This is the sun. Remember what that looks like? It looks like that here all the time.

This is the view from the roof of my parents' house again. The sun was shining so it looked a bit nicer.

This is the roof of my parents' house. Note the rainbow glass from the outside. That thing in the corner on the left...

...is the hot tub. And yes, that little silver thing on the left there is a champagne holder. My parents don't live in the same world as I do.

This is the view from the hot tub. I bet you didn't even realise a hot tub needed a view, right? Well, now you know.

Then I got bored and started taking pictures of the shrubbery. This is a pale pink bougainvillea, originally from Brazil (apparently. I learn a lot about my country whenever I start trying to explain it to other people).

I don't know what this is. But it's sort of pretty.

The much more common pink bougainvillea. Tropical flowers are not about subtlety. An anal-retentive botanist, incidentally, would hasten to point out that the bougainvillea is not actually a flower, but a modified leaf. The real flower is the much smaller red stalk inside.

Don't know what this is either. Hell, it might even be European.

And this is a spider! It was clinging to the side of the hot tub when I took the cover off. I include this here because I've been getting a lot of "oh your country is so beautiful" comments, so it sounds like a lot of people are lining up for invitations to paradise. So, for those people I say: look! It's a spider! It's big and scary! It runs faster than you can (over very, very short distances)! We also have scorpions, centipedes, and the occasional tarantula! Sooooo scary! Wooo! Don't say I didn't warn you!

For those of you whom I actually want to visit, I say: oh, hush. It's just a bloody spider. It's only two inches across. It doesn't bite or anything. I've never seen a wild tarantula. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to see here. Move along.

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