here's a tiny baby weaving i'm working on!!!

going to seattle tomorrow to spend christmas with my family, then off to CA to pick all the mushrooms!

WHEW! what a strange few days it's been. i just got back from a very quick trip to california for porcini season. i dove right back into my school routine after arriving on a three-legged, fifteen-hour, red-eye flight home. inevitably, i got sick the very next day. to top it all off, i got a flu shot on friday which resulted in a pretty high fever and achey bones for the next 24 hours. moral of the story: don't get flu shots when you're already ill, or, ever maybe.

 i came home feeling incredibly overwhelmed by the amount of catch-up work i have to do. i felt totally defeated and lacked all motivation. now that i've spent three solid days in bed, i'm ready to get things done! yesterday i got out of bed and immediately broke down a paper grocery bag to make a giant to do list to post on my door. some of the things still on it for today? make pizza dough (just got a new recipe from a fellow mushroom-hunter-flickr-friend) for dinner tonight, clean up for the landlord who will be here tomorrow, UNPACK, aaaaand of course all of the schoolwork that has piled up. i added this blog post to my list because i've decided that writing positive updates about what i've been doing is crucial for my sanity, happiness, and motivation to do other good stuff. that being said, here're some pictures from my california vacation!

   

 1) so i had never picked boletes (porcini) before, though perry has been bringing them home to me the entire time we've been dating. turns out they are a LOT of fun. they get really, really big and wormy so the trick is to find them when they are buttons. even as buttons, they can be pretty big! one thing i loved about them is that they grow in all kinds of situations -- in deep duff where you have to dig for them, in grass where you have to pat for them, even in a mowed lawn! you have to adjust your mushroom-senses for each scenario. so even though you can pick a lot in a short period of time, it's still quite challenging to find that first one in a patch. ESPECIALLY considering perry was taking me to all of the spots he spent years trying to find.

 

2) perry got out to california two days before me, and had a head start -- here's what he picked in that time. i'd say we picked about 4x this amount over the next few days?

 

3) here's the processing station. the wormy ones get dried and any fresh ones we plan on selling get halved to prove that they're perfect. yes, perfect.

   

 4) aside from picking boletes, i also got to catch up with all my sonoma county loves! here's a picture of noelle (west county alpacas) with her herd!  noelle first told me about her dream of raising alpacas about two years ago.  i thought, YES! now that's a good dream to have!  big, but certainly attainable.  i didn't doubt that she could make it happen, but never did i think she'd get this far so soon! it made me really happy to visit the alpacas and see that it's all really, really happening.

and, now that i've been home...it's been my job to be newt mama while perry's still away. perry has six? kind of newts -- three of which are housed separately...so....9 newt houses?  and we have a one-eyed toad named willie.  it's a lot of work.

   

 they are very good at letting me know that they are hungry.

 

and, finally, last night at midnight, for the first time in many weeks, i worked on some embroideries for my thesis (or...that will help me figure out what my thesis IS.) they are really small...wallet photo size. feeling pretty good about getting back into SMALL, quick and dirty stitched work.

 now.......pizza dough!

2011-12 box

last night i finally got around to pinning some bugs i've had in cue for a while.  some beetles that val collected for me, a praying mantis, a huge beetle, a tiny little moth, and a cicada from jazzy.  i think this box is pretty much full.  time to get a new one...box #3!

i love fall!  i've been feeling pretty good lately.  something like how i felt when i started this blog four years ago!  hungry for new things....content, but not too comfortable.

yesterday i crossed off something that's been on my new years resolution list for the past three (four?) years: bake a pie.  i made a pumpkin pie and it turned out  pretty good!  i was convinced i'd ruined the crust by treating it like pizza dough (add a little flour, add a little water till i get the ratio right) but it actually turned out great!  i think i actually love the crust more than the filling.

i don't have a picture of it, but i DO have pictures of some other things i've been up to.

1) here's a very good (in quality and variety, but not necessarily quantity) mushroom haul from last week.  hedgehogs, black chanterelles, and golden chanterelles.  we were so surprised to find the last two in OCTOBER.  we thought chanterelles had stopped coming up about a month ago!

2) dinner i made yesterday after i made that pie!  chicken, roasted potatoes and hedgehogs, baby broccoli.  

and, in honor of reuniting with my favorite muppets-addicted toddler tomorrow, i'm going to leave you with this fantastic clip from forgetting sarah marshall.

check out these two pictures i found taken like a day apart back in 2010.  one is of colin's legs with fox walking by and the other is of marcello's legs with bandit walking by.  side note: bandit and fox later lived together for a year and fell in love.

anyway isn't it crazy how similar they are and i how i didn't even notice until now??

in case you also struggle with feeling like you're doing everything wrong...this song is sure to make you feel like whatever you're doing is SO RIGHT!

hi!  here's a picture of a hickory horned devil caterpillar that i was lucky enough to spot on a hike this week.  he was just roooolling around in the dirt when i found him, and was still roooolling around in the dirt when i saw him again a little later.  these cutie pies bury themselves 5-6 inches into the ground when they're ready to pupate so maybe that is just what he was doing. who am i to question his actions, anyway?

this first week of school was SO MUCH TOUGHER than i thought it was going to be.  do you ever feel like you're never on the same level as everyone else at ANYTHING?  every single person in my thesis class was asked to talk about an epiphany they had over summer about their work (and every single one of them answered) and i was like, epiphany?  i've just been finding mushrooms and bugs and moving and working jobs and trying not to be an asshole to the people i love.

i thought for a minute that maybe dropping out was the best thing to do about that awful feeling because obviously i am doing art school completely wrong and maybe i should at least pause and figure out how to do it right.  but i didn't, and i'd be lying if i said it was for any other reason than the fact that i've already traveled across this country three times (with my cats and perry and jazzy and newts and toad) to get this stupid degree and i can't really explain myself to all of those people if i decide to quit, or even re-evaluate, and really wouldn't that just make me feel even more awful anyway?  so, here i go, doin' it all wrong one last time.