can without provoking negative consequences we don't like. (BTW, I thought the movie Kids made this kind of statement very well.) A lot of those negative consequences are those put in place by our society, enforced by general agreement and, at last resort, by violence. Nations, although more complex, don't seem to be fundamentally different. They're all angling for what gets them advantage relative to other nations and will do anything possible as long as the negative consequences aren't too bad. The "societal punishments" around for nations aren't as effective as those around for you and me, and thus nations often behave much worse than you or I do.

Second and related, I used to think of those with power as corrupted by that power, and that these people should by fought by those not in power. Now, however, I'm less sure that the powerless are so virtuous. For example, President Carter's calls for energy efficiency didn't make him very popular. If there were an informed, popular vote about, say, increasing vehicle fuel efficiency standards, would Americans really vote to give up their SUV's? Even with the effects of global warming becoming more clear, would they have done so without the high gas prices of late? I'm a little doubtful. It's not that I no longer think that those in power need to be challenged, but I'm more of the opinion that humans in general have a hard time doing what they (might) know they should. I'm still hopeful, though, that decisions can be optimized under these limitations through good information and inclusive discussions, if those can be brought about. (I'm still supporting Clean Money.)

I write this all with an additional sense of frustration because I'm a bit stuck in my meditation practice. I don't really understand what's going on, but what it appears to be is this. I could continue to expand my awareness beyond my "small self", but this larger awareness appears very threatening. It feels like I'd have to give up all the things I dearly love, such as wine. (I think this is where the motif of wrathful gods originates.) This fear has interrupted my practices a few times now, no matter from how many angles I rationally argue to myself what I need to do.

Black Trumpets!

Yesterday L and I went mushroom hunting in the woods which were so plentiful last December. In contrast to that visit, there were hardly any mushrooms at all, even after all the rain last week. Although L found some chanterelles, the main excitement for me was that I finally found Black Trumpets! They were in very pretty (looked more like this), in pristine condition, and smelled earthy and pungent. These are supposedly hard to find because they blend in so well with their surroundings. Indeed, although these were pretty prominently visible, growing out of the edge of the path, they blended in perfectly with the damp madrone leaves scattered around them. I looked around in the surrounding woods, but was unable to find more. Were they there, and I just couldn't see them?

We at them in scrambled eggs this morning for breakfast, in which they were very tasty.

What happened?

The lead-up to the April, 2003, U.S. invasion of Iraq was a pretty frustrating time for me. It seemed obvious to me from the fall of 2002 that the Bush administration was consistently lying about everything, and was just itching to get at it regardless of whatever its stated reasons were. It boggled my mind that otherwise reasonable people were willing to give Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, etc., any credence at all. Why? Because very quickly a pattern emerged of a Bush admin official making a claim, and that claim being refuted or at least significantly "clarified" a day or two later by an independent source, such as Hans Blix, Mohammad El Baradei (International Atomic Energy Agency), former National Security Advisor under (G. H. W. Bush) Brent Scowcroft, centrifuge experts at Oak Ridge National Labs, the CIA itself, the head of Czech intelligence, etc. The easiest explanation for all these contradictions was that there was no evidence that Iraq was a threat to anyone, and that the Bush admin wanted to invade for reasons it was not telling the public. This is not that hard to put together, if you see all these news stories, and this is where sources become important. I was reading lefty sites which culled relevant stories from the worldwide English-speaking press, such as Truth Out and Common Dreams. In contrast, most people were reading headline news, which was dominated by eager support of adminstration talking points. For a discussion of how critical pieces were buried in the back pages by major papers, see the story Now They Tell Us in the New York Review of Books (link to non-NYRB site because NYRB now requires payment). At least this is the explanation I have for most people going along with the whole thing. More, related, thoughts later.

My Favorite (Bay Area) Coffee Roaster

I stopped by Cole Coffee today and picked up a half pound of their featured "Red Sea Blend" of Yemeni Mocha and Ethiopian Harrar for $5.25. Haven't tried it yet, but it smells great. The cup of Timor Organic I got at the same time was very tasty. Sorry I'm not as developed at describing coffee flavors as I am at wine flavors.

