The Endless Sea of CDs

Last night I decided that this weekend I would clean, and re-organize all of The Hubby's CDs. Anyone who loves and knows the man I married, also knows that he is very eclectic and at the risk of being redundant, very diverse, when it comes to not only his music but lots of things.  He also never puts things back where he found them.  Ever.

So when I say "re-organize", I am actually trying to find the right cases for some and just a plain old case for others.  He pulls a CD out and will just ram it into any case that might be nearby.  I found two or three CDs all crammed together in one case more than once.

But I also thought that since I have all the CDs out I might as well burn them to the hard drive and make it so much easier to load my iPod thingie with tunes.  Did I mention that between the two of us, we have about 1000 CDs?  It should take me about a month, I think.

Oh and by the way.  I have discovered that The Hubby has entirely too many BaHa Men CDs for a normal person to have.  I didn't even know they made more than one!  And if it wasn't for Shrek and Alvin & The Chipmunks, they would all probably be washing cars about right now.

As a matter of fact I think that whoever came up with the song montage for the Shrek karaoke scene must of been looking through our CD collection because I think we every single one of these songs on CD somewhere.  Pretty sure, although I am only about 1/10 of the way through.  Wish me luck as I wade through Ani DeFranco, The Grateful Dead, Cher, Chris LeDoux, B.B. King, James Brown, Joss Stone, Peter Gabriel among others and . . .  *GASP*  Yanni !?!  WTF?  I can tell now that he and I need to have a talk.  A wife has to draw the line somewhere. Right?  I better not find Michael Bolten in there.

The Fall Off the Vegan Wagon Was Not As Painful as One Might Think

I know I have not written about my "vegan challenge" since what, the sixth day?  Well, that is because I was riddled with guilt when I fell off the wagon, so to speak, on the eighth day or so.  I tried.  I tried really hard.  But there were two things standing in my way, and that also got in my face.  Cheese and oysters.

Yes, I said cheese and oysters.  When the hubby and I went mushrooming up near Alpine, we got skunked (no shrooms to be found), so we decided to stop in the teeny tavern in the teeny town of Alpine.  Well, lo and behold it was the annual Alpine Oyster feed and Potluck.  We walked in, saw this, looked at each other, and walked back out to the car and came back in carrying the chips and salsa that we never got around to eating that we had brought as a snack.  We were officially in.  We were now part of the potluck.  Hurray!

Tons of smoked oysters with Gouda cheese on top.  BBQ oysters on the half shell.  Oyster shooters.  I just couldn't help myself.  Oh and someone in Alpine makes the best damn cheesecake in the world.  After the cheesecake, I knew I was doomed to be just a lowly vegetarian who occasionally eats non-vertebrae mollusks.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.  In this day and age when everyone seems to have a label for everyone else, I am going to give myself one.  I am officially a "Mollusko-vegi-tarian."  What do you think?

Bear? What Bear?

For those of you who may not know, my husband and I are avid mushroom hunters.  We enjoy slaying them every chance we get.  Last week, the hubby was informed by someone supposedly "in the know" that there were chanterelles  growing in such abundance up by the Erma Bell Lakes that we would need a ton of bags to carry them all.

So we packed up the rig, and set off for the Erma Bells.  The hubby drove.  I wanted to stab myself in the eye just out of sheer boredom.  The main part of the drive is about 40 miles on a scenic byway.  For some reason because there is no speed limit sign, he seemed to think that he needed to go 30 mph on this paved, two lane road.  For 40 miles.  We finally made it to the turn-off and went 10 mph for 4 miles on a very nicely graveled road.  Oh how I wished I was driving.  I remember driving up and down McGowen Rd (miles and miles of twisty gravel, sometimes paved, logging roads) in my younger days, probably going too fast for the comfort of others, but I was just fine at those speeds.  Anyway.

At the end of the gravel road is a campground and trail head.  It is 2 miles to the Lower Erma Bell, 2.5 to the Middle and another mile or so to the Upper.  Not a bad hike all in all.  Except for one thing.  I noticed a sign at the trail head warning of a mama bear and her two cub seen in the area.  Lovely.  And all I had was my 3 inch bladed, mushroom slaying knife with the paintbrush taped to the end (for on the go cleaning) for protection. Oh and the hubby, of course.  He had his pocket knife out, which he kept flipping open and closed for the entire hike.  I'm not sure who he was trying to impress; me or the bears.  I kept envisioning him and the bears in this weird dance in the style of West Side Story, circling each other in a patch of chanterelles.  

Don't get me wrong though.  I was not unafraid of the possibilities of bears wanting to eat me.  I was fully prepared to pee my pants upon introduction to the pissed off mama protecting her young, and then high tail it outta there. I just didn't see the need of the constant click of my husbands puny knife.  Yes, we made other noises to alert the animals of our presence, but after the first mile of "flip-click-smack-flip-click-smack" I was ready to stab him myself.

Since you are reading this, we are, obviously still alive.   We saw no bears, chanterelles either.  Although I will admit that it was awfully hard to watch where I was walking, look for 'shrooms and look out for bears at the same time.  Better luck next week when we go to our usual spots.