Nordberry Nosh

Nordberry Nosh

Copyright August 2023 by Fit529 Dotcom

Started 4/1/2022

Disclaimer:

Everyone is over 18 years old.

Everyone's name has been replaced with the exact opposite.

Since this occurs in an identical alternate universe, even if there is a company with the same name, it's not the same company since they are not here and here is not there.

== Preface: Midvale College

Midvale College operates on the tertiary education model of 9 class periods per day, and even lightweight classes happening every day M-F.

Midvale was founded as a healthcare-oriented college so all majors require continuous enrollment in physical education ("gym") as well as either an art (for art therapy) or a music class (band or chorus).

Freshman year, anatomy classes are required for all majors, which require students be over age 18, so there can't be under-18's enrolled.

Since Sudbury Ontario is remote, at least half of Sudbury High Students graduate then just enroll at Midvale, becoming 'townies' living with their parents.

The other half of students live in dorms on Midvale's 3-city-block sized campus on the edge of town.

== Chapter: Summer Botany ==

My freshman year at Midvale I took the first two botany courses BOT 110 (plant names) and BOT 144 (MORE plant names). Graduation required I do a summer course, BOT 207, Botanical Cataloging, which required a 3 week long field trip to the far Ontario north.

I was stoked! I loved botany. I was (am?) an Eagle Scout and had done my project on wetlands restoration, so my interest was early and my hiking capability... sufficient.

That BOT 207 course required a specialization focus and I was assigned funguses & lichens, so I quickly got as familiar as I could be with what those looked like before we left.

The goals were to find, photograph, catalog, sample, and document every freakin' living plant we run across; bring back the samples, and do any analysis in the lab during the final week.

My major was environmental engineering, a health science because spills, toxins, mining waste, and red-tides are a huge public health risk.

We left on time, well packed and free transport provided by the college. After a bus ride, several float plane trips got all of us to a central camp and we hiked our way back to civilization. If you're not clued-in about Sudbury or Ontario in general, yeah, well, it's freakin' huge. Sudbury is 7 hours north of Detroit... and every other city, too. Where we went? Way out there.

The trip went off without a hitch, aside from two people getting a light case of food poisoning from eating a few unripe elderberries. Those make for nausea and vomiting but do no lasting damage in small doses. Everyone learned a valuable lesson on that one.

I collected a HUGE amount of fungus samples (both 'fruiting body' above ground and some underground mycelium sufficient to culture them at home).

My major laugh was that the fruiting body of the mushrooms wasn't quite like the wild raspberries and other berries the others collected, but we were all collecting fruit of a type.

The analogy broke down when we talked about pine cones as tree fruit.

Did I mention that there's a completely different standard for humor when you're hiking in the woods and it's really, really boring?

We each had a pack at the end with our own samples of things we were going to study for our papers, and tons of pictures of places where each plant grew. Our samples had to be clearly labeled, geolocated, and formal paperwork filled out, it's the point of the expedition.

Getting back to Sudbury, we organized our findings and turned in our projects, and I got over 100% because the prof allowed extra credit and I was ALL OVER that, Top of my Game, I loved the projects and it showed.

Still, the prof was intrigued with some of my samples and said that if I cultured them I could write other papers on just those samples, and if so, he'd sponsor me for Advanced Studies BOT 588, which I could publish and would be great cred on a resume or an application for a master's.

I LOVED that idea.

Over the next few months, I did a bunch of follow-up research on the samples. I'd found four separate unidentifiable fungal types that were possibly new species. The botany instructor had said I would need a significant sample size and good 'characterization' of its growth patterns, food sources, appearance, etc.

My samples were small. I had to carry them in a backpack!

To do that I'd need to grow more.

This presented a problem. How does one grow a fungus? I had to have a climate controlled environment similar to the forest, decaying wood and peat and/or animal dung to feed it, and just some time.

Where to grow things?

Like most Midvale College students, I lived at home.

