Glenda's post from yesterday reminded me of a few years ago when my wife and I went to the island of Madeira for a conference. We arrived a day early without a problem, but a huge storm blew through the Northeast that day and my wife's family were sending pictures of the snow like my picture above to the family e-mail list, comparing who got hit the worst. So my wife posted the following picture to the thread that we had taken on a walk from the hotel to downtown Funchel, Madeira just that morning. A friend of hers was supposed to be the keynote speaker at the conference, but since his flight was to have been a day later, it was canceled and he missed the conference entirely.

Some mushrooms on a recent single short hike in Maine. These last ones are Black Trumpet Mushrooms. My wife's uncle picked quite a few of them, and I made a Shrimp/mushroom risotto using them. Sorry if I went a little overboard today.

Hmmm, Akita is a beautiful Japanese spitz-like dog and it's the name of a city in Japan. Not sure how she's using the word. There are all kinds of Japanese to English translation sites. Babel is pretty well known. Many take romanji (such as the words arigatou gozaimasu) and translate it to English (thank you very much) some will accept the kanji version of arigatou gozaimasu (ãÂÂãÂÂãÂÂã¨ãÂÂ�"ãÂÂãÂÂã¾ãÂÂãÂÂ) and will translate those to English as well. I don't have any special plug in for Firefox and have no trouble seeing kanji characters. Now if you want to be fluent in the written and spoken language, you should have started classes about 30 years ago. :-) Jodi-

I love the color of this oriental poppy. Unfortunately, it is stingy with its blooms--probably because it's growing mostly in shade, in heavy clay and competing with maple tree roots. Here is a regular brilliant orange one getting ready to open.