So How Did You Spend the Fourth of July?

We started our Happy Birthday America celebration Saturday evening, watching the City of Benson's fireworks event from our front porch. AND trying out one of the settings on our new little Lumix ZS6 camera.

As we mentioned last time, the Lumix has lots of specialized settings such as Portrait, Scenery, Babies, Pets, Sunset, Food, and so one. One of the settings is Fireworks, and we had to try that. First suggestion with the Fireworks setting is to maintain a distance of at least about 35 feet from the image you want to capture. We were about 5 miles from the city's fireworks, so we qualified.

We set up the tripod on the front porch, got our chairs in place, and poured ourselves a Bailey's with brandy and waited for the 8:30 show to begin. The mayor must have talked a long time to the folks gathered at the city park, so the first shots were fired about 8:45.

I punched the camera button well over 100 times last evening, and we game up with several reasonably good pictures. Came up with even more duds, because it took quite a while for me to develop some sort of idea of timing -- shoot just as the burst begins. Since we were far away from the bursts, I had to do a lot of cropping to make these pictures OK for display.

From 2010 Fireworks from Benson, AZ

From 2010 Fireworks from Benson, AZ

From 2010 Fireworks from Benson, AZ

A few years ago we were in Clear Lake, Iowa, on the Fourth and sat right on the shore of the lake watching the town's fireworks from the opposite shore. We were so close, and I had found out just the right settings for fireworks, got some great shots that evening. Here are a couple.




If you haven't had enough pictures of fireworks, our web album 2010 Fireworks From Benson will show you about 45 more!

Just to try out more capabilities of the camera, we took these pictures. We had recently bought a big jar of Jelly Bellies from Costco, and tried to get an "artsy" picture of them:



Sunday the Fourth, we participated in a park-wide potluck supper. We cheated a little: bought a couple of large containers of macaroni salad at Safeway. Suzy added her own touch to the mix, adding shredded cheese, chopped onion and a couple of other things, then put the new mix into a serving dish and topped it with sliced boiled eggs. What a treat!




Because of the hefty meal at 1:00, we're putting off grilling the baby back ribs until Monday, which, after all is the Federal holiday. We like to spread out our celebrations.

While all this is going on, we are working on plans and preparations for our 50th anniversary celebration at the end of the month. We'll have a potluck dinner at 4:00pm Saturday July 31 (you are all invited, by the way), with some family time in the evening. Sunday August 1 is our actual anniversary, and we'll be in church at 10:00am for a Mass concelebrated by our pastor Father Mike and our lifelong friend Father Ken Krall. Ken and I go back to before first grade. Suzy met him on our honeymoon while Ken was in the seminary in Oregon. We've visited back and forth all the years since.

And that's how we are spending the holiday weekend as part of ... Our Life on Wheels!