On our way to my friend Nicole's wedding. (More pictures to follow, or surf over to cottonmanifesto for hers.)


In other news, I keep getting comments to my 365 Urban Species posts, from two years ago. I like that people are still discovering it, but I'm noticing a certain consistency within these comments: Mostly they are anonymous, which always bothers me. I know that if someone comments who isn't on livejournal it will call them anonymous even if they aren't trying to be sneaky, but I wish these people would sign their comments. I think the least a person can do, if they are trying to communicate with you, is identify themselves.

There are two types of comments: The kind where someone says "Eek! I just found one of these!" (usually on the woodlouse spider post); sometimes these people want to know how to keep the creature from their house, or sometimes they ask a natural history question that's answered by the post itself. The other kind, of which, distressingly, I received two yesterday, are the "You identified this incorrectly" ones. (Always on a fungus or plant entry.) I should be happy to get these, since (if they are correct) I learn something from them, but they do sting a bit.

I'm particularly nagged by my wood ear entry, describing a common wood-decay mushroom that you can find even in the winter in Boston. Except that it appears that what I've been finding and photographing may not be Auricularia at all, instead an unrelated but lookalike mushroom called Exidia. What bugs me is that I've passed on this misinformation to many others, on nature walks as well as online. I'll have to sit down with my field guides and study the differences, so that I can confidently say whether we have both varieties in our area, or just the one that isn't the one I've been telling everyone we have.

1. I'm pleased to see that after the Atheist Apocalypse there are still pigeons. It wouldn't have killed the cartoonist to change it to an American robin, but hey, I haven't given up the room in my heart for pigeons.

2. On account of the exciting mortgage crisis (Low income people out on the street! Bailouts for Wall Street Usury firms!) our options for where to move have temporarily expanded. Here's a question I asked on thequestionclub with predictably binary results (considering the binary nature of the question): You have two choices about where to buy a house. You have a 300k budget. Do you a) Buy a tiny house with no yard in Oakland California or b) buy a nice house with a gigantic yard 30 miles outside of Austin Texas?