In other news, my mushroom experiment is now declared to be a success. Back in May, I pressure-cooked some sawdust, put it in a plastic bag and added some of the goop from Christmas Kit.

Since then, I've diligently watered it and watched it do nothing.

Last week I did some reading on Oyster mushrooms and finally grocked what I learned back in college.

The trick with mushrooms is that the part we see is the last, dying gasp of a mushroom that's afraid it's going to perish. The bulk of the mushroom is tiny threads deep in the soil or tree-bark or such. This part of the thing will happily just grow as long as there's food and water.

But, when the food wears out, or the water dries up, These threads all join together to make a mushroom which pumps out spores that just might find new, fertile ground to grow in.

I'd given my little mushroom farm plenty of nice cherry sawdust, and kept it watered. Why would it want to leave home?

So, I opened the baggie so it could dry out and stopped watering it so much, and presto - mushrooms!

A little more looking, and it turns out that cardboard is a suitable medium for growing blue-grey oyster mushrooms.

Physicists claim that the commonest element is hydrogen.

Here on Earth, we know that the commonest elements are Amazon delivery boxes and plastic storage containers with a missing lid.

So I chopped up an Amazon box, sacrificed a couple small plastic storage containers, and we'll see what happens.

The quantity of mushrooms I got from the kit hardly justified the cost of the kit, but I've gotten way more than 20 bucks worth of fun and learning out of it.

Now to put this into a story somehow... Then the kit will completely pay for itself.