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Chanterelle pizza
Thursday, July 21 2016
I'd over indulged last night and so I had a bit of hangover as I walked the dogs just east of the "Gator Swamp" (41.927072N, 74.108578W) along the Farm Road. Between that swamp (which always contains some standing water) and the bluff to its east is a narrow strip of flat land that I often walk home through after the losing the dogs in the forest. Today I was delighted to find not one but two separate patches of Chanterelle mushrooms in his flatland. The only other patch of Chanterelles I know about is at the bottom of the Valley of the Beasts (41.921217N, 74.102847W); evidently they live in places with a nearby water table. I harvested as many as I could carry in the bottom of my teeshirt and made quickly for home (since my burden decreased my ability to shoo away mosquitoes, which have appeared in great numbers in the past week).
The internet was still unusable at home, so in the late morning I drove to Susan & David's house, where I'd left most of my stuff. On the way, I stopped again at Hurley Ridge Market mostly to buy another cheeseless pizza. In Susan & David's kitchen, I fried up a portion of my Chanterelles and put them on my pizza. I was so proud of my work that I photographed it and posted the picture to Slack so my colleagues (all of whom are from the tiny sliver of Venn known as "vegan techies") could see. My boss Da joked about how now I would be tripping and turn the database into an "ASCII dragon." Those guys are among the best co-workers I've ever had, but I think I puzzle them. Not many people proficient in MySQL gather their own mushrooms in the forest. "I was a botany major in college," I said as a sort of explanation, though that is an oversimplification; most of my fearlessness with mushrooms is stuff I learned from my father (PBUH). And I never saw (or collected) Chanterelles until living in Upstate New York.
Me with Olive yesterday.
My Chanterelle-bedecked Annie's Cheeseless Pizza today. The colors are kinda ugh in this picture but it tasted yummy.
Later my hangover intensified, and I went through a phase of nausea so bad that I began to wonder about those Chanterelles I'd eaten. Still, I managed to get some good work done from my makeshift workplace. In some ways I was perhaps even more productive than usual, since my reduced set up of two screens (as opposed to five) kept my mind from wandering whenever there was a little delay in the works (having to login to phpMyAdmin yet again) and I'd go TalkingPointsMemo.com to check in on the RNC Trumpster Fire. (By the way, I love John Marshall's explanation of the term "Trump's Razor," which states that whenever something kooky needs to be explained in Trumplandia, the explanation assuming the stupidest decisionmaking is probably correct.)
Late in the afternoon, I made myself a weak cocktail of orange juice and gin and my hangover completely lifted. This was also the perfect beverage pairing for an endless phone call with The Organization's head of donor recruitment. I was feeling so punchy that I even gave her a quick and dirty lesson in SQL, a computer language that almost follows English lexical rules.
That phonecall kept me later than I'd intended to stay; I could see Devin the Dogsitter driving by slowly on Chestnut Hill Road as I was packing up my stuff to go. She was probably annoyed that I was still there and too weirded out to overlap with me there. So as I was leaving, I sent her a text message saying I'd fed the dogs and had just left.
Back in Hurley, I was delighted to find the internet was up and reliable. I celebrated with yet more drinking and pot smoking, which was probably a bad idea.
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