Morels

Most mushroom hunting happens during the fall when the warm earth and late summer rains bring out tremendous varieties of mushrooms. However, there is one delicious type of mushroom that only fruits in the spring -- morels.

They are notoriously difficult to spot and are quite finicky. Some years Oregon boasts bumper crops of morels. But not this year. The winter and spring have been unusually dry, so spring mushrooms have been few and far between.  Furthermore, morels grow slowly, so if they have all been collected from an area, they might not return during this growing season.

However, morels like forest fires. And that's where we found them this weekend - at the base of partially burned conifer trees from last year's fire season.

After some intense searching, and with the aid of local experts, we did come up with enough for a tasty dinner.

Birthday present

I recently celebrated my 65th birthday. A momentous one! I am now the proud holder of a Medicare card. And as you have probably guessed by now, I don't mind at all. I've never felt better, or more alive. So I decided to take another big step and buy myself a very special birthday gift. . . . just to show that old dogs can learn new tricks!

I've been a PC user for 34 years. Yes! we bought our first IBM compatible in 1981 - back in the days of 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, 256 K of RAM, with CPM and DOS as the installed operating system . . . No color monitor, no hard drive, no network, no wifi; printers a pain to install -- you get the idea. There were no real applications, word processing was a joke, and there were certainly no digital photos to edit. No Windows, no mouse, no graphical user interface. Yes, back in the Dark Ages of computing. But I learned to use the cumbersome beast - especially after I went to work in 1985 selling computers in a dedicated computer store (do you remember those?) And so my knowledge grew as the industry evolved - later working for companies such as Adobe Systems and Sun Microsystems (I even used UNIX).

But now, after all this time, my Toshiba laptop is on its last legs - taking a full five minutes just to boot up.

So, after hesitating for almost a year, I went to the local Best Buy store and spoke to a young man who condescended to inform me of my computer options. "Sonny, (did I really call him that?!) I've been using a computer since before you were born. But now I'm ready for a change. I want to buy a Mac.

After acknowledging that indeed, he wasn't yet born when I bought my first computer, he went on to answer the questions I had regarding compatibility with my current files and applications. And several minutes later I walked out with my new MacBook Pro with Retina screen (awesome for editing photos).

So far, the experience has been even better than I imagined. Instant synchronization with my iPhone, no problem with document compatibility, and access to all of my photos on an external disk drive is a breeze. Great speakers for music. etc, etc. I love it!

And so I begin my 66th year starting fresh. New toys, a clean hard drive, a new start. Life is good.