wasn't it just a few days ago i was delivery an angry rant about working on the weekend? so guess what? i worked all day today! the weather looked clear enough to go out but i knew it was bitterly cold, so instead i stayed indoors all day. in order to make myself feel better, i decided to go on an online shopping spree and spent nearly $2000. it wasn't exactly a spree, more like paying a bunch of bills online (mortgage, utilities), but i did buy some stuff from overstock.com. last night i discovered a great deal on an ATI radeon 7500 video card to replace the ATI rage 128 pro that's been kicking around inside my old 400mhz G4. i have a bigger dream, to one day buy a 20-22" LCD display, but first i needed enough graphic processing power to be able to run a big screen like that. i got two, one for my father and one for myself (at $60 a piece), then picked out a few dvd's, a ps2 game, and some books (all of which will be revealed once i receive them).

anyway, the spree ended rather quickly, and faced with the rest of afternoon with nothing to do, i decided to do the unthinkable and - gulp - get a head start on some work for next week. the work's for client B, and one of the reasons why i've been putting it off is because it's one of those projects where i don't get paid by the hour but rather by a predetermined sum, and the more hours i work on the project the less i make. did that make sense? i actually worked on it pretty hard today, didn't finish until midnight, got about 75% of it done, hopefully enough to keep the client at bay for about a day.

well, you won't be seeing mushrooms on these pages anytime soon: i finally harvested them tonight! my parents came over today for dinner, and we had my mushrooms. my father got the honor of detaching it from the bag and then cooking it up, thin-sliced sauteed with butter, fresh-chopped garlic, and a bit of salt. it was a hit, everyone said it tasted like crunchy meat, i just wish i had more. the mushrooms are only supposed to bloom twice, and this was the second time, but maybe there might be a third crop.

i discovered something today about the mushrooms: they were actually releasing spores! i knew that was the function of the mushrooms, and with so many gills, you'd think there'd be a cloud of mushroom dust inside the humidity tent. i was looking on the stool that i've been resting my mushroom on (siting on a plate of water), and at first i thought it was just dust, but it had a whiter consistency, and was almost like lint. it had a faint odor, wasn't unpleasant, didn't smell like mushrooms though, slightly organic. apparently they were releasing a lot of spores, i just never noticed.