You hear snoring snakes

Another eventful week.

To start off I found some (five or six) puffball mushrooms. If you don't remember, these were the mushrooms that the protagonist ate in my side of the mountain (a book which Alison loved (she loves all children survival books it seems) and I also enjoyed quite a bit) They were in a neighbors yard, so I am not eating them (since they might be poisoned with herbicides), but I did collect them and place them in a nice spot in my yard so that they can release their spores, and hopefully infect my dirt with a third edible variety of mushrooms for me to eat.

We went picking strawberries multiple times this week (as my parents were out of town and someone had to pick those straberries (the things that we do for our families))

They were excellent strawberries while they lasted. We made some goat strawberry apple pea ice cream (Andrea added a slice of apple and three peas to the already perfect ice cream, so we just had to leave them there.)

One of the days that we went to visit my parents, on the way home I jokingly told Alison to look for mushrooms on the trees as we went down the dip and when we were coming back up we saw a huge cache of what were possibly oyster mushrooms. I got out and took some pictures, but as they were all terribly dried out I can't really identify them. I will have to check back every month to see when they are growing. They are growing right on the edge of a field, so I can probably pick them safely (since there were so many dried out it seems likely that the owner of the field was not harvesting them.)

We have been considering getting a van for a while, and Alison's parents found us one for an excellent price. We bought it this week. Alison is excited about being able to more easily do the shopping (my new job is far away from the public transportation lines, so I have been taking the car on days that Alison has not been dropping me off.)

We saw monsters university this Friday as a family date. It was moderately interesting (though not really worth paying any money to see (we got free tickets (which is nearly the only way that we see any movie (as we both really don't like modern movies.)))) Andrea has not even had any monster related nightmares yet...

Sara is signing more and more each day. Her cutest sign is 'please', which she makes by clutching her stomach as if she is a laughing Santa Claus and then turning her body left and right.

My dancing robots website is coming along nicely. I am shooting for a simple interface. It should start with the ability to play games against the computer, but before too long I will add multiplayer options. The game is not quite playable yet (I am working on the visual appearance of the event log and the interface right now, but I seem to be making a lot of headway, so I imagine that I will be done with a really simple version of it before too long.)

Alison recently was given a sourdough starter from a ward member. It is super tasty. I am going to bring a sourdough wheat cheese-bread to family dinner one night. It will not be gluten free, but it will be amazing.

On Monday we made an amazing pizza. The only non home made things on it were the sauce and the pepperoni. Hopefully this year we get lots of tomatoes because I really liked having home made tomato sauce. As you can see, it had broccoli, ricotta, mozarilla, parmesan, and mushrooms (field mushrooms from the front yard).

On tuesday we made a feta and scotch bonnet omlette. Last week I posted about the Feta that we made, and it is technically ready for consumption right now. It hasn't developed a full flavor yet, but it is still pretty tasty, and for the first time in a long time it is not too salty.

Lala has had a plugged udder for a few days, and I finally got it unplugged last night using ingenuity and a pair of tweezers. I will spare you the details, but it is good to be able to milk her without protests again.

This weekend we also: planted some spores in mushroom logs (Oyster mushrooms - one of the other really tasty varieties), planted other spores in a mushroom bucket, built a mushroom house (made of cinder-blocks and plywood (for the purpose of keeping the sun off of our mushroom logs and the mushroom bucket))

Yesterday I was also quoting to Andrea Chicken Heart. It went like this:

"And to make sure that you don't leave the bed we have put over one hundred black snakes around the bed. If you set even one foot outside of the bed they will bite you, you'll swell up, and be dead until morning."

"I don't see any snakes"

"They're invisible"

"I don't hear any snakes"

Quickly I improvised: "The're inaudible"

Alison started laughing at this point, so I decided that the joke was over, but later on Andrea wanted to play 'snakes'. we would sit up in trees like boa constrictors and we would catch and eat pigs, baby birds, frogs, dogs, and cats. After we ate we would sleep, and then we would eat some more.

Finally, We found yet another species of unknown mushrooms in our yard. They have dark brown spores, pinkish brown gills, hollow stems, grow in clusters, and split horrendously in the sun. I haven't yet tried out a full identification, so I have nothing more to report about them