Roses

Came across this rose photo from a few months ago. Thanks to Safeway supermarket, and not my garden! I wish...

The single roses are not usually my favourite kinds - though every rose is beautiful, of course. Found this one in bloom at the Calgary Zoo on October 2nd. Thanks, Doug, for your ID: "almost certainly Rosa 'Morden Sunset' a shrub rose developed at Morden." I suspect my external hard drive is what is causing my very latest computer woes. Thank goodness, I have two externals and this particular one is kind of a back-up back-up and is not up-to-date. Yesterday evening, I had just started saving a few of my photo folders from last year to it, and I got another nasty blue screen warning message, which messed up my computer. Think I'd better save a few files to CDs/DVDs today (I stopped doing this a few years ago, as I was accumulating just too many CDs). Hopefully, I can still remember how to do this! I just long for a whole day (months, if possible!) that is clear of anything going wrong with my computer. The last few weeks have been insane and horribly stressful : ) My computer will be three years old next month, so really isn't that old.

A rose for YOU! I found various meanings for "Yellow Rose" on the Internet, but Friendship and Joy seemed to be the main ones. Not sure if the orange edging changes the meaning at all. Thank you all so much for being such loyal Flickr friends. Your comments are so encouraging (and over-generous!) and I so appreciate your taking the time to stop by and let me share my images with you. I'm sure I have improved since I joined Flickr over two years ago - thanks, greatly, to seeing all the amazing and interesting photos you post! Talk about inspiration!! Please know that I read every single comment and almost always check out each person's photostream - with joy. I only wish that I was a good few years younger, ha, ha, when my typing fingers, my brain and my energy levels were, oh, SOOO much better!! Thank you ALL!

This lovely green Rose was in a small bunch of mixed Roses (bought from my usual place, LOL). It stayed in reasonable shape long after all the others had withered and died, which is a good job, as it took me ages to get convenient time to take photos. Warning, everyone who lives in Calgary - I washed my car half an hour ago - now watch it rain or snow : )!

Thanks for everyone's patience as I post a photo of yet another Rose!! June is the wettest month of the year for us here, so I might just have to resort to buying another bunch or two of flowers if we continue to get rain. Yesterday, Calgary had dreadful flooding. Our average total precipitation for the month of June is something like 76 mm and yesterday 98.6 mm fell in just 18 hours!! Felt a little too much like the major flooding of June 2005 for everyone's liking.

No, it's not a bitterly cold, snowy day here today, but I just felt like seeing some bright colour, LOL. In fact, it was lovely and sunny this morning, but has become overcast this afternoon. Had problems with one of my (new) external hard drives this afternoon - wouldn't save my files and instead would freeze my computer. Seems to be OK now, touch wood. Feels good to at long, long last be backing-up some of my photos. I still have about 14 months' worth of almost daily images to save, so I know I'm going to be doing this for a long time to come, LOL. Winter is the only time I seem to have in which to do things like backing-up, so I fall horribly behind.

I did such a crummy job of photographing these very tiny roses recently - this was the only photo that had at least a tiny bit that was in focus, LOL. They didn't last long and, as so often happens, I didn't get round to taking some quick photos until the flowers were beginning to die. This was one of the better ones. Such pretty flowers, maybe three-quarters of an inch across.

I guess it's a white Rose with a tinge of yellow : ) It's hard to even imagine a time when such beautiful flowers can grow. Today, here, it is -23C (-9F) with a windchill of -36C (-33F) with heavy snow! Think I'll stay home - yet again. Just noticed I took this photo two years ago.

My original title for this was "Happiness and joy" (which is the meaning of a pink rose), but it just didn't feel right, having read a few moments ago that Dame Elizabeth Taylor has died. I'm not a big follower of movies any more (no time and no particular interest), but, like probably most of us, I did watch most of her movies over the years. I have great respect for the way she faced all her many medical ordeals (way more than her fair share) and still kept her humour, and fought so hard for those with HIV/AIDS. She certainly seemed to squeeze an awful lot into her lifetime! She will be greatly missed. Snowing again today .... Note: this is the only time I have ever changed the background to an image. I tried everything from exposure to brightness but still ended up with a sickly, dull grey background - and my fridge surface is white. I had recently read someone's description on Flickr of how they had changed their background in PS (Elements). I took a look and tried it. Normally, I take so many of my flower photos against a black background in the first place, lol. That way, I don't feel like I've cheated!!!