Happy Independence Day!!!

We hope everybody had a great Independence Day yesterday. Our great country is 232 years old - and my kids tell ME that I'm old!!! :-)

Yesterday was kind of a laid back day for some of us. Justin and Christopher were working all day down at Morrison Park, serving up delicious lemonade to the masses. Andrew was (and still is) away at Boy Scout Camp. So in the late morning, after sleeping in, Michelle and I, as well as Brianna, Mark and Steven, went shopping at the Boise Outlet Mall - I even got a bunch of stuff from one of my favorite stores, Big Dog. To give some perspective, the exit from I-84 to get to our home is exit #47 (I think - I may be off by one). The Boise Outlet Mall is at exit #54. These exit numbers are also mile markers. A lot of stores in the Boise Outlet Mall are going out of business, citing that it's just too far our of town to be successful. Just 7 miles!

Then out at exit #74, you're way out in the middle of nowhere. Just 27 miles from the exit to our home. Way out there, though, is a HUGE Fat City Fireworks (open year-round) warehouse. We went out there to buy our fireworks. That place was CROWDED yesterday!!! There must have been 300 people there. We stayed away from the stuff (bummer!!!) that you had to sign an affidavit for, the kind of artillery shells (actually illegal in Idaho - but they sell it!) you see at Angels Stadium, and stuck to the Safe 'n Sane stuff.

After getting home from that shopping, we went for a lazy swim in our pool. Having already been BBQ'd out this week, we did the next best American thing: we ordered pizza. We then enjoyed our own little private fireworks show in our front yard. The picture above is of this REALLY colorful fountain we got, and below is me doing figure-8s with a sparkler, as captured with my camera on a tripod. For pictures of all 13 posted pictures, please click here.

Have a great holiday weekend, everybody!!!

For all of you photo geeks out there, I took this photo with my Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi. It was sitting on my tripod; the aperture was set at f22, and the shutter remained opened for 13 seconds, with an ISO setting of 400.