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Ancient, mystical folk medicine of olden lore has it that small amounts of poison can actually be beneficial for the body, giving its immune system a swift kick in the proverbial rear end. This appears to have happened with Wife. The mushroom lunch seems to have given her renewed vigor and, apparently cured of the Plague or whatever it was, announced that we were to head out for more (mushrooms that is, not more Plague).

We drove to a different area today, one that showed up on Wife's mushroom radar quite clearly. Daughter brought a friend with her, and the two of them busied themselves finding beetles and giving them names (I suppose you, too, have named your beetles Diamond, Gemstone and Hugo at one point in your life). I took the responsibility of watching over our parked car, making sure the stereo still works, and eating a bar of Milka chocolate (emergency rations in case we got lost while mushroom picking) before it had a chance to go bad. That left Wife to traipse into the forest for 45 - 60 minutes at a time. Pickings were, however, a bit slim. It hasn't rained for a while, thus much of what she found was a bit old and past its prime (even the blackberry and blueberry bushes were pretty much bare). Her basket was only half full after a few forays. I pointed out that there were a number of giant mushrooms next to where we had parked the car, and these were sufficient to fill the basket.

With our Basket of Death complete we headed back home. This time, with about 12 different kinds of mushrooms, Wife wasn't 100% sure whether all were edible. Her motto is "Not a mushroom left behind", so she sorts them out at home. Eventually she handed three kinds to me and told me to find them on the web. I clarified only one; there is no central, definitive, easy-to-use site on the internet for identifying types. But while at Wikipedia I did run across an explanation about the Slavic mania for mushrooms, which I think will help me understand my own wife better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_picking_in_Slavic_culture

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The Huangyangtan thing is sleeping at this point. Will it wake up someday, will we ever learn what the site's function is? About 150 people per day read the forum post, and no new news or blog entries about it are showing up.