Fungi Foraging Friday, Solar Stereo

On Friday morning, I puttered around, working on the house some more. I was testing my hope that I could run some of our electronic gizmos right from the battery power. But while I was hauling speakers up to the house from the car, I saw Bekah, Karma, Rosie and about 4 dogs walking through “our” pasture. They were on their way to forage for Mushrooms.

I put down what I was doing, grabbed a hat and camera, and caught up.

Karma is apparently a trained mycologist, and she delights in finding edible fungi in the forest to sell at Saturday market. Little Rosie seems to be a pretty trained mycologist, too:

It was wonderful being in the forest. The smells, colors, sounds… not like the forests I know from Wisconsin, but familiar still. These are more boggy; Bekah thinks it’s because they were not too long ago logged. The trees are a mix of pretty young and some old, but the old are remains of “wind rows” put in by some previous generations of farmers. The forests that I know have been “forest” for much longer. And, I think that the land is less swampy. There are even ruins of old farm buildings. A dairy we think, or maybe a sugar-house.

Amazing thing, though: no mosquitos. Even with about 2 weeks of on-and-off rain, even with shady, brambly forest, even with standing water and muck abound, there were no mosquitos. This, I cannot compute.

After lunch, Bekah went back to work, and so did I (ahem. not). I did hook up my cheesy little $30 portable music amplifier, which I had been using in NYC with a power adapter when my neat old tube amp stopped working. This thing is designed to be battery-powered, but can run off of a wall-wart, too. Audio nerds seem to think that this little thing has sound quality rivaling multi-thousand dollar equipment. Of course, they take all the cheap plastic parts out and replace them with hand-wrapped silver coils and junk like that. I have the “old school” original parts in mine.

*BUT* the cool thing is that this little guy expects a wall-wart that makes 12V DC. Guess what our solar system makes?

So we now have a solar stereo (that sounds like a french new-wave band: Stéreo et Solár) that seems to be so efficient that the power controller doesn’t even register its draw. This with my best speakers, no less.

Which has me thinking about how to get our music libraries (which are all on hard-disc) back into the picture, solar-like, too. Hmmm…

I dig this free energy thing. You know, when the man says “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” that’s true. But the same man says “there’s no such thing as free,” and that’s false. The sun is free, for everyone and everything. Nobody can own it yet, sell it yet, or turn it off. Yet. And it’s the source of simply *everything* on this planet. All warmth, all life, all food, all matter, all energy, all wealth and all economic activity… everything. And there’s more than enough of it to go around, if we could use it wisely. No wonder we used to worship the sun.

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Tags: foraging, mushrooms, rosie, solar power, tinkering

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