Update: The web site linked to above is printed on the coffee bag, but doesn't seem to work. It's the place on College just off Claremont, across from Safeway, which used to be called Royal Coffee. When I made the Red Sea blend this morning in the drip coffee maker, it was okay, but a little disappointing. While it had the hard earthiness of coffees from East Africa, it lacked the mid-palate body and richness that I like. Then I made a cup as described in the comments here, and it was much better, rich and full, with greater complexity.

Noam Chomsky on the current situation

Chomsky: 'There Is No War on Terror'

Excerpts:

Same with global warming [as with terrorism]. They're not stupid. They know that they're increasing the threat of a serious catastrophe. But that's a generation or two away. Who cares? There's basically two principles that define the Bush administration policies: stuff the pockets of your rich friends with dollars, and increase your control over the world. Almost everything follows from that. If you happen to blow up the world, well, you know, it's somebody else's business. Stuff happens, as Rumsfeld said.

What gives me hope actually is public opinion. Public opinion in the United States is very well studied, we know a lot about it. It's rarely reported, but we know about it. And it turns out that, you know, I'm pretty much in the mainstream of public opinion on most issues. ... I think the United States ought to be an organizer's paradise.

TMI

Several months ago, there were a few days in a row in which I saw someone with a t-shirt that said something like "I see your lips moving, but all I hear is BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH", or "It's cute how you think I'm listening". Perhaps my running into this series of shirts was just a fluke, but I found this barrage of apparent indifference to other people rather disconcerting. How, I felt, could we possibly function as a society, especially a society that will increasingly need more connections with the rest of the world, not fewer, if we went around shutting out all attempts at communication? It made me want to get a counter-shirt that read, simply, "listen", or, if one were more sarcastically inclined, "to listen, perchance to hear".

Of course, this is not to say that I give the same level of attention to all forms of demands on my attention, nor possibly could I. (My wife or Fox News? Hmmm....) It is quite true that in most of the U.S., at least anywhere that people watch TV, there are constant demands on our attentions: attempts to sell us things, requests to contribute time or money to a legion of good causes, queries about the completion of work projects, desires to go to lots of fun entertainment possibilities, and the never-completed household tasks... just reading all that is tiring. Of course people resent it sometimes. And the absorption with one's self to the exclusion of others has a long tradition in the American character.

But, nonetheless, surely we can accept what we want to listen to and politely refuse the rest. I hope it's not just I who would privilege interactions with the people directly in front of me, the people who will be reading my t-shirt. Part of the reason I take offense at people being proudly inconsiderate is my own self-effacing personality. I'd usually rather be mildly inconvenienced myself than know that I was annoying someone else. But I think the deeper reason it bothers me is the irony that people who ignore others probably aren't paying attention to themselves, either. If we never pay attention, life becomes an endless series of preferences and distractions before we die, with no way to become aware of what we all have in common.

What to make of it all?

I mentioned in perhaps the first post here that my graduate advisor and I had finally sent off a paper based on my thesis work. The reviews came back a week or so after I returned from Eritrea, but at that time, planning the wedding was foremost on my mind. Afterwards, I got in touch with him again and we started the revisions. To be fair, he did nearly all the work. In the last couple weeks, about the same time frame that I was in the midst of early conversations with the trader I'll be working with, he resubmitted the revised paper. In one of the final emails about the paper, he wrote:

I like it. In fact, the odd thing is, now that I really think I understand it, I believe it to be a really brilliant piece of work. Far more original and compelling than that done by my other students (don't tell them that). [I don't think any of them read this blog, or would really care if they did.] It's unfortunate that this work is being delivered to the planetary audience; it will be a case of pearls before swine, and they won't understand it. You should really stay in science.

What came immediately to my mind is the truism that the lover who leaves you and breaks your heart and never calls finally decides to get back in touch right when you're starting to date someone you might truly care about again, e.g., Swingers. Although the idea of staying in science is nice in some ways, I didn't really see how it could work. My original and compelling thesis used fairly basic numerical methods and would not be obviously interesting to any particular community of scientists. Besides, I'd probably have to take another post-doc, maybe two, probably outside the Bay Area.

