Guests for dinner tonight. I had planned to bbq but it’s cold and rainy so instead….
Yum.
This is a Merle Travis tune, but I started off with Weird Bob Dylan and Joan Baez from way back in 1975.
Here’s Mr. Travis:
And of course, Tennessee Ernie Ford:
Ernie Ford built a career around another Merle Travis tune, 16 Tons…I guess we’d better hear that one too:
Back to Dark as a Dungeon, here’s a lovely version by Annie & Mac:
I like this one too:
Finally, here’s The Maddox Boys and Rose. This one sends chills down my spine:
Ellie Mae is blowing her winter coat. Tonight, I raked spectacular amounts of hair off her. She enjoyed the brushing immensely.
There are lots of rivers but this is the one I mean when I just say The River. Today was the opener of trout season and I worked an old favourite stretch I don’t fish much any more. It was lovely to reaquaint myself with this part of the river again. We just call it The Brook Trout water. There may be a reader or two out there who knows what I’m talking about.
There were two mayfly emergences happening today, a really good hatch of blue-winged olives and a so-so hatch of a fly we call the hendrickson. It was a beautiful afternoon and the trout were cooperating too. I looked around in a few places for morels while I was there, but saw none.
Sad news. Canadian painter David Bolduc has died from brain cancer. He was just 65.
I started foraging for mushrooms last year, sometime after morel season, so this will be the first year I’ll be out there looking for those strange brain-like mushrooms. Yesterday after work, I took the dogs out for a little field trip to see if perhaps I could find the first black morels of the season. Of course, I haven’t established any spots yet, so I’m foraging blind. I went to a local place where the dogs could swim while I looked around in the woods. The forest seemed very dry for any kind of mushrooms and I didn’t find anything. The trouble is that I don’t know if I didn’t find any because it was too early yet in the season, it was simply a bad spot, or because I just couldn’t find the mushrooms that were in fact around.
Don’t discount the possibility that the mushrooms were there and I couldn’t see them. I learned last year that spotting various mushrooms can be tricky. Last year, my brother Salvelinas had been finding Hypomyces lactifluorum, the lobster mushroom, for weeks before I came up with even one. In most forests they aren’t obvious, hiding under leaf litter, showing just a glint of red, the colour of cooked lobsters. After I spotted a few, I found I could see them very easily, and even spot them from a distance.
Unlike fungi such as the lobster which appear through much of the summer, morels can flush just once each season. For the intrepid mushroom hound, that means that nobody will ever give up a spot. Find a morel spot nobody has stumbled on before and you can return there every year and likely be successful foraging for these delicacies.
Rain is predicted for Sunday. I’m hoping we get lots and lots of it. I’ll be out in the woods with the dogs next Friday, and I’m hoping to come home with my first morels. I wonder if any readers of this blog forage for morels in the spring? If so, I’d love to hear about it. I’m also interested in how you like to prepare wild mushrooms.
Tomorrow, trout season opens in Ontario. Good thing because I’ve got the Deep River Blues. Here’s Doc Watson:
I understand the airline industry is after some compensation because they couldn’t fly with all the volcanic ash in the air. That tells me that if the regulatory people didn’t stop them, they would happily have sent plane-loads of people up in that crap. Now if they flew and a few planes crashed, they’d blame the regulators for not stopping them.
Sorry guys, but you can’t blame anyone for this. Safety first please and thank you.
Here’s Clifton Chenier and his band. Video quality is poor but in my mind it doesn’t matter. Enjoy.
For a guy who played live a lot, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of video material kicking around. Here he is many years earlier…
This one offers me a banner image that is 50 pixels deeper. I’m going to try it out for a while and we’ll see how it works out. It also gives me a handy edit post button on the site, which the previous theme did not.
27th Street 