it’s the fifth of july
feeling independent
please step aside
the celebration’s over
– eddie from ohio
The end of a good weekend. My back was bothering me on Sunday, so after I made an omelette, I went downstairs to lay down on the beanbag and catch up on the newspaper. Jill ran errands and eventually I joined her to run the paper recyclables out, feed friends’ cats, and do a grocery run. I made a summer chili with ground turkey, and it went down smoothly with some Magic Hat #9. Jill called it an early night, and I watched the rest of the Live 8 I’d recorded.
Monday Jill was working a 12 hour shift. She had cleaned up all her stuff from downstairs, now it was my turn. First I cleaned the bathrooms (and fixed the guest toilet). Then I had to pick my sister, Sharon, up from Dulles. She flew in from West Virginia because she had to fly out early this morning to South Africa, where she’ll be for a month. She had a couple hours of work to do, so that left me free to finish cleaning the house. We were done by the time my mom stopped by around 7. Mom and Sharon made a salad and I made my patented 60/40 lean ground beef/turkey burgers. I started cooking the burgers and dogs, and Jill got home right as I was finishing. The weather was perfect for eating on the deck (once we’d applied bug spray to defeat the ravenous mosquitoes). We finished a little after 9, and Jill voted to watch fireworks from the deck, instead of doing our usual thing of heading up to the golf course and letting them explode over our heads. Luckily they’d moved the launch point slightly west, and we had a perfect view from the deck. Afterwards we had some of Mom’s tasty rhubarb pie, before she left and the rest of us went to sleep.