We got out early today, in an attempt to beat the heat. It still gets warm during the day but cools off quite nicely at night. So, we headed over to the garden while it was still relatively cool. Parking was an issue. The Best of Missouri is encamped across the entire east parking lot, eating up half the spaces. It does not start until Friday, but hey let’s make parking difficult now. Come this weekend parking will be impossible. Anyway, we could not get in the lot at half-an-hour after opening but found a spot just outside the main gate on the street.

We walked around the garden for about an hour, photographing flowers, plants and other things. We spied the pictured spider’s web but try as we might could not capture it in a photo. The spider was tucked away in a rolled red leaf and with the morning sun shining through it, it made for a nice enough picture. I used my iPhone for this shot. We tried various tricks to get the web, including Anne using her shirt as background, but none of them worked. My other camera, a Canon point-and-shoot could not even focus on the web. Anne later remembered a technique that she had used, while working as an intern at the garden, spray water on the web. I find myself using the iPhone more and more now as my go to camera. It does have one major drawback though. It only has a 2X zoom, so you have to be close, almost on top of your subject or settle for a tiny dot in some nonsensical background.

I am planning on getting the new iPhone 17 Pro. It has up to an 8X optical zoom which would go a long way towards matching the Canon’s 40X. I tried to buy one today, but with an hour wait, I made an appointment for tomorrow. This purchase will be just the beginning of what looks to be a complete overhaul of our computing technology. We share a laptop, which mainly is only used on the road. It is the newer of our two Windows computers, but since we just returned from six months on the road, I am all too aware of its peccadilloes. Frankly, I am surprised that it survived the trip.

Ahead of the laptop on the triage list is our venerable desktop PC. It is a Dell that is running Windows 11 that it was only upgrade to last year. Starting next month, Microsoft is dropping support for Windows 11. Our particular flavor of 11 is still good for another year, but I can read the handwriting on the wall. Besides this old machine has recently developed a new problem. Overnight, every night this computer goes into sleep mode. Lately though, it is having a problem waking up. In the morning now, the screen is dark and takes about half-an-hour to come back to normal. My temporary fix was to turn off sleep mode. We’ll see how long this lasts.