Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Something we have had on our to do list for a while is to visit the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.
Neither of us had been before and Tuesdays are free admission. So now that Heather's work exam is out of the way we decided to head out of the house for around FIVE hours in the 95ºF sun. And yes, I did get a little more sunburn.

The gardens are 102 years old and sit back to back with the Brooklyn Museum and guess what they have in their car park....

Thankfully we did stop halfway round for some lunch and to refill our water bottles.

They also had some cool (not temperature-wise) pavilions so we jokingly went inside for a couple of minutes into the desert zone, the tropical zone and the warm temperate zone as outside wasn't obviously hot enough for us.

They had some thistles, which I've also actually seen in the scrub between the trees opposite our house!

The best part though, was probably the Japanese garden complete with its carp & turtle laden pool.

Like all good school english stories I'll finish it by saying "a fun day was had by all".

Independence Day

The weather has been so hot and sunny during the day and it means that nearly every night you get these red-ish skies as the sun sets.

Every so often in Scotland you get a "red sky at night, shepherd's delight" kinda moment but it's pretty much like this every night at the moment.

This was taken from our window (with a powerful zoom ;) looking across to Manhattan with the new World Trade Centre buildings under construction on the left hand side.

Yesterday was the national holiday for some kind of independence from some other country or something.

We just spent it downstairs with the neighbours having a BBQ and then when the fireworks started at the back of nine we went up on our roof. They used to be on the East River but unfortunately they moved the celebrations over onto the Hudson this year, we still got a reasonable view though.

In other news, my paperwork is FINALLY ready to roll. My new cv is just undergoing the finishing touches and after a lot longer wait than I thought, I can get in touch with the real world again, and get a job.... somewhere.