There's a fungus slime mold among us!

---

UPDATE: It seems this post shows a slime mold, not a fungus.

---

You'll remember the fungus posted on Izzy's Net. I'm happy to report that when I went to water the compost bins this morning I discovered this.
Here's a close-up of the pretty stuff up front.

When the bucket of coffee grounds I was trying to rejuvenate my mushroom farm in was growing mold instead of mushrooms I dumped the grounds in the compost bin. I was hoping that some of the mushrooms had survived and would thrive in the compost. But some other life form took over.

This stuff is (well, was) pretty (I hosed it down after taking the pictures). I hope it comes back again and again.

Fresh produce

For the first time our apricot tree set more than three pieces of fruit. Today we found three of them freshly fallen to the ground. They were in good shape so we ate them. They were pretty good.
There are a handful left on the tree. When will we get to harvest enough to make jam?

Fiscal Duplicity

A recent post has a comment accusing me of duplicitousness because I said that some of my BEA money went to paying off the loan we took to pay for our kitchen and bathroom remodel and that wasn't one of the choices in my poll of what to do with the money.

Well, here I go again.

In the poll about what to do with the dough, MrBears gave a write-in vote. His ideas are always fiscally sound. We acted on his suggestion.

Yesterday, as part of my birthday weekend, Jerry took us to Palm Desert for a shopping excursion on El Paseo ("the Rodeo Drive of the desert").

We started the trip by having breakfast at IHOP in Escondido. We take the route through the San Jacinto mountains. I recorded the trip with my trusty GPS device! Here's an image from Google Earth of our route.
For you Google Earth users here is a file to click on that will load the route and let you relive it in many fun ways. (I am so confused...on one system a line shows the route at all magnifications. On another of my computers the line appears only when zoomed in. It should always be there. I hope you get to see it. The image above is from the system that shows the line.)

On the way through the mountains we saw this mountain:
This was Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer!, in Southern California. Snow?!? I didn't think the elevation was that high (but I guess it was).

Just before getting to Palm Desert we have to leave the San Jacinto mountains and drop several thousand feet into the Coachella Valley. This involves a switchbacked road.
For you Google Earth junkies who don't get motion sickness from watching animated views of mountain travel, here is another file that has the part of the trip highlighted above for you to tour.

Two hours (to the minute according to the GPS log) after we left IHOP we parked the truck in Palm Desert and started our shopping.

We browsed in many of the art galleries. We passed up many whose displays in their windows gave us the impression that their tastes and ours don't intersect. We had lunch at Sammy's Woodfired Pizza (just like we did when Colleen visited us).

We looked through a few more galleries then went back to the Eleonore Austerer Gallery, the first gallery we had visited.

We bought a piece by Eric C. Johnson, an artist from nearby La Quinta. The artist's exhibit is still on the gallery's web site. It includes our piece.

Here it is hanging in the living room.

Branching Out

It's made of aluminum, paper and acrylic. It's 58" tall. It's heavy and took a lot of wrestling to get it in the back seat of Jerry's pickup. We didn't want to leave it in the bed of the pickup in case the rain started up again. The black part is the paper pulp rolled onto wood. The tree is painted on aluminum. It's all mounted on a large slab of aluminum.

Here's a closeup on the tree.

I think that this is a wise use of the windfall. Don't you?

More birds

Tonight we had some new birds visit our backyard. Some mallards were grazing on the fallen seeds under the bird feeders.

And here's a little movie of them.

Birthday Dinner

Poss asked what we had for birthday dinner. Silly girl, we had what we always have for birthday dinner! Mac 'n' Cheese and Brownies! Yum!

Macaroni, Tomato and Smoked Cheese
(from Betty Crocker's Pasta Cookbook from the General Mills' Christmas CARE package)
2 cups Béchamel Sauce (below)
1 package (7 ounces) elbow macaroni (2 cups)
1 can (14 ½ ounces) diced tomatoes, undrained
1 cup shredded smoked Gouda or Swiss cheese (4 ounces)

Heat oven to 350º. Grease 1 ½-quart casserole. Prepare Béchamel sauce as directed. Cook and drain macaroni as directed on package.

