Right now I feel more focused ont he future than the past, and I think that’d be a good thing to keep up.

Have some links instead:
Celebrate what’s right with the world, a video that might make you feel all warm and fuzzy. I loved the last story.

Some images found on deviantart:

Incidentally, this is the 100th post published on this blog. Nice timing, entirely unplanned.

For birds I recommend the deviantart account of Cheryl Moore, where you can find a great number of photos of birds in flight – most of them white birds, meaning there is no pattern on the feathers distracting from the shape.

As for bats, during the last week some photos of bats drinking from a pond in flight went through the bits of blogosphere I watch. Looking up Kim Taylor brought up Warren Photographic, which has more (albeit smaller) photos of bats in flight.

On Deviantart I found one compact tutorial on bat wings by cactusart.

The wing tutorial by Kandice Zimbleman-Wang may be a bit weird on the formatting and spelling side, but content-wise I find it very helpful.

For the sake of completeness and comparison, you could look at pterosaurs wings, too. (What intersts me more after a bit of poking around wikipedia are the various head shapes, though. Fascinating.)

Frost itself can be stupendously pretty when you get up close:

Those were taken at the edges of the university parking lot. Since that one is pretty close to the Moselle, and since I’d heard that this not unimportant water-street had been closed for ships due to ice, I went and had a look. I stuck around for a short while, and saw an icebreaker pass through to push the floes around.

I can hardly believe it. Never seen anything like that before. Just for comparison I took some photos the day before yesterday, and yesterday as well:

And I got lucky in another way. I not only saw a kingfisher, but I even caught a photo! The photo’s not good, but here it is, anyway

On the way home I decided to have a look at the Wied, a small river – I don’t think anything bigger than a kayak goes there.

Excluding a few spots, it was frozen solid. Two people were ice skating – ON THE RIVER, I TELL YOU! I’ve never seen a river completely frozen before. And, well, while I don’t even have ice skates, I did take a walk. It did turn out a nice day for birdspotting here, too.

Around the edges I found some more wonderful ice and frost structures. I couldn’t really capture any properly… They were so amazing. You could see the water had been higher when the first layer of ice formed, then ther was another layer underneath that formed with lower water, and the structures that formed between, and the air bubbles, and the light, and the frost growing on the edges. Breathtakingly beautiful.

Nature is fucking amazing.

Mice strike back!

This looks relatively harmless:

This was more serious and sad.

Birds, too!

another one
another two

Starting with the young ones

And then the cats’ humans get crazy ideas…

Mind you, that’s not limited to cats, but happens to dogs, too

Though this one may escape: fluffy, white, canine – but not a pomeranian