April, I have Windermere; you'll love, love it! Beautiful white flowers. I planted it last year as a J&P milk carton bareroot that I bought at the local Menards...go figure that a big box store carries roses. Free shipping,,,well, kinda...cash and carry! Dana who posts on here and lives in Peoria right by me posted and told me that Menards had the J&P roses and of course I drove right there and bought a bunch. Had to, right??? Free shipping .. I used to have Distant Drums..I had two ownroot plants but they both died this spring; didn't make it through the winter. I have another on order that is grafted. The colors are sensational; lavendar, pink, and orange blends. And, yes, you have been hanging around Judy too long, she has unleashed a shopping monster (but in a good way!). Hi, Judy, I'll be e-mailing you soon! -terry

Thank you for the links, I just bought some from kens link (30). I am tempted to do 100 for 100 that is a on of hostas, how do you handle that many? I have 500 hosta seeds planted indoors and another 600 showed up today, I expected low germination because I've never grown hosta from seed but we will see how they turn out. 12 are up from the first set of 50 I did. Question, what do you think will go good with hostas in my area? I was thinking ferns, I can get those for free if i dig them. maybe my hosta growing will inspire others in my neighborhood to grow some, and by then I might have a good amount of hosta babies for them to start off if a lot of my seeds germinate. I have a few more hosta questions, I am gonig to make a new thread to ask them

Got up at 5:30, darn race didn't start until 8, they said 7 on one of the news websites. Had to get there early enough so I didn't have to park too far away, people everywhere all over town. Hot already but not as bad as I thought. Here I am telling you what to do and my photos did not turn out too great. I shot sports mode, buildings & background were bright but runners too dark, many blurry or out of focus, many good and fixable. I am going to have to process each one that's worth keeping (shot 594) and brighten most of them up with shadow highlights. Good learning experience. I shot most in sports mode which kicks into burst, but I'm not happy with a lot of today's because I can't change any of the parameters in that, picks too large apertures and too slow shutter speeds and continuous auto focus I'm not used to at all. It is hard shooting a sea of people, never been in a situation quite like that before. I'm thinking about what to do next time, couldn't figure out how set burst so I could use tv mode standing out there with all those people, should have shot tv mode, 1/800, ISO 800, partial metering. Maybe. I'll have to get some help with that. Coming home, I was trapped in by lots of street closings, had to go way out of my way to find a way out of that maze, lucky I know my streets around here, only one way out from where I got myself. Filled two 1 gig flash cards in about 1/2 hour! Good timing though, a few stragglers were coming up the hill when both cards were full. I'll wait for your photos. Yours will be easy. I know people steal photos. I haven't caught anybody doing that to me yet, maybe mine aren't that good? Somebody in France liked my peacock java applet and wrote and asked, I said ok. What do I care? I just don't want people making money off my work. Will address some of the other issues later. Too bad you have to break up your lily garden, that would be very hard for me to do. You must be either a specialist or have special lilies and maybe getting older like I am? Granny out shooting a race. Hah! I wonder which lens would be best for that? Used 50mm with a different race, much smaller, this time went with the 28-135 so I could zoom. 70-200 not wide enough even if I had it which I don't. That is a conundrum for sure since I was so close to most of them standing on the sidewalk, brushed by a few, tried not to get in their way. Then some other photog gets in my way. There now you taught me something about bracketing. I've been doing it the hard way. Shoot, look at histogram, set exposure comp or some other adjustment. I'm going to try bracketing and quit on the bright end like you do. So thanks for that tip! I dared not shoot that race in AV (my favorite) because with the early morning bright light and shadows, it would have picked too slow a shutter speed. Frustrating. THIS is where I would like to have been positioned lol. She hadn't turned her camera toward the race yet, she had to swing it about 45 degrees to her right to be pointing at the runners coming up the long hill. I fixed this one a little. Later, Alice

I posted this at the Electronics Forum, where I'd been asking about card readers, batteries, & such. Thought I'd post it here too. :) My card reader arrived today, which I was so surprised at, and it was SO easy and fast! I had my pics downloaded, sorted, sized, and uploaded to my website all in about 15 minutes. :))) I love this thing!! My batteries have lasted into the night this time, let's see how soon I have to charge again. I will be getting a bigger-rated set at the end of the week when I go shopping next. Here is a link to my very first set of digital pics, if anyone would care to see them...I took shots of various subjects in various situations, to test out different settings...also, I have resized most of these for purposes of web-viewing. The originals were enormous. Here is a link that might be useful: Amy's 1st set of digital pics with Fuji Fine Pix S5100