Heat tomatoes to boiling in 2-quart saucepan; reduce heat to medium. Cook uncovered 6 to 8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until liquid has evaporated. Stir cheese into Béchamel sauce until melted. Stir in tomatoes.

Mix sauce and pasta. Pour into casserole. Bake uncovered about 30 minutes or until bubbly and light brown.


Béchamel Sauce
2 tablespoons butter, margarine or spread
2 cups skim milk
4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons butter-flavored sprinkles

Heat margarine in 1 ½-quart saucepan over medium heat until melted and bubbly. Shake milk, flour, salt and pepper in tightly covered container. Gradually stir into margarine. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly. Boil and stir 1 minute. Stir in butter-flavored sprinkles.

Some comments: It takes us a lot longer than 8 minutes to reduce the tomatoes. We don't bother with the butter-flavored sprinkles. I guess they're there to have butter flavor without the fat.



The Best Fudge Brownies Ever
(from King Arthur All-Purpose Flour bag)
1 cup (8 ounces) butter
2 ¼ cups sugar
1 ¼ cups Dutch-process cocoa
½ teaspoon salt (1 teaspoon if unsalted butter)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
4 large eggs
1 ½ cups (6 ¼ ounces) King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
2 cups (12-ounce bag) chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350º. Lightly grease 9 x 13-inch pan.

In a medium-sized microwave-safe bowl, or in a saucepan set over low heat, melt the butter, then add the sugar and stir to combine. Return the mixture to the heat (or microwave) briefly, just till it's hot, but not bubbling. It'll become shiny looking as you stir it. Heating the butter and sugar a second time will dissolve more of the sugar, which will yield a shiny top crust on your brownies. Transfer the mixture to a mixing bowl.

Stir in the cocoa, salt, baking powder, and vanilla. Add the eggs, beating till smooth; then add the flour and chips, beating till well combined. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.

Bake the brownies for 28 to 30 minutes, until a cake tester inserted into the center comes out dry (though it may have a few crumbs clinging to it). The brownies should feel set both on the edges, and in the center. Remove them from the oven, and after 5 minutes loosen the edges with a table knife; this helps prevent the brownies from sinking in the center as they cool. Cool completely before cutting and serving. Yield: 2 dozen brownies.

More comments: We use Costco extra large eggs. Maybe that's what makes it so that it takes lots longer than the 30 minutes to finish cooking. Or maybe a wooden toothpick isn't the right cake tester.

The Joker

Well, here I am 53 years old.

Last year when I turned 52 I thought, since there are 52 cards in a deck of playing cards, that I was finally playing with a full deck.

Now that I'm 53 I guess the joker has been added.

I don't know quite what that might mean. It's going to be a wild year? One for jest?

I'm dreading P-Doobie's announcement of this event. I hate seeing pictures of myself. Maybe I'll be lucky and she'll forget or won't find a picture to include.

We had a hole in our roof

The folks who installed our garden room took some shortcuts. They cut a notch in the roof's eaves so that the garden room's roof would fit under the eaves. The problem was that they didn't protect the wood they cut from water and the weather. The bare wood was left exposed to what ails wood. The rafters' tails were rotting badly.

Jerry arranged to have a handyman come out and fix our problem. Here's what the project looked like after the first day.
The shingles and plywood from part of the roof were removed to expose the rotting tails.

After the second (and final) day of the project the roof looks like this.
The shingles hang over the edge of the roof's plywood and there is a metal drip flashing on the edge of the plywood to keep the water off of it. The tails were painted to protect from water, too. Why couldn't the garden room installers have done these things?

Some of the fascia had to be replaced on either side of the notch. Some fascia at the far corner of the house was also rotting (but not because of the garden room). We got that fixed, too.

It feels good to have this taken care of. I don't like having the house rot like that.


Speaking of home improvement, some of my BEA windfall went to paying off our loan we got to pay for our kitchen and bathroom. Our house is all ours again!

Snakes alive!

What a plate of shrimp! BobBIE-Baby posted a tail tale of snakes the day I was going to post our snake story.

Yesterday while I was working on getting my latest Major Motion Picture uploaded to YouTube Jerry came into the house saying "Come look!" What he meant to say was "Bring the camera and come look!" After I saw I had to run back inside and get the camera to get this picture.


