My sincere condolences MsDivine - I have been in your shoes more than once and I know how hard it is.

Add my condolences Ms Divine. It is a horrible thing to go through.

Liz please note (again) "and open August when everyone has reached Friday."
I am all too aware you are backwardoops behind others in time and I will not forget.

But if you close this today (as you stated) and don't open the new one until Friday everywhere, all day Thursday here there is nowhere to post. That was my point

Yeah but... where Ren is it's already Thursday so when she says today she means tomorrow but by the time tomorrow gets to where you are it will already be the day after tomorrow where she is. Or something.

Flopsy I didn't mean that you SHOULDN'T lock your doors. It's just that I don't know anyone here with automatic locks (except for 2 very snobbish couples that have some sort of robot/activate-the-house functions from their cellphone lol).

If we do the Gatsby thing, can we post more than one per week? : )))

Edited to add that I'm in the wrong thread altogether. But I get lost quite often these days, so please forgive me.

Friday is 9 and a half hours away so I will be eagerly awaiting.....

Thank you all for your condolences.

Very sorry about the cats Msdrl, a great shame indeed.

The view towards Teddington Lock looking the other way.

Ty Satguru. Can anyone identify the purple spiked flowers in Satguru's pic?

I am not much into flowers, but I reckon that is lavender.

Lavenders like dry well drained soils. I would think that those are of the Lythraceae family, the loosestrifes (esp: Lythrum). They enjoy putting down roots in wet boggy places. They have escaped here in the new World and are usually found around cranberry bogs at the waterline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loosestrife_family

The zoomed photo of the Mt John Obervatory at Tekapo with a few visitors.

I think mehaul has got the right plant - mostly we just call it "purple strife" although if you want to go all Latin about a weed, lythrum salicaria.

They are actually cultivating these plants for gardens now because they attract butterflies, bees, and other beneficial insects. A weed is just a plant in the wrong place so now they're growing them in all the right places and I expect we'll grow to love them.

Yup, it's purple loosestrife. As far as I know, it's been "cultivated" for a very long time in Europe/Eurasia and some parts of Australia and Africa, as there are several native varieties in those parts of the world. However, it's on the noxious invasive species list in Canada (and probably many US States which still have "wetlands"). In the 80's greenhouses here sold a supposedly "sterile" variety, which turned out to be false (sort of like Jurassic Park, nature will find a way lol). Over time the plants reverted. It's a serious problem here, but not in Europe. Greenhouses here in Edmonton have been more or less prohibited from selling the plant since the early 90's. In North America, there are much better plants to attract beneficial insects as well as my favourite - hummingbirds. Apparently it is now a problem species in New Zealand as well.

Here's a link, if anyone cares. Things are much worse in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario than they are here in Alberta, but I thought the Alberta government info had a nicer layout as a webpage lol:

ABgovtagri

Howie: that's really cool about the observatory. I must confess that I didn't know there was such a thing as a "Dark Sky" phenom. It's amazing what you can learn from a photo thread. Thanks for posting it.

I'd have asked my mum if I'd known the wild flowers would have caused any mystery, but it didn't take long to get an ID.

Here's a bit of personal history, from 1960-5 I lived two roads away from now, and started school at the end of 1962, a year or so early as I was bored at home and wanted to go there. I met my first girlfriend in the class and she lived above the shops here almost next to the school which was just on the left, and I went there once for tea and she came to my birthday parties, and still have the pictures. When we moved I lost touch with most of the people from there and just moved on to the new school and being so young had no way of thinking of keeping up friendships I'd made there. I've found lots of people from back then online but not her as yet.

One more from the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, NY, this time uniforms from the women's league that flourished around the time of the Second World War, made famous by the movie "A League of Their Own".