Now, our house had a big basement, unfinished when we moved in. I had taken it over when I started high school six years before this, since I didn't want to live next to my sisters (a year older, fraternal twins, Tina and Rita). They wanted to live in separate rooms, too, so I gave up my upstairs room to Rita in exchange for half the basement and their help fixing it up to make it a bedroom for me.

Mom and Dad both encouraged me heavily, since it would decrease the random fighting noise in the house, and because a fixed up basement did good things for their property values.

Dad also liked that I was 'learning a trade' doing construction/carpentry.

I wasn't as excited by that part. I was more into engineering than actual house-fixing, but some things just had to happen.

Mostly I wanted not to have to share the bathroom and have some peace and quiet from my sisters' boisterous disagreements. Sharing a room can't have been easy for them, either, I got that, but I knew it would make the house quieter to have me away from them.

My scientific paper mushroom-culture operation couldn't be in the main basement, it needed cold, so I moved it to the crawl space under the porch-addition, accessible from between my bedroom and the laundry room. It was closable to keep the cold outside air outside, but mostly sealed up so it would host my fungi nicely.

So, that's the back story of the culturing operation. The mycelium took off and grew mushrooms, some of the spores grew new kinds of mycelium and different red fungi, and I was a happy camper.

Mostly I left the samples alone and had a normal first half of my college sophomore year. I admit, I got distracted with schoolwork and trying to recover from a relationship breakup.

== Chapter: Winter Break Sophomore Year ==

I turned 20 in December, and had a busy month.

Starting with a birthday party with friends (a giant weekend-long D&D campaign that a friend of mine was DM for), it quickly led into concerts in chorus and band (I'm a bass in one and play French Horn in the other), my Mom and Dad's 25th wedding anniversary party, college applications, semester finals, christmas, my grandmother's birthday party, unofficial track/cross-country practice, and not-least, continuing work on the basement to get it fixed up nicer, like drywall mudding and painting.

I needed a vacation to rest up from my 'vacation'!

We had a few days after New Year's before school started, so (enforced by my busybody mother's 'To Do List'), I got the 'opportunity' to fix up some things around the house.

We'd moved to the house when I was in 4th grade, but SOOO many things were left undone and I just was getting Seriously Tired of the hassles of my living space.

First on the list was hanging a suspended ceiling over the basement rec room. I called it a 'TV area' but it was my new living room, and every time someone walked in the kitchen upstairs, it would creak.

Mom and Dad got all the materials, including sound-insulation batting that went above the ceiling tiles. As much as it was a giant pain, getting it done just meant screw hooks into the rafters, wire-hangers to cross-members, unrolling the thick-fiber sound insulation, and putting in the tiles.

Tile, after tile, after tile.

I'd mostly finished in the first 2 days - knocked it out just going straight, but I had to take a break and do something different.

Cleaning up, I remembered that I had my fungus-growth experiment still running in the crawl space, so I moved the ladder over to get it down and found I'd left my sealing-off styrofoam cracked open, probably for weeks! No wonder it had been cool in the basement!

The stuff I'd read was that it was important for the fungus to freeze, for its growth cycle, but despite it being a typical -20C day out, the area was damp from snow leaking in and melting.

Suffice to say, that much water, warmth, and food (I'd given it a thick growth media) meant it had grown WAY bigger than its container, and I had to carefully separate parts of it to get some inside to study.

Working with it took a while.

[[ MEDICAL NOTES ]]

During this handling, I didn't have gloves or other PPE on. I was aware there might be spores, but I didn't see any. In further study, spores have proved heavier than normal for most fungal species.

I most definitely made skin contact on my hands and forearms with the fungal fruiting bodies (mushrooms) as well as the mycelium 'root' structure. I sawed them with a common steak knife where needed, suspending some particles in the air I breathed. My skin touched freshly cut sections.

Almost certainly I touched other parts of my face and other items around me as I did this, and contaminated those surfaces.

Total working time: 20 minutes at the crawl space access door.

Handling afterwards in my downstairs kitchen took about 15 minutes. I had to rinse off my hands (though I didn't have soap by that sink, an oversight since I didn't use it often) and the growth medium is stinky and made from garden-center horse excrement purchased the previous fall.