For some reason we don't see very many snakes around here. I don't know my snakes so I have no idea what flavor this one is. I hope it eats gophers.

It's not as big as Bobbie's snakes. Those were impressive snakes.

Budding cinematographer and actors

Thanks to Colleen you're getting this post. Colleen remembered that we made a little film way back in high school. That's the early 1970s, you know. I dug into my boxes of memories and there was the reel of film! But no projector.

Weeks ago I asked a friend if he had a projector. He said that his father's 8mm projector was in the rafters of his garage and he would haul it down next time he was up there. Being a bit older we both put this out of our minds at the critical times. Finally, one day I remembered while talking with him and he wrote himself a note. Yesterday he brought it in to work.

The projector hadn't used it in many years. The rubber drive belt had stretched so it no longer drove the works. I replaced it with a rubber band. Amazingly, that worked! I didn't have a screen so I projected the film on the door to the garage. That's the only white vertical surface in the house. (Jerry has a knack for color so none of the walls is white.)

The original images are rather washed out or dark so having it professionally transferred to digital wouldn't have improved it much. The crappy quality kind of gives it a special charm. Good luck making out the action in some spots.

The film stars Karen S., Colleen B., Don M., Poss, and me. There's a cameo from Chris and I think Karen E.

We filmed all the scenes in reverse. Because the film has to be played backward we had to film the scenes with the camera upside down. That way the sprocket holes are on the correct side when the film is loaded backwards. Our little vignettes end up undoing things. It's cute. I hope you like it. (If you don't you only have Colleen to blame! Well, if you like it you have Colleen to thank.)



There's a new poll for this video. Vote!

The Broadway's Best channel is playing in the background. "Climb ev'ry mountain!"

Ray is going to lend me a screen and a splicing kit. The film is in three pieces and I didn't want to reshoot it unless I can do it in one take. It's a pain threading the film and if spliced we'll get to see more of the frames! We'll see if I get around to reworking this epic.

---

Results of the poll:
And the Oscar goes to...

Nominee	Votes
Colleen
Chuckie	1
Don	2
Karen
Poss	5

Another Frivolous Coat

Some time ago I posted a piece about grudges that mentioned a grudge held by one family member against a sister because she bought herself a coat. This seems to be a common basis for grudges. In the New York Times obituary for Robert Mondavi there is the following paragraph:

His quest for ever-better wines led to tensions between the two brothers that finally erupted in 1965. The immediate cause was a fur coat that Bob had bought for his wife a few years earlier to wear to a dinner at the Kennedy White House. When, at a family council, Peter accused his brother of using winery money frivolously — for the coat — Bob struck him. The family rallied behind Peter and, at the age of 52, Bob was dismissed from Charles Krug.

Be very careful buying clothes. Your family might never forgive you.

Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints

Here comes a probably too long essay about my little hikes up the mountain near work. During these lunchtime hikes I have been taking pictures of things people have left behind (other than their footprints).

But first, on my last trip up the hill I took along my handheld GPS receiver to record my trip. Through magic of computers and the Internet I converted the track to a Google Earth file that gets drawn on the photograph of the area. Here is that picture with my journey marked.
That image is for the benefit of you people who haven't installed Google Earth. For those of you lucky enough to have it running on your system, you can look at my track simply by clicking here (this starts Google Earth, loads the track and zooms in on what you see above). Once you're looking at the track you can do fun things like tilt the scene to view it at an angle to see the vertical dimension better. Better yet, you can select the "Play Tour" item in the Tools menu. That shows you the trip from above the track. You can adjust the speed, altitude and angle you look from in the Touring tab of the Options settings.

OK, now that you're back from playing with Google Earth, here come the pictures I've taken of what people leave behind.

Simple Destructiveness
Let's start out with a yucca that was about to bloom. It's so much fun to break it off and throw the stalk on the ground, isn't it?
I think most people would say that this isn't acceptable behavior. Yuccas are prettier when they're allowed to bloom.

Trinkets
At the top of hill people have left some trinkets. On one of the burnt bushes people have hung a sun catcher and a little tinkly wind chime.

