I finally uploaded a few pictures from our visit to Hyde Park a few days ago. There were quite a few exquisite butterflies fluttering around the flowers, and I was lucky to capture a few very nice shots.
Here are a couple of pictures of President Roosevelt's grave, which is surrounded by a colorful garden.
After heavy rain all day yesterday, today has been a glorious day with bright sunshine, low humidity, and unusually cool temperatures for August. Barry went in to teach his class early this morning, but we simply could not bear to spend the entire day indoors. So he came home, we packed a lunch, and headed over to the Botanical Gardens for a short visit. We first visited to the rose garden, hoping to take one last stroll this year amid the thousands of roses. Unfortunately, the roses have just about finished for this season, so it was rather disappointing. We took a look at the map and decided to try something we had never done, the Ornamental Conifer
Garden.
I had no idea what conifers are, but quickly learned that they are basically what we call evergreens. Here is a more formal definition from Wikipedia:
They are cone-bearing seed plants with vascular tissue; all extant conifers are woody plants, the great majority being trees with just a few being shrubs. Typical examples of conifers include cedars, Douglas firs, cypresses, firs, junipers,kauri, larches, pines, hemlocks, redwoods, spruces, and yews.[1] The division contains approximately eight families, 68 genera, and 630 living species.[2][3]
There were some amazingly beautiful trees, and we used all the explanations to allow me a chance to continue to work on my reading. It is still very slow going with many errors, but we are hoping that pursuing this every day will gradually lead to some improvement.
I have spent the last hour or so trying to upload pictures from my Samsung Galaxy Note II to Shutterfly. For reasons I simply cannot understand, it insists on uploading my landscape pictures in portrait orientation. I tried every trick I could devise to fix this but to no avail. I have noticed that Blogger has a special tab for uploading pictures from Picasa. So I finally succumbed and set up a Picasa account and copied the pictures there. I have no intention of learning Picasa at this point, but it did work to properly load the pictures to Blogger in the correct orientation. Of course now the trouble is that it copied all of my pictures from Shutterfly but did not set up the folders the way I had them, so it is quite difficult to find things. If I did not know better I would insist that someone out there is trying to drive me completely bonkers! Worse yet, they may be succeeding!
Eliana and Maya have been visiting their paternal grandparents in Cedarhurst (Long Island) for the past few days. Tomorrow, they are bringing the girls to Riverdale, and Barry and I are driving them back to Sharon. We are packing a picnic lunch and hope to stop midway on what is predicted to be another beautiful day.
If you are living in the northeast, I hope you have found or will find some time to get outdoors this week. We may just not have such fabulous weather again any time soon, so enjoy!
Love,
Rebecca
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