On Thursday, Halloween, I found three puffball mushrooms at the side of the canal towpath:



One of them, 5" diameter, became part of dinner that night. The little one went into a stew yesterday. The big one, 6" diameter, awaits its fate tonight.

Interesting. Since you ate them last night and are alive to post about it, I guess they're safe. I don't have mushroom knowledge, so for me it would be too risky

I went googling for "puffball mushroom" and found this video.
Jump to 2:20 to see him sitting there with a lapful of them.

Puffballs, along with Morels, are so distinctive that they're often recommended as 'starter' mushrooms for novice hunters. It's really difficult to confuse a giant puffball for anything else (except maybe an errant volleyball). The only trick is to determine if they've begun setting spore; they're good to eat up until that point.

cool! now I have a little bit more mushroom knowledge than I used to!

It's a shame you're so far away from the temperate forests most mushrooms call home...

yeah we see mushrooms on lawns sometimes that look kinda like storebought button mushrooms, but without expertise I'm not gonna chance it

RubeRad, where in san diego?

Westbound Mercy Rd, just a few hundred yards west of I-15

The construction that was blocking off the right lane was gone the next day, but some long grooves in the road (going the same direction as the road), like 3-4" wide, hastily 'filled' not quite all the way up with cement, like they planned to come back and scrape that back out and finish whatever job they were doing.

I found a decent pair of small needle-nosed pliers the other day on my commute home. They were laying in the middle of the right lane. Quiet street, so they had not been run over and beat up yet.

Makes me wonder how many people died over the years until we sorted out which mushrooms are safe to eat and which aren't.

There was a famous case in the late 80s in Portland where multiple persons ate mushrooms in an Asian stir-fry at a dinner party. They had been picked by some of the dinner party guests. The result of the party was multiple liver transplants. Oops. Wild mushrooms are no joke.

While definitely off topic, the answer is likely thousands. Most wild edible guides advise against eating anything you're not sure about, and also provide tips for testing items you're curious about. First tip is to taste a little before you consume, and pay attention to sensations in your mouth. The vast majority of plants out there are simply unpalatable (tannins too high, too little digestible content). Most poisonous items you can consume will give you an upset stomach in … various fashions (tomato vegetative portions, green potatoes, pokeweed berries); only a handful can truly mess you up with organ failure, pulmonary depression, or cardiac arrest (datura, water hemlock, etc.)
There are a number of … objectionable edibles that require specific cooking methods; both acorns and skunk cabbage are edible after boiling in multiple changes of water. It is recommended that you cook any gathered mushroom before eating. Cooking is a Human superpower, along with language.

^^^ The Indians around here lived on acorns until the Spaniards showed up and made them grow grains. We had about ten oak trees of two varieties at my last house so I looked into how to make them edible. Hull and grind and soak. The likely result didn't seem appealing enough to go try it. I sure did put a lot of acorns in the green-waste bin, though, and I was yanking little baby oak trees all spring every year.

Today, I found a monocular. (Not a monacle!) I figured it was something nice so I asked other trail users about it as I made my way. It's non zooming, 10x magnification. I looked up the model when I got to work, and it's a Chinese brand of no provenance, MSRP was $35 but Big 5 blew them out for $8 ten or more years ago. So I guess I'll play with it, or maybe give it to my kid so he can.

Interesting, had to look it up. Why not just call it a telescope?

It's a subset of telescope (like spotter scope or spy glass or Hubble). Distinction of a monocular is smallness and low magnification. This one does not have a prism and is heavy AF for its size, the body must be some pretty thick steel and I can understand why it's cheap.

It wasn't looking straight or focusing so I took it apart. Turns out it does have a prism... that piece is loose inside though. It looks like there should be a spacer or spring between it and the eye piece that is missing. The threads of the eye piece are boogered up too.

Sounds like you actually found some neat- looking trash.

From the seat of a bicycle, one creature I have never spotted is a mole. But today, here is this guy, intact but stone dead on the MUP.

I kind of enjoy thinking of things like this as omens. Here is a mole, a creature of night and dirt, on pavement in daylight, and he didn't make it. Am I about to be turned out of my comfortable obscurity, into danger?

Is that a pointy nose or a pointy tail on the right? and what's that third 'leg' on the left?

Snout was on the left. Now down. For some reason rotation state changed when I cropped... shrug.

What a strange little creature.

Ah, closeup makes it clearer.

My family always enjoyed being disgusted by the Naked Mole Rats at the zoo

Returning on the bike highway from the overnight trip, I saw lots of dead rodents along the edge. Voles and mice. I didn't stop to see if there were any marks on the corpses, but it struck me as odd that there'd be so many apparently unfinished meals along the edge of the trail. Could a biologist shed some light on harvest time mass mortality?

Used to commute on a road in Sonoma County where I would ride by the usual assortment of dirty magazines, but also packaging for items from adult stores. Like the person (dude) would buy stuff, then throw the box out the window. The volume was really pretty weird. Only useful thing I found was a pocket knife. It all seemed to come to an end when I found a pink cardboard box containing... a pair of white, leather baby shoes! Really bizarre. Roberts Road.

Who leaves baby shoes behind???

I saw a dead bat once; tiny little thing.