4th of July

Happy Independence Day!  I hope you and your family celebrated in some fun ways today.

It felt very quiet and weird to not have the boys here today.  John was up at 4 AM (crazy man!) to start smoking a brisket for our church cookout this afternoon.  He spent the day tending to his meat,

can you smell it?  mmm, smoky.

while I did a myriad of little jobs around the house.
I also made this to take to the cookout:

Doesn't it look like a firework?  It didn't turn out like the picture from the recipe (taken from the Boston Globe magazine) but I think I liked mine better (hee hee!).

 The shindig at church was tons of fun, with lots and lots of people, many from church, and many friends and people from the neighborhood.  A big success on the loving our neighbors front!

Lots of folks walked from church down to the river to watch the big Boston fireworks and to hear the Boston Pops.
But, with fireworks not starting until 10:30, we decided to come home and use some left over sparklers!

We sure missed the boys, but we're sure they are having a blast at camp.
Happy 4th of July, friends!