A cold blue jay

Doesn't this look like a young blue jay, they're usually very skittish and not staying put in one place for more than a second, but this bird was sitting there looking puffed up and uncomfortable for more than a minute. Just as well as it meant I could capture it on camera.

The cyclo-cross race weekend is all over now, it was interesting to find out the whole of our quiet residential area was used as the VIP parking, everything was well organised but we did wonder if we'd be able to get back into the street with our car if we had left today.

Abstract Thursday AT82

Thanks so much for all your entries for last Thursday's challenge, there were 72 entries and they were amazing. I had another hard time choosing just 5 ! I'm going to ask your help choosing next Thursday's top 5  for a change :-)  Next Thursday's tag will be AT83 and its optional theme will be 'celebration' as it will almost be the Lunar New Year and we can finally put an end to this Fire Monkey year, which did have so many upsets. Not that I know if this coming year of the Rooster will be promising ;-) But we can only hope. As I wrote before, themes are optional, the main thing is that you have fun being creative.

Here are my 5 picks of the week:
rainie  for  a wonderfully soft seaside impression
gblrps for  a fractal impression with amazing patterns
technophobe for an great unexpected abstract landscape made from mould
Dollykgray for a wintery landscape impression with wonderful colours
pipersmom for a zoomburst flower impression

Find the whole collection of last Thursday's entries here, they are really wonderful. Thank you again, and for the visits, comments and stars !