Rain Rain It's a Good Thing

It is raining, not too hard but I think it's enough. Enough for what? Mushrooms of course! I hope to start finding chanterelles in a few days. It rained earlier this week but it was a really light rain. Hopefully that last rain combined with today's rain are enough to start the mushroom production.

We had a nice walk around town in the rain today. It was not raining when we started our walk and we did not let the rain cut our walk too short. I was quite surprised when one of my neighbors said we were crazy for being out in the rain.

My reply to her surprising comment was " We're natives."

Is it really such a shocking thing to go for a walk in the rain in an area that gets 60 inches of rain a year? Here you either walk in the rain or you stay indoors for 9 months.

Anyway our walk was quite pleasant. We stopped by the new (and only) Starbucks in town and I treated myself to a drip coffee and a doughnut while the kids drank pop and ate doughnuts. We are not big on junk-food and even drip coffee at Starbucks is expensive so this is not a normal thing for us to do. For some reason our stop at Starbucks really cheered me up, well that and the rain and the beautiful double rainbow we could see from our table.

After I left Starbucks I was feeling so cheerful that I wanted to sing, but alas I don't know any songs about mushrooms and it's not normal in this culture to break out into song on the public streets. Is it normal anywhere? I don't know.

While we were eating at Starbucks I constructed a backpacking stove from one of the kids pop cans. I tested the stove when we got home and it seems to be the best one I have ever made. It brought two cups of water to a boil in 7-8 minutes and kept burning for about 12 minutes using about two tablespoons of HEET.

Mount Rose is still on fire and the burned area has grown to 1,055 acres. A few good hard fall rains should put it out.