Danube sunset

vienna by night

wasp spider

I know, I haven't been active here for some days, don't you worry - I haven't abandoned my blog. Just have been occupied with other things, like with this lovely spider here.

flax and roses

daffodils

litter

vienna sunset

hydrants

greener grismas even

green grismas

Merry Christmas!

christmas flower

autumn

Finally, autumn is living up to its promises - which are, of course, clear air, bright colours, and frost even of which we had the first recently. No shots of frost here for today (I just didn't have the guts for a bicycle ride in the early mornings yet, but I will have some time soon, or so I hope); but of the other two there's plenty in these shots:

railway train

No, really, I love travelling by rail.

up y***, raincloud!

Well, this is a family blog, isn't it? So please excuse the asterisks but I feel I shouldn't write this out in full, for those whose native language is English. (Actually most of my Austrian readers probably wouldn't mind.)

Now to explain, there's a story attached to those photos. Today was the first one of the year with muggy weather, and thunderstorms threatening. I still rode my bike out to Wienerwald and tempted one of those clouds to follow me.

As soon as I had its attention I blitzed through the entire town of Vienna, to end up in Lobau, which was where the cloud almost caught up with me; but I tricked it by going in a circle, I soon was behind the back of that cloud which you can see in the background. Which is where the title of this blog came into play, or in other words I gave it the finger.

The cloud, as you can imagine, was furious about it - and tried to turn round; but you can turn a cloud around just as easily as a lorry in a cul-de-sac. So it tried to shed as much rain as it could in my direction, but all I caught was a few drops which were more than a welcome refreshment in the sweltry air. So up y***, dearest cloud!

pagoda

For years I've been trying to shoot Vienna's only Pagoda in a way which truly is worth showing here on my blog. (I might have posted it before but if I have it certainly wasn't a good shot.) I should have thought about trying at the time of the Prunus flowering season:

silvester

I completely forgot to say thank you to the friends with whom I spent this year's Sylvester. Where are my manners?

So thank you very much, Barbara and George, for letting me in even though I'm not exactly well-bred, and thank you for the excellent potato gulash (well, admittedly rather gulash soup but delicious nevertheless), thank you Gregory for letting me win in cards despite I was cheating,*) and thank you Dani, for not telling Gregory, and thank you dear master-cook neighbours whose name I sadly have forgotten, but those hors d'oevres were way too good to remember something as mundane as mere names.

*) I mean - I was counting cards!! 

It was the bestest Sylvester I've ever had, really. I could go straight from hating Sylvester to finally loving it, you know!

ice!

water un-frozen

It is snowing as if it couldn't stop. I hope to pass bayous like that one:

soon on cross-contry skis: there should be ice already (but too thin to walk on), and trees and everything should be covered inch- nay, foot-deep in snow.

red & blue

 Early morning light ...

 ... evening sunshine bright ...

... good night.

it's either a sunset or an autumn crocus

Sorry to all who voted for the latter (because they can't stand yet another boring sunset), but it'll be the former (due to the majority voting against the umptieth photo of an autumn crocus).