I don't want to be macaroni

I have been working on my dancing robots game more this week. I am about to start making some 'final' gui changes (final only inasmuch as no new people play the game and point out flaws in the presentation). If i finish the changes to the gui and fail to drum up more players I will probably start to modify the rules to make the game more difficult (not more complex, just more difficult (so that the ultimate dance is really hard to perform and that you don't accidentally set up robots that can dance 90% of the dances))

Sara is really starting to talk a lot. She is figuring out more words every day (She still doesn't say multiple word sentences, but that will come with time) She often will walk up to you and say 'hi!' with a happy intonation, and then say 'up', or 'cuddle', or 'milk' or whatever she wants.

We have finally replaced her raspberry sound which she used to make after drinking beverages with an 'ahh' sound (which is not only cute, but also not potentially offensive)

This weekend we had a ward camp out. It was not very well attended, but it was very fun. We hunted mushrooms and we also ate wild raspberries from a patch of limitless size. Upon attempting to identify the mushrooms that we picked I learned that most of them were either inedible or poisonous.

The first type that we were very hopeful for was the scaly one son the left. They looked a lot like 'decorated pholiota' (Leucopholiota decorosa, which is edible), but could have also just as easily been 'shaggy scalycap' (Pholiota squarrosa, which is poisonous). The fortunate thing is that the poisonous variety has brown spores and the edible one has white spores.

When the spore prints came back I was sad to note that they were the poisonous kind. I had picked more than 5 lbs of them, so I was really hopeful that they were going to be good

we also picked some angel wings, (the oysterlike mushroom to the left) which are of questionable toxicity (they have been eaten for a long time by a lot of people, and only old Japanese guys with kidney problems seem to get poisoned by them). The ones that we picked were a little bit old, but were still actively sporing, so I decided to try to grow them in a bucket of cardboard. Perhaps they will grow more fruits and we will be able to decide if it is worth risking poisoning to eat an apparently culinarily choice variety of mushroom.

When we got home and spread out the catch I estimated that I had gathered about 10 lbs of mushrooms (all told they weighed more than a gallon of milk). Even if we didn't get to eat anything I still enjoyed hunting quite a bit.

Perhaps we will have to go up Big Cottonwood canyon again just to amble around some time. perhaps in the fall I will call together the men of the family to hunt mushrooms up there

Andrea is still crazy about penguins. I decided that it would be funny if I pretended not to like macaroni penguins, so every time she says "let's play peguins!" I respond "Ok, but I am not going to be a macaroni penguin." She doesn't seem to mind if I don't like macaroni penguins.

Last night over dinner I told her "Let's play pasta! I will be ravioli, and mom can be angel hair". Her response was "I don't want my parents to be pasta" (said with a grumpy face). I said "what do you want to be?" and listed a few varieties. She decided upon linguine. Of course I had to apply my irrational penguin dislikes to pasta.