Mushrooms!

It's been a long time since my last post.  I'm still here.  I've had some sick kittens that have taken lots of my time.  So does blogging, so something had to go for a while.  The kittens are better, so I hope to make regular posts again.
 

We've finally gotten some rain here in the midwest.  When I let Lucy outside this morning, I noticed the grass had grown about 2" overnight, and there was a patch of mushrooms in the yard.  So what, you ask?  Everybody has mushrooms in their yard after it rains. 

  Well, feast your eyes on these babies.  Lucy's not a small dog.  She's about 75 pounds.  I know portabellas get this big, but I've never seen mushrooms this big growing in my yard - overnight.  Lucy didn't want to get this close to the alien beings, but she slowly came when I called her, but wouldn't look at me, so she's not really there.

 I wish I knew if they were edible.  I'd have these sliced, sauted in butter, garlic, and panko bread crumbs, and wouldn't need anything else for dinner.

 To give you a better idea of just how big these are, the Sharpie pen is 5.5" long.  The large one here is 7.25" wide.

 This is the largest at 7.5" across.  Why is there a red dot on the marker?  All of my notions and tools that I take to quilt classes I teach, have a red nail-polish dot on them so I know they're mine.  Anyone is welcome to use my things.  I just want to make sure I come home with all my stuff.

My hand is only to show the scale.  Even the smallest mushoom is bigger than any mushroom I remember seeing in my yard.

My weak attempt at artistic photography.  The mushrooms really are cool.  The areas around the edges look like dew, but are flaky and rough places.  The large darker pieces are the skin of the mushroom when it was smaller.  As it grew, the skin cracked.  Like when all the continents drifted apart from one land mass.

A baby mushroom, only about 3" across, with the skin just starting to split. 

As I was taking the last of the pictures, I heard Randy, the guy that does our lawn, start his weed eater.  The sky was very dark to the south, and he was trying to get our yard done before it rained again.  So, I pulled up all the mushrooms.  I'll always wonder how much bigger they would have gotten.

I will get some kitten pictures posted very soon.