Gorgeous July Day

When I opened my blinds in my den this morning, I saw one of the sunflower plants totally flat on the ground. We had lots of rain and wind yesterday evening. The plant was uprooted. The other plant was still standing, but for the last week the heavy flower heads have been bent over drooping lower and lower. So I asked my husband to uproot the second plant and dispose of the two of them.

The rain cooled things off and lowered the humidity. I donned my old shoes and went to work pulling out the weeds that have accumulated these past very hot days and weeks. 
The portulaca has benefited from the heat though. The plants have grown larger and are now developing blooms.

I may end up with some color in my patio plot yet.

I walked thru the wet grass to my back-door neighbor's house. She told me to help myself to hydrangeas any time I wanted. I might pick some one more time, but this is the third time and I don't want to wear out my welcome.

These photos were edited with Photopad, my new photo editing program. It doesn't have an automatic "button" to change the colors and sharpness like the old Microsoft Photo editing. I lost that when my computer died. The computer repair company was unable to recover any data or programs for me, and the old Microsoft program is no longer available for download. Photopad is more sophisticated than my old editing program; I think I will like it once I become familiar with it. I purposely bought a computer with a camera card slot only to discover my card won't insert. Maybe there is a technique I am missing. I used the USB cord instead. My camera is maybe 15 years old though so technology probably has changed.

My next decision is whether to try Thunderbird to take the place of Windows Live mail. I did like having a desktop mail program. Have you tried any desktop mail programs you like? I am right now going online to gmail. Maybe I will stick with it, but since our internet connection drops out several times a day, it would be nice to be able to read the emails on the computer any time I want.

Our small monitor didn't accommodate Windows 10 very well with the new computer. Icons and screen views were scrunched up at the edges, sometimes not showing the full story on news sites for example. Changing the resolution didn't solve the problem.
We went to Staples and bought a new monitor. I was surprised that Walmart no longer has displays of computer towers and monitors in the Warsaw store. You can order them online for store pickup, but I was anxious to be back up and running quickly after the loss of our computer. I bought the Dell computer from Best Buy in Fort Wayne on Tuesday. They had a few monitors, but not many, but at that time I didn't know my old one would not work well. It is becoming a laptop and smart phone world.

With lots of fresh air coming into the house, I sat on my loveseat going thru my decorating folders this afternoon. I bought a new folder at Staples when I was there. It has stars all over it, sort of like a "favorites" theme. Since I am running out of ideas on how to create more categories, I decided to pull my favorite photos from the other 9 folders and create that category. It was fun going thru all of the photos to select these favorites. A low-tech activity instead of all of the transferring of files and installing programs I have done the past several days.