Okay, I’ve uploaded some more Chicago Botanic Gardens pictures and jiggered things around. The main albums page is here, and the newest album is “Spring 2005.”

It was a nice day that day, if a little cold, and windy on the southern exposures (Ooh! my Aunt Fanny!). Today, though, was a really nice, actually quite warm day. The tulips are coming up in the front yard, I can hardly believe it but it’s true. And only last week the whiskey barrel was full of ice. I’ll be doing more gardening this year than I did last year, that’s for sure.

Anyway, enjoy the photos. Vote as you see fit.

Boing Boing: Google launches Picasa 2

I’ve used Picasa/Hello, but stopped using it a while back because it wouldn’t go through the work firewall.

Not that I did anything like that at work, mind you.

This seems to be the full-on Picasa for free, where before it was just the Hello piece. But just the other night I was in a panic trying to find images on one of my many harddrives.

So, we’ll see. I liked using it for my Razzberry Vinaigrette blog.

Oh, yes, I’ve been wanting one of these for a while now. David has one, and his photos always come out with much more depth and richness than my current camera can give. In the May road trip album, all the pictures I took in Moab of rock art came out pretty “meh” because of the glare, and the fact that I couldn’t change focus (much) on my camara – it has digital zoom, which I found did not work very well on pictures I took for the England trip. David’s, meanwhile, came out much better, though a stepladder might have been handy for shooting the art at the same level.

That’s not to say that my pictures totally suck – I got some good ones of both near and distant subjects, but I can’t really do anything about the exposure, or to deal with glare.

So anyway, new camera arrives this week. Hoping to get out with it next weekend, weather permitting. It’s very cool that David found me a Canon EOS Digital Rebel for such a good deal – fortunately, it comes with a very good lens. I don’t think I’ll go wacky and start buying a lot of junk for it aside from a haze filter (which is more for protecting the lens than anything) and a polarizing filter.

Saturday we drove around more or less at random, first south, then north to Volo Bog. It turned out to be a good decision to get there so late – the light was much better. my husband David’s photos look a lot better, he’s got the better camera.

For a while. Whee!

It was a nice time, and in spite of all the cars in the lot and people who seemed to be arriving, we had the whole trail to ourselves except for the first 200 yards or so. At one point, we stopped at the duck blind and settled down to watch a white crane feeding, and then some blue heron came in and made a move on the feeding grounds. David got some in-flight photos.

The new gallery for the recent trip to Napa Valley and San Francisco is here.

I didn’t tinker with some of these images, hence they were uploaded fairly quickly. Some of them could use some cropping and at least one needs to have some artifacts Photoshopped out, which I may do later.

However, there’s no hope for the one with the big fuzzy red hair right in the middle, so I left it in for now. It was taken by aiming the camera straight down from a balcony, which is why the hair got into the act.

Ah, well. The pictures are up, and a few of them are not bad. Most are “eh” quality. There are probably too many pictures of David, Steve and I in the mudbath (not all together, mind you).

Travel is such a broadening experience.

Especially when you eat as much good food and drink as much good wine (well, not that much, really) as we did. Plus, the mud helped sweat some of the toxins out of our bodies, or so we like to tell ourselves.

And it certainly helps to give us new perspectives on life (at first this image was loaded sideways – almost left it that way). Anyway, the images will soon be loaded in a new album in my gallery. They will include some rather scary mudbath pictures as well as pictures of Steve eating the entire "small plates" menu at All Seasons, Calistoga. N t to mention a bunch of pictures from the Stinking Rose. In the meantime, I've had a couple of cups of delicious jasmine pearl tea that was a gift from David's friend Adam Sah. He had bought it on his walk from his office to the restaurant; he may have stopped off somewhere like this place to purchase it. And yes, the tiny pearls of jasmine-scented tea really do unfurl as the tea brews; it's a heavenly scented infusion, too. I have a feeling that I'll be buying an Asian-style tea service soon, as my sturdy British teapot and bone china mug from England aren't quite the right style.

Hey, one of these might be nice to have…Moon Phases :: Calendars

Earlier tonight, David took some nice photos of the moon. He’s still working on some of the features he can use with the Eos Digital Rebel.

Man, now I’m starting to think about that camera, too. Stop it, Ginny. Just stop.