More book repair stuff

Since I was fixing these 2 books anyway, it occurred to me (after I'd gotten started, of course) to document and post another book repair entry, this time showing what I do when a book has completely split apart.

For anyone who happens by -- I talked about the basic materials in my first post on repairing books -- so I won't repeat that here, I'll just refer any interested readers to that post, but I will repeat one thing which is too important to skip:

NEVER repair a book unless you are willing to destroy its value. Repair pretty much does exactly that. If you want to sell it, collectors would rather have it in disrepair. Really. Repair only no-value books that need to be used and handled.

OK. You'll see 2 books here, but i'll show the repair steps for the more complicated one.
It's complicated mostly by my choice. I want to keep the original bookplate and to keep all of the original paper of that ripped endpage.

You may not want to. It would be simpler and would, in fact, look neater to discard the torn paper and make a big, neat, new pastedown. But I like the plate. I like the personal history in an old book. And I also tend to keep as much of a book's original material as possible ... just ... because!

The general idea is to secure the text block to the cover.

The first step requires a decision. There's paper backing against the bound page edges.

The bookbinding guide calls this the "hollow back." It is NOT hollow, it's thoroughly glued to the bound edges, but they call it that.

Is that backing secure? Or is it shredding, or peeling off?

If it needs fixing or replacing, this is the time to do either one, by gluing it down, or peeling it away and replacing it, the same way I have placed new paper on this one.

Two views, one from each angle:

But in this case, the old backing was very securely glued down already and needed no attention, so I just placed the new piece on top of it.

Now -- BEFORE gluing the book together, it's a very very good idea to close the book on the new piece.

This shows me exactly how the piece will conform to the cover. AND when I DO put glue on the pieces, they will already be shaped to each other and will fit together in their natural position, without pulling against each other.

All I need to do now is glue the new piece onto the cover.


IMPORTANT : NOTE that I have put NO GLUE ON THE SPINE. The cloth spine is not supposed to stick to the back of the pages. The text block, as it's called, just kind of hangs into the spine like a hammock, attached ONLY at the hinges.

Press it together. Since glue always oozes out around the edges, lay wax paper between the repair and its facing page, till the glue dries.

If I were discarding the old torn edges, I'd pretty much be finished, but I chose to trim the new piece to fit around the plate ... and to glue the torn paper back onto the pastedown. It looks kind of yucky, since it's been crumpled down into the spine, probably for decades, and darkened. But I wanted to put it back where it belonged!

And here are both books. In the other one you can see that this technique makes a pretty neat repair, especially if you sort-of color match new paper to the old paper.

This is another book I should sell. I'm not sure that a real booklover should even be in this business. I should sell collectible thimbles or something.

Marvels of Insect Life, by Edward Step. NY:Robert M. McBride, 1916.



Loads of amazing photos. as well as the spectacular color plates. This photo close-up of a honeybee's tongue is amazing. Maybe I'll sell it ... um ... later.

It was 20 years ago, maybe today

I've mentioned before that I'm in the amusing position of not knowing exactly when Larry and I met, because I was merely the librarian who issued him his library card at the time.

He's still got the card. The date sticker reflects a couple of later renewals, but I originally gave it to him in September 1989.

So any date in September is as good as another to call the 20th anniversary of our meeting. Though, actually, today is his birthday, so he likely didn't hit the library that very day. But it'll do.

Neither of us was in a life situation amenable to dating one another at the time. By 1992 that was different, but I still wasted several more years doing stupider things. Yeah, it's his birthday, and I'm feeling old and mulling over lost times, but I'm well aware of how few people get another chance at all.

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Each of us, at the time. Larry is with Younger Daughter on the Hilton Head beach.

September 1989 brought very very good things into my life.

Happy Birthday, Love. 8~)

The Very Thirsty Spider

I know that helping a slighter dumber member of her species beat Natural Selection is not exactly what a hardline ecologist would advocate, but I couldn't help it. Neither could Larry.

We felt for this girl, and partly because we let the "pest" control technician kill one, right there in the same corner of the same porch, a couple years ago. He sure doesn't do that anymore - each guy who comes out tells us he's been duly warned not to harm garden spiders.