These are next to the rock on the summit where an American flag is flying. On the other side of that rock is a pinwheel.
And just because I wanted to play with my camera's movie making function, here's a very short movie of the pinwheel. It is really spinning very fast but the strobing that comes from the rate the frames are taken makes it look like it's going at a casual rate.

I kind of feel that this is not the place for these treasures. We're out in nature and these aren't quite natural. But I suppose they might be a step above trash. But only a little.

That said, I find pilfering these treasures is a little mean spirited. So when somebody took the sun catcher from the bush (and didn't do a general cleaning up by taking the broken wind chime and the pinwheel) I think that somebody is just being selfish.I'm still trying to figure out whether I should be upset that somebody has taken the prettiest trinket, depriving us of its beauty, or upset that they didn't clean up the rest of the debris.

I'm not going to be the one to clean up. I don't even know whose land I hike on. Maybe the owner has decorated their property.

Religious Symbols
I might have mentioned this cross before. Somebody hauled some major lumber and solar powered lights up the mountain and set up a cross. There are a lot of people who think every hilltop needs to have a cross for all around to admire and be inspired by. (I'm not one of those.) This one is rather tacky.
Again, to me this is litter (unless it was put up by the land's owner and I suspect it wasn't).

But I'm somewhat bewildered by vigilantes who have to tear things down for the sake of tearing things down.
This is the stump of the cross. Somebody brought a saw up the hill and cut the cross down. They tore up the lights and didn't even take the little solar panels. They just smashed things. (The flag in the background isn't the one by the pinwheel. There are two up there. This one is at the end of my walk where I turn around to go back. The pinwheel's flag is earlier in the walk where I was wandering all around while at the summit chatting with another hiker and photographing the pinwheel. Somehow I think the flags are sanctioned by the property owner.)

Dog Poop
I don't take pictures of dog poop. I'm just annoyed by dog owners who let Fido poop on the trail. They should at least have them do their doodie off the trail. Better yet they should pack it out. (Don't click on that link...it's disgusting!)

Rock Balancing
The art of rock balancing is a mixed bag for me. It is fascinating how people can get rocks to stack. I sometimes think it would be fun to try to get good at it. There's something New Agey about rock stacking and it sometimes gives me the creeps that New Age philosophy gives me.

I added the top rock to this stack.

The next time I climbed the hill somebody had swept the rock clean.I don't know if I should be annoyed that somebody knocked this stack of rocks down (because I figure whoever did it was just being a killjoy) or if I should be happy that somebody is cleaning up an unnatural arrangement of rocks (but people were simply rearranging what is already out here in nature). I don't know. I'm leaning towards being annoyed at killjoys.

Anyway, those were the pictures I took of what people leave behind. I vote for just leaving the footprints. That's simpler than trying to figure out if some of these leavings are OK. And then those footprints should be left only on the trails.

(Go back and play with Google Earth some more!)

Two weeks later

One last follow-up to the spruce-up-for-the-board story.

The mulch covered up the dirt and made it somewhat attractive while the board was in town. Now the weeds are growing.
How will they control the weeds now? They can't mow or take a weed whacker to them with all that mulch, can they? Roundup, perhaps?

Accidents happen

One of Jerry's and my favorite artists is Randy Chitto who makes the greatest turtles. Now and then we diversify. Last year we got one of his bear storytellers, "The Warrior's Journey to the Stars." As you'll see, it's a big bear with a small on his lap. The small bear is held in place with a metal pin.

One day recently the piece was being moved and the small bear got bumped and shifted a bit. In moving it pried the toe off the large bear.

Here are the bears and the toe.
The chip from the toe came off in one piece and fit back into place with none of the light colored clay showing. I sent a note to Randy asking what sort of glue he recommends to reassemble the piece. He said that the small bear had been glued on with five-minute epoxy. I figured if that's the glue for the original piece it should be good for the repair. I had that kind of epoxy on hand.

I glued the toe back on.

After that set (I gave it half an hour to set while I held the toe in place much of that time) I glued the small bear back in place. I had the big bear lie on its side so the small bear rested against a bit of epoxy on the large bear's arm and sat with its pin in more epoxy in the big bear's toe.
If you're looking for the repair, you'll see it. But it looks pretty good for all it's been through.

