Pasithea

--Life--
Well. I ate the lactarius last night and thus far, I'm still alive so things are looking good. :) Actually, I don't think there are any seriously poisonous members of lactarius family. About the worst they'll give you is a serious case of 'tastes like burning' or upset stomach. None the less, I prefer to be 100% certain of my identifications before eating mushrooms.

On the whole... Would definitely eat again. They're easy to identify and pretty good as a snack. I minced garlic and stuffed the caps with it, then sauteed them in olive oil for about 15 minutes. Sadly, cooking removes most of their beautiful color but other than that, they're pretty pleasantly crunchy and nutty tasting. Kind of between water chestnut and woodear fungus. It's possible that steaming and pickling wouldn't suck their color out. May have to try that with the next ones I find.

--Song--
I've been thinking about memorizing a few songs for flute and ocarina. Mostly like irish and american folk tunes. Problem is, I can't find any good books on the subject. There are lots of collections but I'm not really quite good at reading sheet music and humming it to get a good idea what it sounds like. I've picked up old music books in the past only to find that they have a weird scoring or that they're abbreviated or truncated pieces. So I don't really know where to begin looking.

I have come up with a backup plan though. I went searching for free sheet music online and stumbled across a large archive of bad midi versions of various folk songs.... PERFECT! The MIDI gives me an idea what it might sound like and I can convert midi to sheet music. Then I just need to adjust the music to the proper keys for the various instruments. ... Now I wonder if there's a program I can use to shift the key of a score. Possibly I can do it in Garage Band. Hmm. I'm open to suggestions.