Since the sun cooperated today and it wasn't 100 degrees I tried for some pix of the campus gardens....everything is blooming like crazy...heres one of the thousands of roses.... ~Kathy~

Don't ask me to name the flowers because even though I am a farm boy, sadly I don't know pumpkins from petunia's, but I know when I like what I see.

That could be my road, Joan, although I'm not sure about the birches. Not the winter squash crop I'd hoped for (by a long shot), but I'll take it.

On our recent trip to Maine we stayed with my wife's Uncle Dimitri in Camden, Maine. One evening I stayed up late talking with him hearing some of the fascinating stories from his past. His grandfather was the Prime Minister of Bulgaria for a period of 4 days. Subsequently his grandfather was a diplomat and I believe his father was as well. During one stretch when his family was living in Rome, Dimitri was in school there, and one of his classmates was Benito Mussolini's son. On one table in his house I found a gardening magazine that did a piece on a semi-tropical mimosa he was growing and how he converted an open patio to a greenhouse to protect it from the harsh Maine winters. The greenhouse was open for the summer when were there, the tree is still thriving, and interestingly the best view we had of the eclipse was due to the sunlight passing through the leaves of the mimosa tree casting little crescent-shaped spots of light on the wall of the house.