Anyway a balmy 64°F in the mountains of Western North Carolina today, slightly overcast though but still a bit of sun every now and then. The forests are still damp from the past rains of a day or so ago and I have noticed that mushrooms are beginning to pop up here and there, as are a small number of myxomycetes.
I was exploring a new trail today near Grandfathers Mountain and as I went along it, a very bright yellow and orange formation caught my eye off in the distance to my left. Curiosity killing the cat, which is quite possible here in these mountains, I bailed off of the trail and scampered down the gradual slope to where this curiosity was hanging off of the side of a tree. Don't ask me what kind of tree, I don't know. What do I look like, a Woodpecker
" Don't answer that. 
Anyway it was as I suspected, a wad of fungus. "Kinfolk," I exclaimed! 
I've often wondered about my family tree. 
Next on it wasn't long before I came across this. Seemed that I had seen one of these in a book somewhere and so I took a photograph.
Knowing that the possibilities were good for identification, unlike my baby pictures, it made taking the image a bit more justifiable and a bit more meaningful. What I have here is possibly a Dictyiaethalium plumbeum, though the identification came from the Eumycetozaon Project Database. http://pick5.pick.uga.edu/mp/20p?see=I_UARK167&res=640 This was the closest I could find to that which I have presented. My identification could be in error though but close I think. Of course "close" only counts in horseshoes and nuclear weapons and with horseshoes you have to get really close.
Notice also that there is an enumerable (spelling?), okay a "whole lot" of spores scattered about the aethalium and on the substrate, note too that there are a number of holes in the aethalium, probably due to the invasion of Cryptic Slime Mold Beetles.
Don't tell our president though, he will send about 25,000 of our boys over to stop it. Then I will have to deal with IED's placed by the beetles while hunting slime molds. 
Hmm...does size really matter? 