this is pretty darn interesting. i've never given much thought to mountain climbing. i mean, you climb up, probably with a rope and you climb down. sometimes you fall down. so? you have to not be afraid of heights, but ... so?

well, after clicking on the little green boxes and seeing what is actually at person-level on these wide, flowing rivers of snow and ice, i am actually pretty intimidated. climbing is not the world for me. i mean, it takes energy and stamina. i mean, at first you think ... hmmm, so? but clicking on those little boxes is an eye-opener.

check it out. but only if you have at least half an hour to spend.

nature can be mysterious

these are beautiful pictures of various gorgeous places around the world. oh how i wish i could visit them all. especially the lowest point of the u.s., badwater salt flats. i'm curious if it would have any effect on my left-over lymphedema.

loud crickets

i'm not sure that i knew that the earth 'sings'.

very fun!

do you like to see tree houses? yeah, me too! go here to take a look at a lot -- several of them are from my state!

beautiful colors and arrangments

wow! if you ever want to take a look at some gorgeous flower arrangements, go here and look through their galleries. i love what these people do with flowers and if i had tons of money, i would have them create for me.

when would you realize the danger?

this short video about pompeii is curiously intriguing. the disaster seemed to take much longer than i would have thought, especially since experiencing mt st helens (even from far away). and it makes me wonder ... at what point, time-wise, would a person have realized they needed to bail out and run away to escape what was happening. the husband would have figured it out -- he's pretty good about stuff like that. anyhow, if you have a quick 8 minutes, scroll down and watch the vid.

it's a dragon. now it's a puppy. now it's a castle. now ....

here are some fascinating pictures of clouds. i've seen some of them. some of the pictures were taken from above the clouds. isn't nature curious?!

spain

so. you want to go to the beach, but you can only find one road.

well, that's okay. surely it will take us to the beach even if this road looks like it's going to peter out ....

oh. the beach isn't quite where i thought it would be.

pretty, though.

whoa ... realism in the paintbrush!

these are amazing. they aren't photos, they are paintings. and i thought they were beyond superlative until i read that he takes pictures, then draws from them. if he were to create these completely from his mind, that would be mindbendingly, fantastically, genius to the max. but, until then he's just beyond superlative. click the link to see more pix.

nature's beauty

these pictures are just so pretty. i would never have imagined anything could be pretty in eastern washington. but we never traveled to southeast wa.

and i can just see myself on my horse right down there .... looking for bad guys or buffalo or a good place to plunk down ....

nightscapes

these pictures of the colorado sky at night are beyond lovely. my favorite is the first one (shown below). nicely done, mike berenson!!

stormy skies

wow -- this is unreal. i mean, there's just something about a tornado video ... you just can't not watch it. this one isn't too long and it shows, the first i've seen, a number of trucking units being picked up and tossed around. it's just like 'twister,' which i thought was a good flick. the thing that i really thought was weird, though, was seeing all the traffic continuing on the highway less than a mile away (a guess). don't those people know that's dangerous? a sign of the times, maybe, huh?

walk softly ...

man, it can get really vicious out there in nature. see goose. see man. see goose attack man. see goose chase man away.

let's go play

i've always thought swiss family robinson looked like fun. if you ignored the spiders, the bugs, the mosquitoes. and last year my grandaughter and i climbed up (via stairs) into a tree house and later i realized i'd been bitten by something nasty.

but this tree house looks like fun and you're supposed to be able to live in it. for a day or however long. i'm not sure what i think, because ... wind?  spiders? tornadoes? ants? you'd have to be choosy where you built it, and spread around some kind of magic ward-away to keep little critters at bay.

but if you're just day dreamin', yeah. it'd be fun.

nature's beauty

MYS bought me some flowers before they left. awwww, that was so sweet. i don't get flowers very often, and these are beautiful. they are little carnations, creamy-white background just ever-so-slightly tinted with pale-pale-pale-yellow, with powdery hot pink and vivid violet colors on the edges. he couldn't have chosen better and i am still enjoying them. much pleasure!

worse than the past ....

i don’t have much imagination, but i have wondered what it would look like if there was a huge world war. these images are interesting but it seems to me like it would be much, much worse than these pictures indicate. but, again, maybe i just don't have enough imagination.

kinda like a dodo bird ....

i always thought kakapo meant ... well, nevermind. but this is a parrot bent on self-annihilation. the females don't want to mate, the males want to mate with everything, and all of them live to be 90. the birds only eat one thing and that is a fruit that only is on the tree every four years. weird.

the loss of individuality and one-ness

is this a day you'd like to be scared? i suppose you'd think it was scary only if you had any brains. this article talks about merging computers with our grey matter and carrying on. oh ick. if you read down the paragraphs, it just conjures up sci-fi at its scariest.

and supposedly it's going to happen soon. but then, as richard smalley says, "When a scientist says something is possible, they're probably underestimating how long it will take. But if they say it's impossible, they're probably wrong." that feels like a totally accurate statement. so ... ick.

flowers that glow along with the bride

at first i thought they were pretty when i read the article, then i went to their website and decided they were kind of spooky. making the flowers pretty would take a little talent so that they didn't end up looking spooky.

don't leave home without it

did you ever want to see someone caught in an avalanche? this gal was snowboarding and triggered an avalanche and used an airbag to keep herself on top. it's interesting to watch. curious that the whole thing was filmed, but i don't suppose they had that all planned out.