I had named one of the samples / fungal species, 'Reetus', as an unkind reference to my semi-bothersome sister Rita.

The name was a misnomer, though, since it turned out to not be an insult - it was a beautiful, colorful, and interesting fungus with a complex underground structure despite an unassuming fruiting body (mushroom top) topped with two blue dots. These were unusual, very few things in nature are the color blue.

(There's a complicated biochemistry reason why, google it.)

Besides the blue colored dots, the mushrooms from the top looked very similar to several other species. What triggered my interest besides the blue was that the myceilium's colors were really vibrant shades.

That night, I put some razor-thin slices under my microscope (a $700 good-quality one my grandma bought for my sister before she changed from bio to chem). The digital pics were kind of cool, and I filed them away as exhibits for the paper, taking lots of notes about what prep I'd done and how. My prof had emphasized that it was super-important to note that stuff because figuring it out later is impossible and it can make or break whether a paper is published.

The botany prof had said: Everything has to be so clear that Absolutely Anyone can replicate your work.

That night, I utterly regretted my decision to mess around with the fungus without gloves on.

That was Wednesday, January 3rd. It started with red hands, and then a severe headache and then Really Really severe body and abdomen aches. My hands got better in short order, but ... I just couldn't stay awake, and the really nasty body aches continued.

My dreams, most of them, were seriously weird, extended, and clearly memorable, despite some being plainly violent (and others, happily, very erotic). I just slept and slept, getting up only to go to the bathroom and chug some protein powder drink mix.

The protein powder was strongly recommended by a friend from cross-country, who was convinced it would drop everyone's times fast. It hadn't. It was seriously bland and I didn't know if it was actually helping me, so I still had a huge container of it, and it was easy to make as a meal when I felt horrible.

Even with that, I was still super-hungry whenever I woke up and probably my eating so much was what was making me poop so much (in explosive and voluminous events, sorry for the detail).

I was still on winter break, and would have to go back on Monday, so I was bummed I was missing out on my last good vacation days being sick.

My phone was next to me, and since I mostly kept to myself, my mom and dad didn't really notice me being "gone" for two days, until finally one of the few times I went upstairs they happened to be there at the time. I knew I looked like death warmed over.

Mom got really worried and was going to take me to the clinic, but by then I was through the worst of it.

My 'active theory' at the time (what I told them) was I'd had a bad sandwich at my friend Dave's house. That part was true - I'd been over to his house, I'd had a sandwich there. I'd also had some leftovers that were pretty old.

I didn't mention the mushrooms. Since the swelling on my hands made that obvious, I decided I'd leave that part out and hopefully Mom wouldn't make me throw them out, and a huge amount of work with them.

The thing was, I'd worked with the mushrooms before when I'd collected the samples, though not for any length of time, and I'd almost certainly worn gloves since I was putting it all in horse poop.

Convinced I was on the mend, I skipped going to Mass on Sunday and kept sleeping, and sent emails to my professors telling them I wasn't feeling well.

Given that I slept most of Sunday, I was awake for a little while in the afternoon, and the most odd feeling came over me. It was like I was newly awake after having been asleep - which was true - but way more than that.

My brain just felt sharper. I had to experiment with it, so I sat down at my electric piano keyboard.

I'd taken lessons for a long time but finally dropped it when I got busy in later high school, and though I could have picked up lessons again by taking piano as a course in college, I just let it be and figured I'd practice every once in a while.

Sitting there, though, I started the way I always did - scales and arpeggios. This time, though, instead of this being an exercise in frustration, it just got easier and easier.

Playing through a piece I actually knew, I realized I'd been reading a particular section as the wrong rhythm versus the music score, and instead of having to un-learn the wrong way, I just transitioned to the right way easily.

This was unusual.

I didn't learn things that fast on piano, it was always harder than that - but the playing was short-lived since my energy faded and I collapsed back into bed.

By Monday night I was feeling quite a bit better, and felt good enough to notice that I needed a shower (badly).

Looking at my body after my shower (impossible to not do that given the wall-length mirror in my downstairs bathroom), I saw that I looked different.

