Pick Me Up Time

We've had a rotten winter with illness hitting far more often than we'd have liked so - with Spring about to start and Mother Nature about to burst into renewed life - I decided it's time for a pick me up and linkage seemed a good way to do it. All of these are actual images of Nature at its stunning, colourful best.

First there's this breathtaking tropical eucalyptus tree - Eucalyptus deglupta - with its rainbow coloured bark.

Then there are these photos which range from the lovely to the surreal and these which are even more amazing. These last take a while to load but they are well worth the wait.

Enjoy.

Gilded Flower

This is what greeted me as I opened my front door just after sunrise yesterday morning. In a rare moment a few rays of the early morning sun were shining in through the back door, through the house, out the front door and onto the red pelargonium flower on the front porch, splattering the flower with gold. Pretty, isn't it.

2014 Hugo Awards

And the winners of the 2014 Hugo Awards, announced at Loncon, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, in London - where I was supposed to be at this very minute having a brilliant time until my body decided it was the right moment to invite any number of ailments to attack me all at once - are listed here. Congratulations to all.

Pudding Lane Animation

This is what you get when six talented students create an animation of London before the Great Fire of  1666. It's simply amazing.

Haunting Photos

This link to abandoned artefacts came up on my Facebook newsfeed as did this and this. They are so breathtakingly beautiful and yet so sad and, yes, there are a few duplicates but not many, certainly not enough to leave any of them out.

As a human being they speak to me of our impermanence as a species but as a writer they bring images of a post apocalyptic - or post human - world where nature is slowly wiping out all signs that we as a species ever existed. Don't be surprised if some of them feature in a story sometime.