We also owed her. She's kept the entry to our house free of mosquitoes and has waylaid and lunched on one of those nasty stinging horseflies that ventured up.

The fact that this one chose to build her web across the doorbell is rather inconvenient

but she pays her rent, and, I mean, we're not ridiculous about it, we've removed other encroachments of the web that began to cover too much of the doorway and told her sternly to expand in the other direction.

She seems healthy enough, but we noticed she wasn't fattening up as nicely as her cousin down in the yard. She'd had the foresight to build deep inside the portico, which protects her web, but has a downside: fewer bug passersby to catch and eat. Still, she'd caught some, she had grown. Maybe she was just settling into a lower-metabolism state for the coming autumn.

But something else occurred to us. Because of her seclusion, it also rarely rains on her web. All living things need water in some form and she hadn't had many juicy insects lately and wasn't getting much liquid.

Webs get rained on naturally so at worst it couldn't hurt. Here, Larry endows her web with a fine mist of water.

And though it's hard to capture, I can tell you, she skittered over to the droplets and began slurping them up like they were ambrosia.

But...it says so on the internet!

I just took this shot of my weather gadget on my iGoogle page.

It did not get above the 80's (F.) at all today, much less after 5PM. What bizarre instrument fed them this figure?

The most trivial 1969 anniversary post you will ever read.

Of all the 1969 anniversaries that seem to be coming up, the one I just might cherish most is the appearance of hair straightener on the drugstore shelves, giving me my first victory in a long series of hair battles.

I will love Eugene Payne forever because he drew me without curls. Better known for editorial cartooning, and winning a Pulitzer for it in 1968, he did some portrait work in Charlotte, NC during the '50s and '60s, and my grandmother commissioned him to do pastel portraits of Emily and myself when we were six.

She arranged the sittings without consulting our mothers, so my unfortunate mother had most of my despised (by me, not her) curl cut off shortly beforehand, causing my grandmother near-apoplexy. Grandmother had instructions for Payne: "Give her curls!" i.e.: They're gone? Fictionalize 'em!

"She said she doesn't want curls," said this wonderful man. Few defied my grandmother. I still like this portrait.

Long straight unstyled hair rode in on the early feminist rebellion, but the straight unstyled look became its own thing-to-conform-to. My problem,

and it took being this elderly to prove it, is that I wanted it not because it was fashionable but because it was comfortable.

My hair was uncontrollable.I fought it, clamped it down, and hated it way before the hippie era. It wasn't about looks. The wiry bulkiness, the endless springy tickling, drove me to distraction, and it was worse to keep hearing that appearance was supposed to be all that mattered.


I hated the totally uncool "easy care" chop job that kept my bangs from curling outward. I tried repeatedly to grow longer bangs and fought a losing battle against the curl.


By 1969, when I was 15, straight hair was in, and along with it came a great product: hair relaxer for us Caucasians. CurlFree [TM] got more publicity, but I found it pretty wimpy. My favorite was Straight Set [TM]. It contained lye. It worked.

Of course, it also stripped my hair out and turned it into straw, which meant I still envied the girls in the magazines.

But it was better than nothing. Once, often twice, during the week after a straightening, I'd heat up some ultra-moisturizing conditioner in a kitchen saucepan, apply it directly to the dry hair and wrap a towel around it for a couple hours. It was a week of work for every straightening, but so worth it. I could almost be normal. I could wear bangs!

Curliness made a fashion comeback and my beloved Straight Set disappeared but products were always available in what they called the "ethnic needs" section of the drugstore.

And over and over through the years I have had to listen to the critiques of people who have a variety of reasons for shouldn't-ing at me:

"Everybody should just be natural!"

Good thought. I'll give up eyeglasses too. Loan me your car, since I'd rather not total my own.

"Be yourself! By failing to be Who You Are, you are Failing to Love Yourself!"

Lord save us from The New Age. Excuse me, but to say my hair is Who I Am would the antithesis of valuing myself as a full human being.

Women in particular go with: "Oh isn't it cute how everybody wants what the other person has! I always wanted curls!"

