New and mysterious

   Now that the days are longer and the sunrise is earlier, it's already pretty light when I arrive at Golden Gate Park for my morning walk. If I get there too much earlier, I have too much time before I need to go to work, and so I've been missing that special time of day there when the light is just beginning, and the place is quiet and still, except for the animals.
   Today is Saturday, the second day of my weekend, and because I was already up, I decided to get to my favorite park spot early, forgetting that it's been awhile since I was there for that wonderful time of day. There was a misting drizzle at times after some light and steady rain a few hours earlier, and the wet colors  and delicate sounds produced by the water droplets dripping off of the trees were beautiful and soothing.
   As I passed a tree favored by squirrels on the northeast corner of the path around Stow Lake the second time, I noticed this strange, milky white substance accumulated there. In the midst of my walk, I decided to wait until the next time I passed it to look at it more in depth, which is when I took these two pictures.      
   Looking at it closely, I could see that there was an area above the white formation where a small piece of bark protruded, and it seemed that this is where the drips where coming from that formed this substance. I'm guessing that it may be some combination of rainwater and possibly sap, or perhaps a sickness in the tree that caused this, but I had never seen something like it before, or perhaps I had but had never really looked closely. Either way, it was new and a bit mysterious to me today, and experiencing things in my life that those two words can be sparingly used to describe make my life worth living.

Bubbling stuff.

Middle-top of picture, the piece of bark where the drips came from.