I's singin' dem ol' cap'tal gains blues agin, mama!

Long ago, I was working for a company called NCR that had been in business for more than 100 years. Then, for some reason, AT&T decided that there was something that NCR had that AT&T needed. So they bought NCR.

For a while I worked for "NCR, An AT&T Company." After some time they thought that that wasn't a good enough name so they changed it to "AT&T Global Information Solutions" (or "AT&T GIS" for short).

AT&T had developed a product (called Tuxedo) that was a competitor of a product that NCR had come up with (called TOP END). Once AT&T owned NCR they didn't need two products that did similar things. (I won't bore you with what they did, mostly because I really don't know.) So AT&T sold their Tuxedo product and kept NCR's TOP END. (I don't know if it was because TOP END was seen as the better product or what.)

AT&T sold Tuxedo to a company called BEA Systems.

While all this was going on, I was in a department of NCR that was about to be shut down. When my department ceased to be I had to find a new spot in the company to work in. I happened to end up in the TOP END department.

Somewhere along the line AT&T spun NCR back off to be an independent company.

After a few years working in the TOP END department they started having morale boosting activities for us. We had a winery touring day and a bowling afternoon and other fun outings. I didn't know that morale was needing boosting. I had lost contact with the rumor mill. It turned out that there were rumors that NCR was considering unloading its TOP END product.

Finally, in June 1998 we got called into a meeting where we were told we were indeed being sold to another company. It happened to be BEA Systems. It was effective that day. Now Tuxedo and TOP END were products of the same company again.

Lucky for us it was just before the company's Employee Stock Purchase Plan enrollment opportunity. I took them up on their offer of discounted BEA stock. In December I became a stock holder in BEA Systems.

Just after that BEA laid us all off. Like AT&T before them they didn't need two products that did similar things. I guess they bought the competition to get its good parts to add to their product and to shut down the competition.

Just after this the stock market's irrational exuberance kicked in. The price of BEA stock benefited from the exuberance and I decided to sell a tiny bit of my stock. That was just before the bubble burst. With that I recouped my initial investment many times over. Oh, the capital gains!

Then the bubble burst. At least I had made a profit. So what if the rest was not worth a lot.

Well, earlier this year Oracle decided that they wanted to buy BEA. BEA said they weren't for sale and Oracle came back with a higher offer and BEA, with pressure from a big share holder, Carl Icahn, agreed to be bought.

I thought that I was going to become a stock holder in a competitor of my own Teradata Corporation (Teradata and Oracle make database systems). Friday's mail brought me an envelop from the company that manages my BEA stock. It had a big check in it. It turns out that the sale was a cash deal, not a stock deal. The price they paid again was many times more than I had paid (though a mere fraction of what it was in the exuberant days).

So I have unexpected money in my hands. I have no idea what to do with it. Well, other than send a big chunk to the tax man.

Maybe you can help me decide. There's a poll over there on the right. Please, no ballot box stuffing and no hanging chad.

The Pearl Fishers

Today we saw Bizet's "The Pearl Fishers" performed by the San Diego Opera. It was their production by Zandra Rhodes that I was afraid was going to be a lot of gawdy costumes in lurid colours but it turned out to be much nicer and subdued than I had expected (though full of color).

It's a minor opera with a few good tunes that were sung well.

Here's the most famous of the tunes, "Au fond du temple saint," performed at the Met's James Levine 25th Anniversary Gala.

The End of Chuckbert's Mushrooms

In a comment for Izzy's Net's There's a fungus among us!, Mombert asked if we've heard the end of my mushrooms.

I hadn't shared the end of the mushrooms.

They kind of petered out. I tried rejuvenating them. The instructions said that I could try taking some of the material the mushrooms were growing in and put it into fresh coffee grounds. I went to some Starbuckses and got some of their Grounds for Your Garden bags of used coffee grounds. I mixed in some of the old mushroomy grounds, covered them with the plastic bag (the "perforated humidity tent"), and misted them twice a day.

