09 Jun 01

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The Silver Coin Test

You know, something funny happens when you get short-timer's. Your job gets better, you get bolder, and sometimes, things get funner.

I first heard the term short-timer's when I was in the Army. It refers to an attitude a person gets when they know they will be gone soon. Lots of things they used to worry about are no longer consequential. Sometimes they say things like, "What are they gonna do? Fire me?"

Thursday I did something kind of fun. Mushrooms had popped up in the flower beds at a sales office again. They were annoying me. Rather than wait for the landscaper again, and initiate another row about how soon and who notified, etc. etc., I just took a trash bag and did it myself.

The first several mushrooms broke off at the stem as I plucked them. I'm no gardener, but intuitively this struck me as wrong, so I sifted the mulch with my fingers to get at the knotty white fibrous root left in the ground. My de-mushrooming technique got better and better, as I sifted up the bases of whole clumps of them at once. It only took something like fifteen minutes to get them all.

The sales assistant said that if her father were there, he'd cook them. I wondered if they were edible and she told me how he found out. She said he'd slice and fry mushrooms up with a silver dollar. If the coin tarnished, he'd discard the mushrooms as poisonous, but if it stayed bright, he knew they were safe to eat.

DO NOT TAKE THIS STORY AS GOSPEL! Please nobody eat any mushrooms you find just because a silver coin remained untarnished while you cooked them. I am just relating a story here, ok? I am just saying. Don't want any mushroom related deaths on my hands.

Anyway, I found the story interesting, and I found the impromptu gardening relaxing. I was in the shade of the house, and thus avoided being burned.

The Merriam-Webster Word of the Day is:

hypocorism

My name, Spring, is a hypocorism. It's not on my birth certificate, but it's how I am known, hell even how I know myself. Hypocorism is simply a fancy word for a pet name. Other recent words of the day have been hoodwink, restaurateur, commensurate, mayhap, and bucolic. 

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