I miss living in the countryside. Suburbia is boring to the point of maddness.

Here are some orchids in flower. There are plenty more where that came from.

Orchids are beautiful. I have two at my mom's house, but my dad keeps over-watering them so they might not last long :(

But are they meat-eating orchids that forgive no one just yet?

I liked the way those clouds looked. Especially because in every other direction there were storm clouds.

it looks like one of those "identify the cloud types" drawings you get in 3rd and 4th grade.

Haha, I was thinking that too when I took it. Well, kind of.

The rest of the clouds looked like this:

Are these pictures you've taken Aaarg?

If I had some of those views at my disposal I'd be a happy man. Shits beautiful as FUCK.

make with pics of the Anne of Green Gables tourists, steve. I know you've got 'em.

One time I was in a Niagara Falls gift shop and this group of Japanese tourists thought I was an Anne of Green Gables impersonator. They were all taking pictures of me. True story.

Fuck my red hair :(

Those are all pictures I've taken. The only one I've posted here that isn't is the picture of autumn colors.

I moved down here in May of this year, and yeah I'm much much much happier here than the DC suburb I grew up in or the shitty West Virginia city I lived in for a while.

Basically going in any direction for 15-30 minutes will bring you to somewhere worthwhile: The Blue Ridge Parkway, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Cashiers/Highlands (the people and towns suck but the nature is fantastic).


That's the "highway" at the end of our street.

The driveway.

i should take some pictures of the nature around here :O

I didn't take this picture but this is basically what i would take a picture of:

yiiiiikes.

no wonder you're so pissy all the time.

no joke, if i lived in a wasteland i'd be the most miserable person ever.

I can't complain about tourists too much, they give a lot into our little economy. but yeah... it gets pretty annoying in the heat of summer.

where abouts do you live Aaarg?

Near the southwestern corner of North Carolina.

In the dot!

:lol
coming from the person with the highest pissy thread creation rate :O haha do you live in an ugly place too?

c'mon, she lives in ohio. . .

I'm not sure if thats good or bad :(

Well I just got back from a whirlwind tour of Australia's Northern Terrirtory and New South Wales, so I have plenty of photos that I need to put in here when I can be bothered.

Sweeeeet.

I didn't get to spend very long in the Northern Territory; I only got a little over a day in two different national parks, and that was it. The first one my female companion and I visited was Litchfield, just south of Darwin.

Darwin has the worst weather I have ever experienced so far in my life, by the way. 33 degree heat is hardly anything to worry about, but the air was so wet and humid we couldn't walk 50 meters down the road without needing to rest, drink water and complain. It was a chore to breathe. Anyway, Litchfield was about 35 celcius, but dry so it was nice.

First photo is of magnetic termite mounds. They look like gravestones. The termite nests act as huge sails that face East; maximizing morning and evening sun and minimizing it in the noon.

Cathedral termite mounds dotted the place too. They just build massive nests that get to be as big as trees and hundreds of years old.

More Litchfield.


Twin Falls; I swam there.


Twin falls was where I began my love affair with a reasonably large type of green arsed ant that when you licked it's abdomen it tasted like lime. For the next five days I licked these ants wherever I saw them :\


I think I might have known what this tree is called at some stage, but I can't remember. It is a parasite sucking on another tree.


Swam here too.


This plant is a carnivore. It attracts insects by smelling rather nice, then when they wander in to have a gander, they get stuck on the sticky, dew tipped hairs. The leaf then folds in on itself to consume it's victim. I think it's called a sun dew something or something. Maybe not.


More to come.

drosera, sundew, yeah. Very cool :) I've only ever seen one, and not in the wild...just in a terrarium :(

Edit: the lime taste (lime because it's green?) is formic acid. Ants squirt formic acid from their asses when they're threatened; I'm guessing having their asses licked is perceived as enough of a threat to give you that burst of lime flavor. Most people say it's lemony, so it's interesting you went with lime. The french word fourmi, ant, comes from the same root as formic acid.

Anyway, humans aren't the only ones who learned to take advantage of it. Certain species of birds practice something called "anting"...mostly jays, who are pretty intelligent although they're asshole birds. They antagonize the ants and stuff them under their feathers. The threatened ants squirt formic acid, and the acid kills the mites that are bothering the bird. As a consequence of anting, jays are typically pretty clean birds.

Alot of the time it's the small things (not always literaly) like that that can be the thing which interests you most. I didn't expect to see them there, because I had read about them and thought I remembered that they grew in boggy or marsh like areas. There were hundreds, and although most were only about ten centimeters across, there were a few as big as your hand. Or clusters of several plants, I should say.

I like stumbling across plants in the wild that I'd only seen in books before. I remember when I came across some Viper's Bugloss in a waste area and being so excited. My field botany teacher encouraged me to harvest one for my pressings project, but was enough of an asshole to neglect to tell me that I needed to wear gloves.

Turns out that there are little poison spikes in the stems that protrude when the stem is compressed, injecting fun little squirts of poison into your hand, like nettles. I had a bad rash on my hands for days :(

No consequences from your self-anting?