It grew mold. It started out white. I thought that was a good sign since they say the first thing to appear was going to be "whitish mycelial growth." Then it turned green. That's a bad sign. I kept the bucket of grounds misted for a couple of weeks longer, hoping that the fungus would grow and overwhelm the mold. It never happened. The grounds are now in one of the compost bins.

(The white ball near the back corner is a black widow's egg sac.)

When I got the first batch of grounds out of the bucket the middle was rather dry. I guess I didn't mist them enough (but the top of the grounds was always oozing watery stuff...I thought they must be wet enough if the fungus was getting rid of excess water). Maybe the fungus just dried out and died.

I'll have to try again.

Waste not

Our Mother is a champion Reducer, Reuser and Recycler of waste. She held onto cottage cheese containers for years until they were taken by recyclers. She sends us letters in envelopes that are provided with bills (with the bar codes marked out so they don't go to the utility companies). She's given us some great canvas shopping bags that we use every time we go to the grocery store. They were probably shipped to us in a reused box. She has probably increased by years the lifetimes of several cities' landfills by reducing waste and inspiring others to do the same.

(I hope Mom has limits. I hope that reusing or recycling toilet paper is "NOT" one of her activities. I advocate the first "R" in that department through the use of Jasmin.)

We go to concerts and shows at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, where we often are sitting next to a woman who has been volunteering time helping in a school's kindergarten classes for the last 14 years. A few months ago she mentioned that she uses magazines and the artwork on all those address labels that charities send out in their fund raising efforts. She said that if we had anything like that she could take them off our hands.

So imagine my surprise when Mom asked if I had any idea what she could do with all the artwork from the thousands of address labels charities have sent to her in their fund raising efforts. I told her about Lu and how she uses these stickers with her kindergarteners.

Mom sent her big box of address labels to give to Lu.



Lu would have been happy just to get sheets of address labels. She said that she cuts the names and addresses off and shreds them. But Mom was way ahead of Lu. Mom had cut off the address portions of the labels and organized the pictures into many categories. They were in reused window envelopes labeled with the kinds of stickers they hold. The envelopes were arranged alphabetically.

Today we went to a concert by the San Diego Symphony where we always sit with Lu. We took the box of stickers to her tonight. Lu is thrilled to have these. She says the kids just love this sort of things. Some apparently become treasures for some kids. And some become very special presents for their parents.

Thanks, Mom! You've brought great happiness to many kids. And to Lu.

By the way, the concert was pretty good. They played Mozart's 40th Symphony and Dukas's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." Those are always good to hear and they played them well. It also included John Corigliano's "Pied Piper Fantasy." It had interesting rat squeaking, scurrying, and gnawing sound effects but went on way too long. Maybe if I heard it more I would appreciate it more but I sure did get fidgety.

Since Mom insists...

Mom doesn't get tired of my flowering yard so here are some more pictures of what's going on today.

Some time ago we were wandering through the San Diego Wild Animal Park where there was a tall, spindly plant with spectacular flowers that look like sunny side up eggs. Somehow we managed to find out what they are and we got a couple of them at a local nursery. It was a Matilija poppy. These plants don't transplant well and one of them promptly died. The other has thrived. And spread. The flowers have a very nice fragrance. The front yard is being overtaken by these plants and I am very happy it is.

The bottlebrushes are in bloom. That makes the hummingbirds and orioles happy. Anything that makes the birds happy makes me happy. The flowers drop their red stamens and the ground gets carpeted in knee deep pink.

The Sapphire Dragon Tree is blooming. It's supposed to be a good tree for tight spots. Its roots don't tear up their surroundings. It's between the house and the yard holding the annoying neighbor's constantly barking dog.

The Pork and Beans Sedum that I planted in the mailbox's pot are blooming. I had to replant them last year because the mailbox used to be on a redwood post. The post rotted and the mailbox tilted precariously. It's now on a metal post anchored in concrete. I filled the pot with new potting soil and put some of the plants back and they filled it in.

The pitiful red hot poker is making what I think is its last stab at beauty. It gets smaller and smaller each year. It probably wants to be somewhere other than the spring flowering bulb area. It doesn't get a lot of attention. It apparently wants a lot of water in the summer when it gets none at all.

That's what my yard tour gave me today. Well, there are roses but we've all seen a lot of roses.