Although the dream of being an academic scientist is almost certainly dead, it nonetheless appears that this trading gig will get me most of what I think I would have wanted: learning about a diverse field with branches into lots of others, freedom to think creatively about technical subjects, and interaction with a collaborator. It also has a stronger financial incentive than being a scientist, something which, particularly after being unemployed for a year, doesn't hurt (as long as we're successful :) ). To close, this quote from the insightful and entertaining Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb:

Particularly thoughtful are those who had to abandon scientific studies because of their inability to keep focused on a narrowly defined problem. Without excessive intellectual curiousity, it is almost impossible to complete a Ph.D. thesis these days; but without a desire to narrowly specialize, it is impossible to make a scientific career.

Yet another field change

After returning from Eritrea (free trip there for the work done, but no pay otherwise), I made another promising connection in the renewable energy / energy efficiency business. However, that led to neither work nor pay. It seemed that there was little need of someone with my sorts of skills and interests in the field. There are companies running weather simulations for wind prospecting and forecasting, but there are only a few in the country, and none in the bay area. Instead, it seemed more likely that I could find interesting employment in San Francisco's financial services sector, something that physicists have been known to do since the 80's or so. Basically, I'm a modeler, and I thought that I may as well see if I can earn a living and keep myself entertained modeling dynamics of markets instead of atmospheres. It would be nice to be doing something which felt useful, but one thing at a time, I guess.

When I mentioned this shift to a friend, she mentioned that she had recently met someone already in the energy business who was having a hard time getting into renewable energy. Another friend, a consultant in wind energy, opined that most of the challenges in renewable energy involved figuring out new ways to sell it, not how to analyze it better. So there I had it.

In response to posting my resume on Craig's List, I'm involved with a guy who's been successfully trading on his own for six to seven years who's putting together the ability to manage client money. He wants me to help him develop trading models to use for his clients, which sounds like fun to me. I've started reading Intro to Econophysics and have ordered Dynamics of Markets. Yum!

So let me join the chorus of folks thanking Craig's List: apartment, wife, job! Next: bicycle.

Holidays and afterwards

There hasn't been that much to this holiday season. The highlight for me was probably a mushroom hunt up in Marin a couple days before Christmas. It had been rainy and warm, just how fungae like it, for several days, so it seemed very promising. We drove up to some woods in Marin, and I have never seen so many mushrooms in my life. The forest floor was littered with mushrooms, both in quantity and in variety, many things I'd never seen before outside a mushroom guide: cup fungae, jellies, conks, corals, and the russulas! if they had decided to attack, we'd have been dead in minutes. Also, the forest was magical with the fog drifting through the tall trees, little streams cutting across the paths, meeting other people only very occasionally. For all that, there wasn't much in the way of prized edible species. We found some young chanterelles which were delicious in a pasta meal for two, but the main edible turned out to be shrimp russulas (R. xerampelina). They were in dense clusters of large mushrooms all over, and we were limited only by what we could carry. Also, I had never positively identified shrimp russulas before, much less eaten any, so I was rather wary about collecting large amounts, especially since I believe that some similar-looking russulas can be vomit-inducing. However, that night, we cooked up a few with the single (although very pretty) coccora (Amanita lanei) we found, and they were both delicious. Moreover, neither of us had any digestive issues with them, so the next day we put a whole bunch of the most "typical"-looking shrimp mushrooms in a rice pilaf to take to the family Christmas dinner on Christmas eve.

While on Thanksgiving, everyone came over to our place, for Christmas, everyone went over to the parents' house. In contrast to a relaxed and gluttonous Thanksgiving, Christmas dinner seemed to me rather cramped and tense. But as far as family duties go, it was hardly onerous. There were no mushroom poisonings that night, either.

Now, the holidays are finally past, and the rain is gone for the moment. Both seemed kind of stifling this year, mushrooms or no, and I'm glad they're over.