Today we had brunch with Norma and David, Stewart's parents, who were in town to receive another award for their building, and to meet up with the guy who runs Hollyhock, an Esalen*-style workshop and retreat center where they conduct things like Aldous Huxley seminars and The Art of Didjeridu Playing. In spite of having lived for 8 years on the West Coast, I still don't go in for that kind of thing, preferring to organize my own chi, eschew macramé and maintain my customary demeanour, which has been described as unrelaxed.

Norma brought us the catalog anyway, which included a seminar that I just have to take, Mushrooms from the Forest to your Table taught by Andrew Weil and Paul Stamets. I have no idea who this Andrew Weil character is, but Paul Stamets! He's the author of The Mushroom Cultivator and Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, as well as a bunch of other books I haven't read.

Close Readers** of Caterina.net will remember that I got really into mushrooms after finding a Calvatia gigantea on my lawn one morning, 20 inches across, which hadn't been there the night before. I was even a member of the Mycological Society of San Francisco for a while. One of my many plans for retirement (though first I'd have to get a job to retire from) includes finding a way to grow chanterelles and morels, which are well nigh impossible to cultivate; the reason they're so expensive is they have to be found growing wild. David said he's never understood why all these scientists are cloning sheep. What would he clone? Truffles.

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* Amazingly, they still have the site up that I designed in 1996 (based on an earlier design), though it didn't have the sidebar or that nasty scrolling banner thingy, just the calligraphy and the four images. I think this is the only design from my Organic days that is still extant -- tellingly, it belongs to a non-profit.

** Does anyone remember that really irritating part in Lolita where Nabokov, in a bid for Total Authorial Insufferability, writes something like, "The murdered man (close readers already know his name)..."? I remember the crumpling of my little bookwormed heart when I realized I didn't, in fact, know his name...