I'm Back!!!

I hope everyone has had a great summer vacation. I spent my days cleaning, painting, re potting, exploring and having a great time. Chris, the dogs and I were able to take a long weekend at my family's cottage in northern Wisconsin in July. It was so much fun being able to be out and catching up on all the wonderful things going on in everyone's lives. We went "geocaching," have you heard of it? Basically its a scavenger hunt that is connected to GPS. You're told how far and the direction to walk. Once you are "over the geocache" you get other clues ("look under a rock" or "climb.") It was a lot of fun searching even if we never found it and got a little lost. It reaffirms that you should always take the same path in and out and if you have a cell phone... make sure it's charged. Another highlight from the trip was the amazing finds on my mycology foray. I found SO many mushrooms and other various fungi. I was stunned and kept running back to the house to show them off. The top two would have to be a giant Laetiporus sulphureus or "Chicken of the Woods" which is pictured below. This fungus is a heart rot, meaning it infects the trunk of mature trees through the roots and makes its way up 20-40 feet above the forest floor. That is where the giant blooms of orange tissue usually emerge but I was lucky enough to find 25lbs of it on a fallen tree the day after a huge storm. I was reeling with excitement. I brought a few pounds into class for soup day. It was so delicious and I was trying everyones, I probably ate a couple pounds of cream of mushroom that day. The second best find would definitely be the "Indian Pipes" I stumbled across on the geocaching trip. Now if you don't know about these rare and extraordinary flowers listen up. These are blooming plants that do not use photosynthesis to grow. From the research I have done not a whole lot is known about these miraculous plants but it is believed that they feed off dead fungus. I had always thought that they were always and only pure white. After all this is what I've seen in almost every picture I've looked at but on this trip out, the rarest of the rare was found... PINK Indian Pipes(pictured above.) I was blown away. A) I had just seen them for the first time ever only a few hours earlier and B) I had just found something I had never seen in any book or on any website. Other than our vacation north, I spent most of the summer redecorating our apartment, I won't get into too much of that now as there will be many blogs in the future with more on this. But my collection of plants quickly grew to 75 and I have just started really getting into carnivorous plants. They're super neat. Classes started almost 2 months ago and I am in love with Pastry school. We're having so much fun baking cookies and eclairs and quick breads and learning lot's of new stuff from fabulous instructors. It gets cooler and cooler everyday and I am so excited to be there.
So what's next? Well I have a lot in store for y'all.Autumn crafts, pumpkin and apple picking, tons of decorating tips with lot's of pictures from the "new" apartment and much, much more. I can never understand why people complain about the weather, "Oh I hate that winter is coming..." blah blah blah. I love it all! The idea of the leaves changing and cooler winds moving through gets my heart fluttering. I am so anxious to carve pumpkins and decorate for holidays and spend cold nights cuddled up with a movie and the four I love the most. Winter is nothing to fear, it's beautiful and enchanting and we should embrace it, not fear it. Complaining only creates misery. But all in good time, right? We don't want to speed through and miss out on the glory of autumn, one of my favorite seasons. So YES! Lot's lot's more to follow. We'll get started slowly tomorrow with plants and the benefits they have on the body and soul. Goodnight and hoping everyone enjoyed their summers as much as I did.