Bar coded playing cards

Recently at the bridge club I go to there have been some new packs of playing cards with these black marks on the top and bottom edge of each card.  I wondered what these bar codes were there for, and to be honest I found them quite distracting and irritating.

It appears that these are used in dealing machines when set hands are being dealt for duplicate lessons or sessions.  The machine reads the bar codes and following the program deal the cards to the correct position, i.e. North South East or West.

This saves organisers and teachers a lot of time that would be spent locating and placing the correct cards in the slots on the duplicate boards. A potentially tedious job.

Another Red Sunset

It's 10.15 pm, the temperature is 23 degrees Centigrade, and it's another red sunset.  I'm not complaining.  I love this wonderful weather with wall to wall sunshine day after day.

Just look at those little skinny clouds.....

Moth

This moth was on the monitor screen of my PC when I came to write this post.  It was tiny and I tried to put a ruler next to it but the ruler fell and scared the moth which disappeared and is probably looking for a flame or lightbulb on which to fry itself.

It measured about one centimetre from one wingtip to the other.  As moths go it was quite pretty. 

Giraffe

Jasmine

In this hot weather, the jasmine climbing bush in my garden has really thrived.  This was given to us as an anniversary present about twenty years ago.  This evening as the sun was setting the garden was filled with the lovely scent of jasmine. 

                                  About one-third of the length of the bush....

                                     ......and a close-up of the flowers. 

Parched

I was in London today, and on my way home I passed through Wanstead.  We have had a couple of weeks of hot dry weather, and this showed in Wanstead.  The Green is a shade of straw rather than green. 

Big Little Gems

I planted some little gem lettuces some weeks ago.  At first they grew slowly, but it's been pretty hot here the last couple of weeks and they've shot up.  It looks as if they think that they're giant cos lettuces rather than little gems.  You can see that the ones at the back are as large as the tomato plant at the front.