How do we balance worldly awareness with our own personal sanity? This year more than ever, Miss Kelsey Mort finds solace in the mushroom “promise lands” in our little chunk of the Sierras. A county native, she can usually be found sharing her wealth of knowledge with locals and tourists alike at the Yorba tasting room, where she and I have carved a relationship of deep conversations based on curiosity and jest.

In this episode, Kelsey shares insight into the magical world of mushroom foraging: “Until I see that first morel of the day, I always worry that I can’t see them anymore. It’s like magic how they almost come into being like ‘there you are!’ and until you see that first one you always worry that maybe you don’t have the magic anymore.” We also discuss small town life, leaving things better than you found it, and how the movie Zoolander was way ahead of its time. Kelsey says, “Rewatch it now, Nerds, ‘cause it’s going to hit a lot of buttons!”

Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, we get a brief cameo from Lucy the Dog and the Yorba meister herself, Ann Kraemer, which is hopefully a foreshadowing that we can get her on the show eventually, too (:

And, if I didn’t freaking say it enough throughout this episode… mushrooms are aliens.