I did take my long awaited walk in the woods the other day. I hadn’t been yet this summer and mostly because of the ticks. We’ve had mosquitoes too this year, which we haven’t had since we moved here. This year they’re bad! So, I sprayed myself down with Deep Woods OFF! and off I went. I contemplated taking one of the dogs with me but I knew in my heart they would not appreciate all the stopping I was hopefully going to do when I saw something to take a photo of.

A leaf decoupaged onto another from the heavy rain the other day.

The woods are lusher than normal this year with all the rain we’ve had. It was even hard to find the beginning of the trail it’s so overgrown. No thorns reached out to clutch at my clothing as I entered the forest as they have done in previous times. I can’t describe it, but the woods have a different feel to them. Almost more secretive.

The trail was boggy and wet and I came across many pools of standing water. At this point I was glad I decided not to bring a dog!

Of course, all this wetness means that it’s just the right kind of conditions for mushrooms to thrive. I found they came in all colors.

Bright orange.

Yellow.

A combination of colors.

Purple. (!)

Some were huge. These were bigger than they look. My hand could not span the top of these.

Some were ugly.

Some grew on trees.

Some were brown but interesting all the same.

Some had me fooled. (do you know why?) Look closely.

While others didn’t look like mushrooms at all. This one looks like it’s trying to disguise itself by looking like the surrounding mulch.

And this one. Well, anybody for a cheese pizza?

Remember the coral mushroom I showed you the other day? Seems they come in different colors too. Yellow and this lovely peachy color.

I didn’t take just photos of mushrooms. A few blooming things along the way caught my eye.

I walked all the way down to the pond which had a lot of visitors for the middle of the day during the week. An elderly man that was fishing commented to me that it was a nice spot for taking photographs, and asked me what I was taking photos of. When I told him mostly mushrooms he cocked his head, raised one eyebrow and said “Kinda strange, don’t you think?” I told him I didn’t think it was strange at all. I’m sure most of the people I passed on my photographic journey walked right past all those mushrooms and didn’t even see them. Admit, it: aren’t you glad I pointed them out to you?

 

Good grief. A week ago I had nothing to say. Now you can’t SHUT.ME.UP.

I have been meaning to write this post for some time now. I read quite a few blogs. Some I try to read every day, others I read on a weekly basis or as my mood fits. My blog list is varied indeed. I don’t link all of them because frankly, I don’t have room.

My favorites are listed in my sidebar. Bar none (no pun intended), these are the blogs I tend to read the most. A few people on the list don’t post much at all anymore (like pod). Because my particular sidebar can’t hold more than a handful of favorite links at a time, I sometimes add some while subtracting others that just aren’t posting that much anymore or are just not of interest to me right now. Call me fickle if you want to. But if someone only posts once a month or only sporadically, I tend to lose interest. If someone I read never visits my blog or leaves a comment, well ... it would be easy to get in the “well, if you won’t comment on my blog, then I won’t comment on yours” mode. That just isn’t right. So, I try to comment on the blog posts I find relevant to me whether or not these people ever visit my site. If the spirit moves me, I comment. I think people are much the same about my blog. Some people relate to some blog posts more than others. I have to admit though, if someone comments it prompts me to comment on their blog.

I have seen a trend in some blogs to write what the reader wants/needs to hear from that person. Does this mean I want to skew my blog to garner more comments? Nope. Absolutely not. This blog is about my life. Mine. What you see here is what I really am doing on a daily basis. This is me. Love me or leave me. Period. I have never been good at subterfuge. If I tell a lie my face turns bright red. Really, I am not good spy material.

Other people I am not so sure about. One blog I read you will not find in my sidebar, and neither will I give you a link. It’s my guilty pleasure since I never watch soap operas on television. Frankly, I don’t believe a word of what she writes. No one’s life could be fraught with so much turmoil and live to tell everybody about it. It’s a soap opera! She tells a good story, I’ll give her that, but none of it rings true. She never backs anything up and the photos she shows could have been taken anywhere. I catch her all the time in inconsistencies in her blogging. I think I might be addicted to her lies. Not just to her lies, but to proving to myself that what she is writing is not true. No one else but me (and maybe one other person that comments on her blog) even seems to to notice. Are most people that gullible? And, really, just why should I care?  Good question. She had a donate button on her blog (which really pushed my buttons!) where you could donate any amount of money you wanted to save her broken-down-fixer-upper-house-in-the-middle of nowhereville (if it even exists), then she finds someone to buy it (because she can’t afford to keep it and the bank is about to foreclose), and the next thing you know she’s showing us a 4-acre piece of land where her new cottage is going to sit. And, she’s going to build it herself. Anybody got a shovel? Or maybe I should tell her to be sure and wear her boots. But yet .... I keep reading this drivel!! Go figure. Maybe I need a life. What can I say? It’s like those cliff-hangers on the daily soap operas—you never know what’s going to happen next or just what she will come up with, so I keep tuning in.

