Fall Beauty

I have so much homework to do that I feel sick to my stomach.  So before diving into it, I decided to take some pictures and do this blog.  You know, find my zen.

Here is a small piece of my front yard.  We have raked diligently but you cannot tell at all.  Its pretty... now that it has started raining again, I doubt we will get much more of it raked.  Oh well, at least its pretty and good for the soil.  As you can imagine, we have oodles of mushrooms under these leaves.

Here we have that lonely Vine Maple that lives in the shade so will only turn yellow.  Now that it has all turned, I think it is a beautiful shade of yellow and am tickled when I see it. :)

A few blogs back I posted a pic of a Douglas Maple leaf starting to turn red.  Here is one that is completely turned.  So pretty!!!

And here is a shot of the Douglas Maple.  As you can see, there are leaves in all different stages.  I was hoping the whole thing would turn red at once like the Vine Maple does but I guess not here.  That's okay, I'm still really enjoying this one. 

I spied this mushroom in my front yard where very few leaves have fallen.  It is completely in the open and all alone.  No other mushrooms like it or different are growing in this area.  Is it growing from the roots of the grass or what? I wish I had x-ray vision so I could peer into the ground without disturbing it to see where its roots go.  I haven't seen any mushrooms like this one on my treks into the woods or anywhere else on my property.  Perhaps I'm just not looking close enough.

That is one of the neatest looking mushrooms I've seen.  I see fallen Indian Plum leaves and a few feet away is a large Indian Plum standing about 8' high so maybe there's a connection there.  But its hard to say because that is located at the edge of a coniferous greenbelt so who knows?