The Gardener and his Assistant

For the third year in a row my son the Gardner has wanted to plant flowers. This year I decided unless something wa said about it I was going to let this go. I just didn't feel like having to remember to water them and have enough stuff on my plate to do already, but yesterday it was brought up.

Now in the past two years, we have planted flowers from seeds. This year it is too late to plant seeds so today I went out and bought flowers at Wal-Mart. As soon as we got home my son started in on planting them and my daughter was chomping at the bit to help so all I did was stand around and supervise the work. Both my son and daughter did a great job with this and I am sure I will enjoy seeing them as they will remind me all summer of today and how they went about working together to get this done. The only complaint I heard was about how hot it was.

Close enough to "Feel the breeze"

As some may know I am a Railfan. I go out and enjoy some sun when the weather permits and take pictures and video of trains. I have loved trains since I was a kid. Yesterday I didn't know if I was going out today or not. I just didn't feel like going. I set my alarm just in case. This morning I decided it had been a month since I had left the house to do something fun so it was time to get out of the house before I go sturr crazy. Enough just going to work and coming home.

I headed up to Butler Indiana and much to my amazement Norfolk Southern put on a show like I have never seen. None stop trains from 6:30am to around 11am. More were coming as I had to leave. At 10am I stopped just off highway 6 at County Road 79 East of Butler. Train 24M was heading East. I setup the camcorder on the tripod and started rolling.

I took some pictures as you can here in the video. I have told friends and family that I have been close enough to the tracks to feel the breeze when the train rolls by. In recent months I have taken the stance that I will leave the camcorder roll and move to a safer location. Retrieve the camcorder when the train has passed. What happend in this video is the breeze from Norfolk Southern train 24M which was screeming by my location at around 50 miles an hour blows the tripod over. For one heart sickening moment I though my new camcorder was toaste. I bought my sisters camcorder to replace my old one. Much to my delight it was ok and still rolling. It did get a few minor scuffs, but all in all I was very lucky. Have a look at the video you can see the vibrations of the breeze on the camcorder before it falls.

Kicking off the Summer

I know the calendar still says it is spring, but for me the summer season offically kicks off in May and ends in late September. This year the weather in April was increadibly nice. Upper seventies many days and even hit the eighties a couple of times. Today my kids and I made our first trip to the Fort Wayne Childrens Zoo. I, as I have in the past several years, bought the pass for the year. This year the cost of the zoo pass is $89. However, I know my kids will want to go several times over the course of the summer. If I had just paid the admission today it would have been $26, but after the third time we go the rest of the time will be free. I figure the cost of the pass will be covered at that point. I bought the wagon shown last year and we recovered the cost of it buy saving money not renting one last year. At first today I didn't think I would take my camera with me, but finally put new batteries in it and off we went. This blog post contains only a few of the photos from today. We only spent a couple of hours at the Fort Wayne Childrens Zoo, but I believe a good time was had by all.