Besides the guilty pleasure blog, I read blogs about food. About knitting. About photography. About people struggling with very small children. About people renovating old train carriages and making them into homes. About just day-to-day-life in different parts of the country and world.

Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Yet you have no idea if that person is really who they say they are, and if what they are blogging about is real or fabricated. It’s so easy to do when someone sits at a computer where nobody knows them. Me? I can’t hide. My neighbors here pretty much know about the blog and my life is their open book. Sometimes I am taken aback that they all know what I am doing on a daily basis and then I remember the blog. (Like the other day when I was going out for a walk in the woods and I passed neighbor Luke coming out of his house. He said oh yeah, I saw you blog this morning and figured you’d be heading out. And by the way, I did get some pretty cool photos on my walk in the woods of weird mushrooms and other things which I will be posting soon!)

C’est la vie! Non, c’est ma vie!

Note: After reading over this entry I’m not sure I’m making any sense! I’m going to post it anyway since I went to all the trouble to write it all down.

 

Scarf, that is. The Lovely Leaf Lace Scarf from Purl Bee.

I took a short break from my embroidery work (finished two tea towels and just can’t decide on which pattern to start next) to finish up this scarf that I started some months back. I lost interest in finishing it for a while since I knew I would not be wearing this wool scarf in the spring or summer. Plus, I loved working the lace pattern but when it got to the second straight stockinette stitch I was quite frankly bored. Ho hum; knit this row/purl the next. Do I also need to mention I was not looking forward to

doing

learning the kitchener stitch to join it together?

Anyway, what jump-started me to finish was a knitting buddy who lives in New York. We haven’t seen each other for quite some time and she suggested lunch and a trip to the yarn shop in Cornwall, New York that is equal distance to each of us. The light bulb went off in my head that I should finish so I could have some help in grafting my two halves together into a whole. TODAY is the day!

I have watched several different teaching videos of the kitchener stitch and even practiced on scrap yarn about four times. Although I think I know how to do the stitch, I have not been completely happy with my results. It looks a little bumpy to me. After all that work on the scarf I certainly don’t want it ruined by my ineptitude! And with 61 stitches on each needle, that’s a lot of kitchener-ing around! So I am seeking professional help from both my knitting buddy and the yarn shop.

Wish me luck!

Edited to add:
I did not use the cashmere! Just a 100% wool.

Late day update: Well, I didn’t get the scarf grafted together just yet. The yarn shop was crazy busy and she didn’t have time. But, I did have her look at my scraps that I grafted together and we decided I was doing the stitch correctly but probably just had too much tension. So, back to practice again and this time I’ll try to leave it much looser!

The other day I grabbed my camera and headed off to see what I could find in my yard and woods. We’ve had so much rain lately that I was hoping to find to find a few interesting things.

In the woods in back of my house I found a few fungusy-mushroomy things. Like this coral mushroom. I’m pretty sure it’s Jellied False Coral. My book says it’s edible, but I think I’ll pass. Can you see why it’s called a coral mushroom?

And these that were growing on a log. I can’t identify the species but I think they are pretty.

I came across this group of Indian Pipe Plants. To me they seem to be members of a dance troupe working out a piece of very complex choreography, albeit a somewhat ghostly one.

Next I focused my attention on what flowers are blooming in the beds. I came across this spider napping. See how he’s holding on to the leaf with his leg?

Bee balm up close and personal.

I don’t know what these flowers are. Maybe bellflowers? It’s the same type of flower that the spider is napping on, just that this one is fully opened.

And this little beauty growing wild in the front yard. It resembles the Pipsissewa  (or Prince’s Pine) that we have in Colorado only this one is white.

And lastly, this strange bug that has been camped out on the same bee balm flower for about three days now. Even after the rain the other night he reappeared. It’s amazing what you see when you are using a macro lens!

He seemed to be studying me and trying to figure out what that big black thing is that is staring him in the face. Should he eat it? Maybe not ...

All this and I never had to leave the confines of my own property. Pretty amazing isn’t it? I plan to take a walk down to the pond, maybe this morning, and see what I can find in the “real” woods.

Edited to add: I think the Pipsissewa is also known as Swamp Pyrola and perhaps not Prince’s Pine.

I lay on my float, belly down, fingers and toes dangling in the cool water. The warm sun beating on my back is turning my flesh and bones to the viscosity of jelly. I feel my internal self flowing outward from my body. Letting go. Releasing tensions and worries. It’s difficult to resist the temptation not to nod off. I turn over to toast the other side.

I hear cicadas (!) in the treetops, there is a Snowberry Clearwing Hummingbird Moth (!) drinking nectar from the poolside flowers, hawks ride high in the sky on thermals, and a dragonfly (!) whirs by.

Can a day be any more perfect?

Yes, actually it could. Rick leaves today for nearly a week on business. We’ll all miss him!