The Fourth of July 2026: The 250th!

 I was excited for America's 250th birthday and anniversary! I love this country, and I count it as one of my greatest blessings to live here and be an American.

We spent the long weekend of the Fourth on Cape Cod like the good old days when we'd do that every year. It was a mostly sunny, nice, warm day.

We put together a patriotic puzzle the day before.

Voila!

David made delicious waffles for breakfast with red (homemade strawberry sauce), white (whipped cream), and blue (fresh blueberries) toppings. Yum!

I enjoyed not only eating red, white, and blue, but also wearing it. 😄

The colors theme continued with these treats I picked up at Lighthouse Keeper's Pantry. 

David wore blue and took an afternoon siesta. 😄

We had a good old-fashioned barbecue dinner with hot dogs, pork chops, corn on the cob, and potato salad.

A fitting dessert made by Hayley.

John got in on the patriotic action too while on his mission in Colorado. 

In the evening, we were very pleasantly surprised that the fireworks down on the beach were so good. Years ago, the annual Fourth of July fireworks over the water were canceled because of an environmental issue with nesting birds. It was a major bummer, and I've really missed those magical fireworks down at "our beach." I didn't realize that the locals put on shows of their own, or maybe they just did really good ones this year for the 250th. In any case, it was awesome! 

David took most of these pictures. They do the fireworks justice!

It was a fun and memorable Fourth of July and 250th celebration of the greatest country on earth! 

💖🤍🩵

June 2026 Randoms

 

How cool is this!?

A younger David at his family's lake house in Montana. 😍

He was more around my age when this picture was taken.

I was tasked with decorating the summer reading sign-up table at the library. I think I did a pretty good job, EXCEPT that I put the flowers thing on backward, which you can see if you look closely below. Aargh!

We went to a good pizza place to celebrate my sister Jennifer's birthday. I got a Mexican street corn pizza, and it was delicious!

The other half of the pizza was David's, and I think it was cheeseburger (or something like that).

David and I shared a strawberry shortcake dessert.

It was really special to see Elder Bednar in person. He gave an awesome and memorable talk. That's an actual Apostle of the Lord right there, and likely a future prophet of His church.

The drugstore in my town is gone and is being replaced by this:

I miss the drugstore; I went there for decades.

I love a good cupcake, and this one was good! Cream cheese frosting, yes, yes, yes.

David's pictures of the temple:

Speaking of which, the late sunset sky was pretty on our drive home from the temple.

I believe this, all of it.

Funny descriptions of different types of bees...

I want to have chickens someday, but only with David's help, so this was fitting.

😆

Look at how cute and young John, Jennifer, and I were! We were on Martha's Vineyard.

That was my last good year of hair before it stopped growing normally and crapped out on me.

Choose optimism!

Healthy life advice from a book I read, condensed into a few lines:

I wanted to document my clear and glowing skin because I'm vain like that. Though my hair has special needs, my skin does not.

Books of June 2026

I had these three books checked out from the library. The Giver of Stars was for my book club, and I liked it a lot.

Sam is good at solving mysteries, so I got him a more challenging one to read. Agatha Christie is one of my favorite authors, and And Then There Were None is one of her trickiest mysteries.

I saw this at the library and snapped a pic. Good for this guy for writing this!

This was a good book I came across in the Children's room for my display about America's 250th. 

I want to get this cookbook. Trader Joe's is a personal favorite of mine.

Ambitions, ambitions! I can say now as I'm writing in September that I only ended up reading three of the books on this list I made at the beginning of summer. The rest will just have to carry over to next summer's list!

As an editor, I should read this, so I snapped a pic to remind myself. (I'm procrastinating reading it. 😆)

I was in charge of the big book display in front of the director's office for July, which I put together at the end of June. As I mentioned, the theme I chose was America's 250th, so it was books about America's founding or the Revolutionary War period. I got non-fiction, novels, YA books, children's books, and a few DVDs for it. These displays are fun to put together! It's one of my favorite things about working in the library.

I've learned how to use Canva because of the displays, too!

I also put together my endcap display for July, which was "Book Your Summer With Books Set in Summer." Clever, I know. 😄

My summer was indeed booked! Even if I only read three of the books on my list. 😆 But I did read over ten books this summer, so I did pretty well overall. 😚📚