BOOJUM!: Snow!

I Know There Isn't Any -
Just being perverse for the sake of it, tee hee! Instead we have sun, and plenty of it, too, which is unusual. Not just for this time of year, unusual at all for the UK, which as the more observant of you will recall I have dubbed "The Pond of Eden" at times.
Anyway, allow me to illustrate the snow that's not there any more:

Hard to credit that we now have the sun playing over those snow-strewn flagstones, or that you could sit on the seats without getting frostbite. Note the pawprints of Edna as she went to take up position on her sentry-pot.

Predictably, this has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else here. Let the motley begin!

UNIT UK
Yeah, those chaps. Conrad's recent Charm Offensive, wherein he refrained from attracting the security service's fond regard by going on about Lovely Fluffy Bunnies instead of atom bo - foofoodillies - atomic foofoodillies, seems to have worked in that there is only one sinister white van keeping an eye on the Mansion. Presumably somebody from UNIT is one of their suspicious spying selection.

"What does this have to do with anything logical and connected?" I hear you ask.
Good point.
Long before I started this blog, I had a presence at the "Fanfiction" website, with a few novel-length Doctor Who stories that got good reviews. I've actually got a First Doctor story still ongoing somewhere. I also wrote a lot of short stories about the fictional UK branch of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, and wanted to re-read one of the later ones.

Could I find it in Word anywhere? No I could not. It must have been deleted, which is stupid of me*.
So! It was back to Fanfiction and I dug up the story, and here's the link if you care to click it:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4187081/1/UNIT-UK-26

Warning: this is not a whimsical comedy, slash or romance, and at one point features death by elephant gun.

My version:"To defend against exotic threats to the human commonwealth"

Frogs And Gorgosaurus
More of my museum mission. Hey, if I took pains to take photographs, the least you can do is look on and learn!

Spot them

I can't remember what variety this is, except to say that there are four in the photograph. It took me an age to pick them all out when there in the flesh, so you may not pick them all up.

Golden Tree Frogs

These little rascals are poisonous, and extremely so. The notes state they exude enough toxin to kill ten humans at a swipe; South American tribes use their poison in blowpipes to hunt prey.
One of the guides was explaining about the Vivarium to some visitors:"They're not here for our entertainment, they're here as a conservation programme."
He, and the wall notes, mentioned the Puerto Rican Tree Frog, plentiful up until the Nineties - yet now extinct. So these Vivarium frogs are a conservational defence, if you will.

Gorgosaurus

Here's a chap who went the way of the Puerto Rican frog, although 60 million years ago rather than 30.

Meanwhile, In Downtown Tcherbevan ...
This is the capital city of the fictional Black Sea-bordering nation of Andrievia, dreamt up by my chum Richard. A former Soviet Republic, it has a chequered history and a tempestuous present. We'll be waging a wargame there over a coming weekend and Richard asked for scenarios.
Aha! thought Conrad, a lightbulb almost visible inside his skull.
Here's the first part:

Dateline: 31^st June 2016-03-09

Citizens of the capital city of Andreivia, Tcherbevan, were awoken in the small hours of the morning by a series of explosions, thought by some to be a meteor – and by the tinfoil hat brigade to be a UFO – although the truth is even stranger.

The American espionage agency the NSA was deliberately de-orbiting an aging Keyhole KH11 spy satellite for a soft landing in Kazakhstan when it suddenly vanished from radar. Rather than Kazakhstan it ended up crashing in Andreivia, damaged yet mostly intact – the impact of collision triggered emergency release of drogue parachutes that slowed the terminal descent.

The Americans don’t know the location of their property, but they do want it back! It has acquired critical real-time intelligence data about Russian troop movements in the Baltic, stored on a comparatively small (suitcase-sized) detachable memory module. The KH11 itself weighs well over 10 tonnes and would need heavy plant to remove from the crash site.

Obviously anyone getting to the KH11 would be able to extract the memory module, which is worth a considerable amount in ransom. Any G20 country would love to get their hands on a KH11, damaged or not, as it would again be worth an entire monarchy’s ransom, quite apart from the reverse-engineering opportunities …

Ah, what an easy way to boost the word count!
Oops, was I typing aloud? Quick, bring on a picture as diversion -