It's now definitely spring!

After the landmark heron sighting in the park the other day, I made a pact with myself to not go walking without a camera on me... and then I remembered why I hadn't been doing that, because when I have a camera on me, all I do is take pictures. But fortunately, there happened to be a lot to see, as in OMG, BABY CHICKS EVERYWHERE!! An embarrassing number of fuzzy gosling pictures are now in my galleries. (Click the picture to go to my galleries and see more and bigger pics.) ( Baby Geese )

Art!

LJ is being weird and not emailing me comments. Which sux.

It's been a decorate-y sort of day - as part of the new redecoration trend in our house, thanks to Toys's computer resurrection, I got to browsing the PixelGirl Presents site for new Mac OSX icons and wallpapers, and came across this site featuring... rabbits. Yes, silhouettes of rabbits in spooky Gothic landscapes. (Check out the gallery!)

I think I'm really getting a feel for the development of today's young designers, too: start playing with images you like, make a few wallpapers and icons, get a DeviantArt account, make friends, post your stuff on PixelGirl, Iconfactory, Iconbulk, and other places to create buzz, and then, presumably as you take a few classes and/or just develop your own self-taught mad skillz, eventually get a website of your own going, and then the work rolls in. It seems so easy, viewed from the outside... sigh. (reminder to self: redouble efforts to learn Flash, Illustrator, etc.)

Recs!
[ETA: I belatedly realized that "Paper Heart" was the subtitle of the LJ page, not the name of the fic listed below so I've corrected it.]
makd has already recc'ed this, but Friday by girlpire is a must-read. Spike/Angel. A scenario that you can really imagine being done as an episode, and it just gets more and more poignant as the chapter wears on. Amazing; go, read.

And although I find it hard to believe that anyone on my friendslist has not read this already, rahirah's To Grandmother's House. Spike/Buffy, domestic chaos over Christmas and answers to a lot of pesky Season 7 questions about the Guardian (no kidding!) and even that damn axe. Impossible not to love; enjoy it like a finely wrapped present.

Finally, in honor of all the deep thoughts about comics these days, I leave you with a contemplation of just how hard it must be for poor Batman to get around town in a stealthy manner while driving a nitro-burning armored funny car. If nothing else, this post reminded me that Jason Todd, Dick Grayson's replacement as Robin the Boy Wonder, gained entree to his new career by being a punkass who tried to jack the wheels off the Batmobile, and man, they just don't write 'em like THAT anymore!