Completely distracted today by an idea. My son is 34 and my grandson is 2. My son messages me with photos of fungi. I send my grandson photos of my cat, and of interesting stuff I’m doing.
So, the idea. I got my son’s Duplo down from the attic, built a staircase to get the Duplo figures out of their box, should they be bored in there, and took photos. Sent them.
Have yet to hear of the junior’s reaction, his parent sent me the usual.
This is the 83rd fungus I have observed in Brunswick Valley Heritage Park, a white crust … type 13 … that apparently parasitizes the undersides of ‘waxy’ and ‘pikelet-like’ brackets.
My filing system is littered with labels like that. Crusts get a number. Polypores and Agarics get descriptive words if I don’t have any other clue.
Fungi have three main life-styles. They are parasitic, like the one above, living on other organisms; they are saprophytic, consuming dead wood … if we didn’t have saprophytic fungi we’d be neck-deep in wood; and they can be mycorrhizal in habit.
Mycorrhizal fungi help keep us alive, by helping to keep 95% of plants alive. They help plants to gain more nutrients and moisture when plants and trees themselves can’t reach, by extending plant roots with fungal mycelium.
Spent the morning strolling around #MaslenArboretum (tree collection) with some of the people who look after it and are constantly improving it.
They accompanied me on my pre pre fungi walk ahead of the pre fungi walk with the organiser of #BigScrubDay, which in its turn is ahead of the day when I will lead a #FungiWalk.
The biggest problem is no rain so no fruiting bodies to show off. I’ll probably have to call the walk something like Evidence of Fungi in the Arboretum.
…a dearth of anything. Am dealing with a bout of influenza. The doc said, go home two weeks in bed. This after I already spent eight days ailing, including an overnight stay in the local hospital.
All else is the fluttering of leaves in the wind.
A hurdy-gurdy features big time in Meld, the second book of the Doomed? series. The one pictured above is quite a historic instrument with its wooden keys stretching the six strings. Two strings either side of the bridge — I’m tempted to call it the superstructure it is so imposing — and two strings across the top. The wooden wheel at the right-hand-side acts as a bow, and strokes the strings, leading to the hurdy-gurdy also to be called a ‘wheel violin’.
Those of you into gleaning will feel right at home on this blog.
I’ve been writing this series for a such long time that when I googled hurdy-gurdies just now — to find the owner of the above pic — a website promoting its business of making hurdy-gurdies also came to the fore, http://www.altarwind.com
In Meld, the hurdy-gurdy is a hollowed-out electronic ‘modern’ (2150 +/- AD) version with the deeper box that will accommodate the rolled-up bane.
According to my trusty thesaurus, a bane is a ‘scourge, plague, curse, blight, pest, nuisance, headache, nightmare, trial, hardship, cross to bear, burden, thorn in one’s flesh/side, bitter pill, affliction, trouble, misery, woe, tribulation, misfortune, pain.’
The bane under consideration is all those, and more, to the much put-upon hero of the series. It’s possible to get started reading that series with Doomed? Book 1: Mongrel available now as an ebook, and in the not-too-distant future as POD paperback.
Learning what slash fiction actually is, at the same time that I’m struggling with a section of my WIP that describes the friendship between two young male protagonists.
#graffiti from one of the local galleries
This week is the final week, I’ve decided, that I will battle the WordPress platform blog architecture. I’ve given it a month and I’m too old to want to spend more time on trying fruitlessly to get what I want.
I’m still having difficulty trying to put easy things in place. On this platform I have so far not been able to hyperlink either between different posts on the home page or, more importantly, between pages. OK, yes, I’m giving myself five more days to get positive outcomes in that problem.
My second problem I suspect will be due to my own too high expectations. Perhaps a blog is not the right sort of platform to serialize story-instalments set in a fictional world … that of the Eleven Islands; write about the process of worldbuilding involved; and to promote novels and other published material set in that world.
Rita de Heer 