Yeah. Well.

The thing about not having been deployed over the last eight years is that the deployable pool has gotten shallower over each of those years. By this time, we've been aware that this was going to happen at some point. But the last word was "Probably within the next two years" and "Most likely Afghanistan."

Now it's "Probably within the next six months" and still "Most likely Afghanistan." Which, given the news in the last couple of days, makes me sick to my stomach. Not that it's ever been that safe of a place.

So let's talk about something else, like mushrooms.

I grew up with a shelf of field guides and a mom who knew how to use them. Her interest was mainly trees and wildflowers, so by the third grade I knew trees by sight the way most kids learn the words for chair and table.

When I went to college, I considered getting an English degree. But then I had a flash of myself standing in a school trying to teach English, and the instant I got to college, I changed my major to horticulture.

By the end of my degree studies, I could rattle off the scientific names of a couple of hundred cultivated plants, everything from Asparagus esculentus to Zinnia elegans.

When I got married, I married a guy with a family tradition of foraging for edible mushrooms. Not just the easy obvious morels, which you have to work very hard and delude yourself greatly to get wrong, but the tasty stumpers or honey fungus, Armillaria mellea.

We joined a not-so-local mycological society, with a lot of knowledgeable mushroom experts, and learned more of the edible and yes, deadly species that grew in our often damp and rainy state.

For a while we were on the local hospital's list of people they could call if someone brought in a case of suspected mushroom poisoning.

It was a great group, and we enjoyed their forays (and their potlucks!) greatly. Sad to say, the group disbanded about four years ago.

So it's always interesting to come across a species that we don't immediately recognize.

And oh, yeah, knitting.Almost to the end of chart B. Which is boring. (I can say that now that I am almost done with it.)

And I'm up to a dozen needles in this one. I'm using pieces of wide rubber band on the ends, a tip I learned from knitting designer Diane Willett at our last lace group meeting.

I have longer circ.s on order from Knit Picks. Until they get here, I'll just add needles until I run out.