My Hydrangia Flowers in FULL force

I have a 22' ring of these that come back every year around my deep well head. I call these snowballs but the real name is Hydrangea. They sell these things at the flower shop for 5 bucks each! I usually get about 300 of them easily around this well head. They love shade and wet soil...Sun is their enemy!

I am ready for more monster tomatoes

You can see here evidence of my "premier" virginia grown (organic) tomato from my garden the previous seasons. Things are looking good out there other than the rabbits terrorizing my green beans for the 3rd year in row. I need to call Dick Cheney down here to eradicate them! Don't worry I'll stay far away when he is around with a loaded weapon.

Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs

Well, since I was feeling lucky when I woke up Saturday morning I thought I'd head down to Colonial Downs here in Virginia-New Kent County (about 23 miles from house) to wager on the biggest horse race of the year. I did quite a bit of research on the internet to help me choose the winning horse and came up with #6 Frisian Fire , #15 Dunkirk and #16 Pioneer of the Nile. These horses were heavily favored to win the roses. I also went ahead and picked my long shot horse #4 Advice since I usually always do. The track was super sloppy since it had rained so much and the inside horses through the day seemed to be favored so this did not fair well with my #15 and #16 choices. I knew this , but was content with my picks.

Wow..was I ever wrong...none of my horses placed and were far from placing throughout the whole race. Horse #8 Mine that Bird as you all know was the horse that had the longest shot at winning 50:1 , and you know the result..#8 pulls in the big win by far. I mean BY FAR. This horse took them all out and left the herd in the mud. This was the second biggest win by a long shot in the history of the Run for the Roses at Churchill. The last time a long shot won by this distance was 1918.

Since 8 is my lucky number I should of placed a simple Win bet on him for poops and grins. A $2 bet on this would of yielded $104 big smacks...Whew. I only heard a few people holler at the result at the track and likewise only a few people go to the window to collect any earnings. What a loss for SO MANY PEOPLE today. I still wonder if anyone out there put a Win for $2000 bucks on number 8 because if they did it would of been a $104,000.00 gain !!! What a race. I am sure Mine That Bird will be one of the most famous wins at Churchill and would bet that a movie will be coming out to tell the story of this great win.

Lipton Tea 250

Friday night I went to watch the Lipton Tea 250 at Richmond International Speedway with James Key. We found some great tickets in the Commonwealth Tower section so that was very cool. The higher up you get at these races the more you can see. Our seats were just about at the top (highest point in the stadium). The race was fun to watch, not that many accidents and Kyle Busch ended up winning the race fairly easy.

The 2 pictures you see here I had taken at last years Indy Car race at RIR. You can see how high the Commonwealth Tower is in this picture. The Indy cars run near 200mph while top speed on the NASCAR's are about 145.