Being in cross country and track, sometimes I'd flex in front of the mirror, admiring my hard work (coach made us lift weights too, even for distance running) and trying to find the faintest hope of extra studly muscle definition here or there.

The difference was very clear. I imagined the lack of food to be the primary cause, though my severe body aches had meant I was isometrically flexing and stretching a lot in bed, just to feel better. Shivering, too, might have made me use my muscles more...

The net effect was my shoulders, triceps, pectorals, legs, everywhere, even a full-on abdominal six-pack, had dialed my body up over the previous week.

There was No Way that protein stuff had anything to do with it. I knew that much!

Looking down, though, there was a Seriously Odd thing - my penis seemed to be bigger. Now, I was getting out of the shower, and it's hard to make that call without consistent temperature conditions, etc., but... still...

Perhaps it was from losing abdominal fat? I didn't know. I was already pretty fit. Checking only required me to stroke a little, and very quickly I had more certainty on the size question - yes, both circumference and length, significant but not grotesque, and certainly not what I'd seen in porn vids, but then again a lot of pr0n vids had women with breasts larger than their heads.

I wasn't into that.

Looking down at my own pipe, I wasn't pornstar big, but I was pretty sure I was bigger. Not so shabby. Maybe being sick had matured me a little.

Since my penis was erect, I looked in the mirror at myself, and it occurred to me my balls looked larger, too, so I felt them and they did seem quite a bit bigger, maybe even double the size they'd been. They did ache a little.

Also, it wasn't that they were hanging lower, it was that they took up more space. One had always been slightly bigger than the other, but the bigger one had gotten to be nearly the size of the head of my penis when it was erect, which didn't seem anywhere close to my previous reality.

I didn't keep track of the size of my testicles, but it's something a guy sort-of notices, but not quite, an edge-of-awareness thing because it's not something I could compare to something else, easily, at all.

Still, I was tired and went back to bed, but after getting hard it wouldn't go down, so I had to masturbate to take the pressure off.

I was still SERIOUSLY horny, I got extremely distracted, and had to do it again more or less right away. The second time it was as if it was the first.

[[ MEDICAL NOTES ]]

I hadn't masturbated for 7 or 8 days (prev avg about 2 days), so some buildup was normal.

My volume of ejaculate was excessive, both times, enough that I noticed it.

My sensitivity was definitely WAY turned up compared to normal and this continued.

== Chapter: School Starts ==

School days in winter usually mean getting up at dark-thirty, on a city bus or my mountain bike (sometimes I walk, it's about 2.5 km). I'm a morning person, so it's not bad, but still... Ug.

Tuesday, though, was different. I was bright awake,and utterly bored by the bus ride. I had my calc book since that didn't change with the semester, so I decided to just start at the front of the book again and review from chapter one onwards.

I could skim through pretty quickly, but at the end of the chapter, I realized I could do some of the problems in my head so I kept on doing them.

Granted, it was older material, but the problems were divided into easy, medium, and hard ones, and I found I could do even the hard ones without using paper. I liked it - lots of confidence that I had been lacking in the subject.

Since it was my first day for the new semester, I had to stop by the school bookstore to pick up textbooks for my new classes. My english literature course email had a ton of warnings that a lot of reading would be required so I should expect that, but when I got the list I was amazed. It just kept going, over 120 books. I was going to have to pick some, it said.

Mom and Dad weren't rolling in money, but the class had all the books available as a single ePub book-bundle purchase. Being text, it zipped to nothing and I put all of them on my pad, replacing some anime I'd downloaded and already watched.

Classes were normal, I guessed, with most doing reviews of previous material, or just chatting about big themes we would be covering. Translation: boring.

In Band (I played French Horn) and Chorus (bass) were exactly like before with the same people I'd been with for years, so that was normal.

One of the things I loved about Midvale was getting to still be in a band and chorus program, like I was in high school. I had friends that went off to U Toronto and they complained it was super hard to fit in band and chorus to their schedule.

Music was so cool, I just ate it up, it made my days complete. Engineering work can do that, make you cherish the sensory-joy classes like that.