Fourth of July

Well I only have a few minutes left to get in a 4th of July post. Happy Birthday America. How does it feel to be 229 years old?

Well I had a busy day. Sterted out slowly. I got up a little after 9. I had gotten to bed late so it felt good to sleep in. I immediately parked myself in my chair to watch the 3 hours of today's Tour De France coverage that was waiting for me on the TIVO. Good day of racing. David Zabrinski held on to his yellow jersey for another day. David a young 26 year old rider from Utah is only the second American to ever wear the yellow jersey on the 4th of July. OK, so the French couldn't care less about the the 4th of July, but someone there in France did. There were a lot of American Flags flying along the race course. It was good to see. I love watching the tour for both the cycling and the scenery. I may not care much for French politics and many of the people I've met from France have been snooty and rude. But I love the scenery that they live in. The chateau's are nice looking but I like looking at the buildings, particularly the churchs in the small villages they ride thorough. You get the feeling that some of those buildings haven't changed in over a thousand years. It's kind of disturbing to think that some of those little villages have furniture in them that is older than our country.

About noon our guests started showing up. We mostly just sat around and chatted for a while. Turner Classic Movies had an Elvis Presley movie marathon going so we had that on for a while for those who wanted to watch some TV.

I set the waterslide up around 2 for the kids to play. They had a blast and no one mananaged to kill themselves. But not from lack of trying.

I put the meat on the smoker early in the afternoon. So we got to smell that nice hickory and beef smell all afternoon.

We had a good old fashioned American BBQ dinner around 5:30. Hamburgers, Hot Dogs, Smoked Sausages, Cajun marinaded/Smoked London Broil (no one had tri-tip on sale for the last couple weeks so I had to substitute), Potato Salad, then three types of cheesecake and strawberry pie for dessert. We all ate way too much.

Then we relaxed while the kids played with smoke bombs, snakes and snappers in the drive way.

The sun went down about 8:15 and it got dark enough for fireworks. So we all moved out to the driveway where we shot off all the fireworks we had. We had a couple of neighbors a half a block down the street the were setting off their own fireworks also so we got to watch theirs and ours. It's not a nice as 6 or 7 years ago when we had all fice families that live in the cul-de-sac out sitting around the sidewalk with everyone taking turns shooting off fireworks. We did that for a few year but then everyone else just stopped showing up. So the last few years it's been just us.

Oh well. We had a wonderful day with family and good friends who in a few cases are as good as family.

Now it's almost midnight we finally got the kids into bed, the house cleaned up and now it's my turn to get some shut eye also.

Happy 4th to all.