Yes, I have indeed read anne rice. She is a good writer.Shame about her ending up getting infected with xtianity and starting to rub herself off using a prayer book.
As for a living, I get some money (although not nearly enough) from the govt due to disability (kneee being fucked up, and being autie...not that I would want to be any other way)...that aside, there is my lab work, and some engineering stuff. Making guitar parts, and parts for tools used to make/repair guitars on an old dinosaur of a capstan lathe. It was old when my father got it, but its still functional quite perfectly. My prescriptions I get for free due to getting the right disability benefits.
And of course, if there is legal gear I want, I have the skills necessary to do a synth myself. I'm pretty handy with a ser of glassware. I can think of few things I enjoy more than spending a quiet, chilled out day in front of a RBF with my latest project refluxing away . Maybe spending all day hiking in the woods, searching for wild mushrooms, but walking, or bending down to pick something fucking kills my hip.
Icequeen...I wish! I LOVE morels. I was lucky enough once, at my previous home, when the garden was mulched with woodchips, to have a gluttonous morel feast, when tons of Morchella elata, the black morel, sprang up all over the garden. Few things taste better than fillet or rump steak, slathered in a marinade of worchestershire sauce, hot brown devil's sauce, soy sauce, teriyaki marinade, and half a bottle each of tabasco and tabasco habanero sauce, with a morel and fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) gravy (they are poisonous raw, but when heat cured and dried the toxic ibotenic acid converts to the psychotropic muscimol, an orthosteric GABAa and GABAc receptor agonist....and also lends an excellent savoury, meaty taste; what the japanese call 'umami'. Good medicine too, a tea made from cured fly agaric makes an excellent tonic, which boosts endurance, gives resistance to cold and can induce relaxation and sleep, and unlike all commercial sleeping pills, does not disrupt sleep architecture. I harvest bag after bag of the fly agaric every year from under silver birch trees in one of my favourite hiking spots in a local wood. There is a nice little glade there too, which I love to sprawl out in at the base of a tree, spark a nice juicy doob and take a nap after spending the day picking, just watching the world go by, before going to sleep for a bit.
I take it you are a fellow mycophage, icequeen? I've been picking since I was about age 4-5 or so, having taught myself what is safe, what is loaded with poison, and of course, what is good to eat. Anything I'm not sure about, I take to the lab, where I can test my pickings with various reagents, and stick some samples on a slide, then bung them under the microscope. I have a pretty damn good one; that under the oil immersion lens, can go right up to 2000x magnification. Shows up cell nuclei pretty well. Although I need to buy more stains when I get paid again, and I need to synth some chloral hydrate to prepare some more Melzer's reagent, although I'm out of potassium iodide and need more.
