LEISURE AND LAUGHTER

If you wonder where the birds go when it is raining hard?

---now you know!!!

When it is clear out, you celebrate with ice cream!  (My parents!)

And singing happy birthday with nieces, great nieces, a great nephew a brother in law and my sister!

My sister's great dane--they are so much more than a dog! lol

Crazy kids in the pool that is so chilly after all the rain! 

 Bill supervised and cheered them on!  

Muchroooms (toad stools) grow tall and fast!

But the syringa like the warm/rainy/warm weather!  

 

TAKING A LITTLE WALK

We have a cute little 2" toad that lives in front of the garage. 

 I enjoy seeing him every evening.

We took a little walk in the woods and were very pleased to see the Indian Pipe is back again this Fall 

but has quadrupled its spread!

Most of the mushrooms are pale white

 but a few have a pretty pink tinge.

Some even have a few specks of black. 

 A very interesting plant!

Look at the little log that is sitting on the trail--

it is a fully intact bark exterior ...

but the wood has completely rotted away!  

A fun little tube now!

This mushroom is a very pink variety 

we see every once in a while...

it is easier to spot when it grows all by itself in a bare patch!

 

Knitting has been happening!  The sock is really shaping up!

A Day for Outside Time!

 Always something new when you take a walk....under the canopy of our LiveOakForest, 

we discovered a rather large area of these 'ghost indian pipe' fungi.

 They have a parasitic relationship with their hosts, the large trees, and feed from their roots!  

 Beautiful and  fascinating!

 And not to be overlooked, we saw this toadstool with a few nibbles taken from his top!

 Some critters love a good mushroom!

Adventure in the shallows...nice to have two strong gondeliers!

(the water is only 6" here which made it fun for the kids and tough for the big guys! lol)

A Sumptuous Saturday!

 Everyone woke up cheerful this morning and Bill took the boys over for an early morning visit with our neighbors.

Which meant that I had a quiet early morning time in the studio!

I finished piecing the bow tie quilt and added the borders.

 I loaded it right up on the frame and set to work.

 Everything just fell into place which was so unusual!

 I moved on to watercolor the second , vertical painting of the Sprague House.

 And then while the first wash was drying, I cut out a bunch of the crazy colors blocks so I could grab a pile and piece it through the week.

The blocks are adding up.

I want to have 24 done by the end of the month.

I'm getting there!

When Bill got home with the boys-I was so refreshed and ready to start our day!

What a gift.

And now, in honor of Earth Day-this is the source of a great rotting stink in our front flowers.  It is just an amazing and disgusting mushroom,

called a stinkhorn mushroom.

It has a much more scientific name and a lot of disparaging ones, too.

Bill pulls them up and on a good day, 

he gets them at their source-the round root if left in the ground,

will have another stinky mushroom up within days!

You can almost see them grow!

Be grateful there is no scratch and sniff screen.

These babies smell like the walking dead!