My husband has been quite indifferent to the lack of rain, (enjoying the weather) although we are resowing grass in most of our yard. I have complained daily and he hasn't listened to me because he's not the one dragging the sprinklers around all day. Until...the water bill came! That evening, he was reporting to me the week long forecast for rain and what day we might get a shower and he's been outside watching the clouds and checking the weather news. I about fell off my chair laughing when he gave me the weeks forecast.

I'm not 100% strict about the "all native" thing, but I don't like to plant things that might spread unless they are native. I have a few uses for the "cloverish" plants. 1.) Mix into a section of lawn that is an unmowable swamp in the spring and mowed in the summer...I figure if it is a "de facto" meadow in the spring, I might as well have bee food in it. Anything put in it has to survive summer mowing and be inconspicuous. There is a hard to find, swamp loving Californian clover that looks like white clover. Unfortunately, it is from California. 2.) Mix in to my parent's lawn to supplement the "invasive" white clover (and fill in dry clay spots). I figure the New York Purple Prairie Clover is pretty and loves dry conditions. 3.) Put on a steep slope with poor soil to supplement the grass. 4.) Illicitly slip into a local vacant lot...since I suspect it will be mowed occasionally, that limits wildflower options. (The vacant lot is a recently leveled building which will be used as a parking lot for construction equipment during a city renewal project...also next to a park. "Volunteer" baby grass is just starting to grow there...it would amuse me to have some native wildflowers there. I have some surplus seed I purchased from plot 1-3, and that big expanse of plantless dirt is temptingt...) I love the idea of Arctostaphylos uva-ursi. It loves salt and produces edible fruit. Unfortunately, it grows slowly and is hard to find...I'm not going to be able to buy enough to fill in a large area. Also looks to be to brittle to survive mowing. This post was edited by edlincoln on Sun, Jun 30, 13 at 20:41

This is from an amateur's viewpoint- Is your Kodak a point and shoot camera or an SLR? I have a Nikon D50 Digital SLR which can use additional lenses. I presently have 2 lenses, a 28mm-55mm, and a 55mm-200mm. We are thinking about getting a more powerful lens, but we are not sure of the size yet. The SLRs in general have some weight to them compared to a point and shoot, but my D50 is nice to hangle. I just bought a Panasonic Lumix ZS3 approx. $300. (the ZS1 is similar and $100. less expensive) with 12x wide angle zoom, 10.1 mega pixels -all that I need. This camera is a point and shoot and is not able to take additional lenses. When buying a camera with zoom you are looking for OPTICAL zoom. The ZS3 p&s also has a maximum zoom of 85x digital which means that we can see the windows in a house approx. 1 1/2-2 miles away but it is not a photo you would want to print for display, except to show what the camera can do. I have not printed a photo at this distance, but I want to soon. I really like this point and shoot for its 12x, light weight, fits in a pocket, voice recording, image stabilization, shutter burst (video) and the photos look great. We take photos of family, wildlife, flowers, etc. If you want to add lenses, as lazypup has mentioned, you will need an SLR (single lens reflex) to be able to uses lenses for maximum distance, and you will definitely need a tripod to control camera shake. Just some thoughts. Good luck. Jane PS:Before I finally chose my ZS3 I checked out a lot of reviews.

FWIW, I believe it's actually illegal, or breach of contract or something, to charge your card before shipment. There's some rule? or something governing credit cards that say you can't pay for something without "immenint recipt" of the item or something like that. So if you order online and they charge you for it they have only a small window to actually deliver it. Granted, It's been a few years for this, but I remember working with a tile contractor about 3 years ago and we would often pay for the tile shipment from Germany via credit card. Credit card was the easiest way to handle the exchange rate, etc even with the additional fees. And each time we would have to lie to the credit card company and tell them the tile was already recieved because there was no way to claim the tile would arrive in the time period allowed. I don't know if that information will help you or not but I think it's pretty interesting.