They may send you a refurbished one but you still have to pay a minimum amount. I did that years ago with a SX60 - everything worked except the connectivity to my phone. I think I paid over $100 to get it fixed and they sent me a refurbished one for the repair price they quoted.

I got an email from DoorDash thanking us for using them for a food order a few weeks ago. Except we have never used DoorDash and we certainly did not order food from some grill in NJ (we live in GA). Thank goodness our CC company caught it before I even got the email from DoorDash. The CC company denied the charges and issued us a new CC. About forty minutes later I got a second email from DoorDash with a picture of two brown paper bags put in front of a door that looked like it was inside a carpeted hallway (assumed this was a hotel).

So some scam artist got a free dinner, and the grill and DoorDash got diddly squat.

I think DoorDash should change their policy of no-contact delivery to signatures to avoid such scams.

I have the same experience at least once a year, sometimes more. Our street number is 4822 and the neighbor's is 4922. It is about half a mile away and so we drive their packages to them. GRRR!

Those are not my tuberous begonias but grown by one man in a lath house in N. California. Getting the bulbs that grow huge flowers does make a huge difference. If you get WFF catalog (White Flower Farm) you will see in their spring edition some very large flowering tuberous begonias from England but expensive. About $75 each. I would never spend that on one bulb with a good chance of losing the entire bulb in one year. Yes a bigger bulb will produce a lot more shoots and flowers. Another man in S. California would show his tuber of B. boliviensis or 'Bonfire' (which is a superior sport of the species boliviensis and the size of this bulb was over 12" across.

I have tried setting up pseudo studio in the past for my favorite begonias but it is more trouble than it is worth. In winter, I rarely take a plant off the shelf for a photo shoot. I'd rather take a quick shot and move on to other plants that need tending to. What I usually shoot with phone or camera is more for documentation these years.

rooted plants from leaf wedges that were potted up last week.


some of my begonias outdoors last week. Too many for one person to take care of except for crazy old guys.

I love begonias and they beg to be photographed. HAHA!

Here are some tuberous at the San Francisco ABS (American Begonia Society) convention in 2010.

Cut flowers


one man grew all these that I remember


I wished I could grow one this size

I grow hundreds of houseplants (mostly begonias except for tuberous) in winter under shop lights (about 90 running 12 hours a day) in the basement. In summer I drag 90% of them outdoors and back indoors in late October. While I do like tuberous, I don't want to give them any more attention than I have for everything else. We (the Atlanta Begonia Society) are preparing to host our first national convention since 1998 (I didn't know about them back then) in late September. My basement is now a growing area for sales plants (I go to Florida and buy a load most every year but this year I am going for my second trip tomorrow and maybe a 3rd trip in September).

My wife even took pity on me Friday and helped me pot up 132 plugs and I had already potted up around 272 of my own cuttings. I bought 850 pots so I still have quite a few (about 450) for anything else that comes along.

Here are some I brought back in June (the canes) while the ones on the right are ones I grew from my own stock plants.


A few from Florida in June

I grow them as annuals because it gets too hot in Atlanta. I've seen them grown in California the size of saucer plates but then they have cool nights which I hear is what they like/love.

Good growing on your part!

I bought two Canon cameras from Best Buy online, the first one was the EOS7D that I picked up in the store (already prepaid) and the second one (80D) delivered to the house due to the video kit (they did not carry this in the store but could pay for it there and have delivered). The thing about delivery was no ring, no knock - just put on the front porch and I got an email a few minutes later that it was delivered. I didn't hear a thing and neither did our two dogs. For that much money it seemed like they would require a signature.

Another avenue is Canon direct. I got my R5 from B&H with the 24-105. I then wanted the 100-500 and the 800 f/11. It was taking weeks with no end in sight. I finally went to Canon's website, ordered both of these with the 2x extender and they were all in stock. I canceled the order at B&H and got the lenses from Canon within a week.

You may have to log out of your email account for her to log into her email account while you are logged in on your new laptop.

A simpler method is to make a new user ID on your laptop so both of you are independent of each other's email and other websites. You can switch users without logging out in this scenario.

The phone apps are a bit quirky. I have a Sekonic 478 meter and used the Lux meter app on my Samsung S20 for shop light readings in the basement just to see if some of the fluorescent lights are weak (usually I can tell by looking at them but this verifies it). They both measured about the same when it came to fluorescent lights but when it came to LED lights, they could be off quite a bit. I trust the Sekonic more in this case.

May be leaf hoppers. I get them on my tiger lilies. Kind of an ugly bug once you get the fuzz off of them.

The adults will move to the other side of a stem but if you spray water or insecticide they hop off the stem to another stem.

I pause the video at the point I would want to get a still of and do a print screen (screen grab or whatever one wants to call it) and use this capture in PS to crop and save.

We went to Belize in 2006 and the camera I took back then was Canon EOS 20D (very small review screen so almost worthless). I had the kit lens and it did a good job. When I went to Cancun in 2012, I just took a small Canon PowerShot 210 for that trip and was very pleased with the results. I also had an Olympus TG-810 for water activities (beach and Xcaret) - it was so-so. Enjoy your trip/vacation.

I sometimes forget to format the second card and the images are still on it. I wished the format command had a 3rd option to format both cards at the same time.

Christmas 1999 - Kodak 3MP 2X optical zoom for $800 ($100 off normal price). Nikon pro cameras with digital backs were going for $12,000 to $25,000 at the time - hard to imagine.

I thought of the Kodak as a toy but after the first download I never shot film again. Had it until I could afford an upgrade to Nikon Coolpix 5700 in 2003 and it went belly up in 2 years. GRRR! Finally bought my first DSLR in 2006 Canon EOS 20D which was hard to see the image after shooting (very tiny review screen).

I had the Kodak for a Cancun trip in May, 2002. Did a halfway decent job back then.

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