A rolling stone gathers no...

They say a rolling stone gathers no moss (I think), so we must not have any rolling stones here at Sage Creek Ranch.  Today's post is about moss, lichen and fungi.  

Before I talk about the photos, a little riff on what it took to upload them.  I am using a new version (the beta) for Adobe LightRoom 3 to catalog and play with my photos.  Two issues - the first is that I had never used LR2 - so I didn't know what I was doing or how to really utilize the program.  The second is that for some reason, it takes an inordinate amount of time to process even one photo.  Sigh.  These photos were taken yesterday morning (before the snow fell), but it's taken me until today to figure out the presets, how to save, where to find them once I have, how to get them uploaded to the blog (because the program put them in a different format than the one the blog likes).  All that said however, I really like LR3 beta.  It does a gorgeous job.

This is some sort of mushroom.  It is bright orange - especially against the rainy, dark sky.  I've only seen it growing on dead wood.

I loved the stone below because of all the kinds of lichen and the variety of color... (the color is un-retouched in the photo).

All of these shots are within .5 miles of the house... with the rain and the damp, the beautiful lichen is everywhere!  When we lived in Minnesota, I never pictured Texas as "green" - but there is a lot more green than I could have imagined here in the Cross Timbers region.  We love it here.

Dead things are especially good for sprouting some lichen.

This is my favorite photo of the bunch - a little bouquet of lichen inside the lichen.  And some of the lichen has died - but look at the beauty of the tree bark as well.  The deep green lichen looks like little stars.  

This moss always looks like hair to me.  

This tree trunk has been growing lichen since we moved here in '06 - sometimes it's a little greener than at other times, but it always has some sort of moss on it.  

I haven't taken any photos since the snow fell yesterday, but they'll be coming.

Oh - the bird feeders got filled the other day and the cardinals and chickadees have started coming back, so there'll be some new photos of our flocks shortly.

Find some awe-inspiring beauty to behold today.