I honestly don't think anybody wants what the other person has. Women who pay about the same annually for perms that I do for straightening may want lovely cascading curls, but they do not want my orange afro. What most of us want is a nice-looking and easy-care happy medium. We're not trading places, you with your perm and me with my straightening. We're more like meeting in the middle.

I kept up the drugstore relaxers, with a brief go-natural break in 1990.

Let me emphasize: brief. I quickly resumed my use of Dark and Lovely [TM]. By now manufacturers apparently considered a "No-lye formula" a selling point, to my dismay. That lye was g‑o‑o‑o‑d stuff, man.

Then they invented bio-thermal hair straightening. It never wears off, leaving only new growth to deal with. I read about it in the newspaper in 2000, but it would be 4 more years before it was available locally.

It's wonderful. It's a joy. In exchange for a long afternoon at the salon twice a year, I can, for the first time in my life, ignore my hair instead of working on it every morning.

I still keep it long. I can pin it up, à la Elly Patterson, for occasions on which I need to act willing to age gracefully, but mostly I'm unapologetic. It's not my fault that the hair I wanted at 15 is only available to me now when it's age-inappropriate. They'll undoubtedly hack it off when I'm in the nursing home. Not before.

We now return you to the 20th century.

This computer has multiple problems -- yes, again, and ever since I bought it -- but anyway, it has a bunch of dysfunctions, including no sound. Multiple attempts to fix it -- my repair guy was here for 4 hours -- have failed.

I'd gotten awfully used to MP3 convenience. Now: no carefully compiled playlists. No easy clicking, no uninterrupted 90+ minutes of music at a time. Worst of all -- no YouTube! Larry is fine with my using his computer, but since everything at his desk is set up for a left-handed person who likes s-l-o-w mouse scrolling 8~) I won't do that every day.

But I can access music to work by, using old fashioned 20th century technology, CDs, a player, and my headphones. CDs not only have a full, rich sound -- MP3's are cruddy, really -- but many I bought in the 1980's still play. There's a lot to love about music that's not disposable.


This also got me to dust and organize my bookcase to make room for the boombox.

I really would like to get Sindows out of my life forever. We've already gone un-Window Shopping at the local Apple dealer, and I'm thinking on a Mac for next year, but right now I can still work and write on this machine, so that purchase can wait until the other bugs --- and there ARE others, including no saved log-ins anymore (Yes, I've done all the suggested fixes)-- drive me so insane that I take this thing to my cousins' house on the next Confed'rate Holiday and let 'em fire their cannon at it.

I do not like my computer.

Sanctuary

I hated Junior High School with a passion. When people play games, like "If someone promised you a million dollars, would you ___?" I can say with confidence that, while I would take a million dollars to relive some unpleasant things in my life, there is one thing that even a million could not induce me to go through again and that was junior high. I was a target of bullying on grand scale. I'm not sure why. I was from the right side of the tracks and wasn't particularly odd looking, though I was somewhat fashion challenged.

12-14 is a cruel age. I wasn't alone by any means. A kid who exudes shyness and tendency to submit will kind of attract it, like blood attracts sharks, and the structured environment of elementary school had given way to the looser movement of shifting classrooms which allowed the meanest people free-er reign for bullying others.

Two days ago we were in Charlotte visiting Cousin Emily, and she asked me to go with her to my old junior high. She was donating to them some posters with vintage photos of the class of 1936, which her dad was part of. I've visited other sites from my youth but never had any desire to go back to that school. It appears in unpleasant dreams often enough. I (smiling) accused Emily of trying to "help" me "confront my demons" which she found hilarious, but we went, sat in the office, handed the old photos to the assistant principal who was a very nice, enthusiastic guy, and Emily said, "Could you give my cousin a nostalgia tour?" while I rolled my eyes.

But, though not particularly nostalgic about the place, I was a little curious to experience it again. Predictably, the school seemed smaller, less intimidating. There were some new buildings. The landscaping was lusher.

And I did remember something good, something I actually wanted to see. The library.

1968 had been a pinnacle of school misery, but at the end of the year, I became aware of an option for the next year. You could be a Library Assistant. It wasn't the hot activity. Hip people who craved authority and power wanted to be Office Assistants. I doubt if they had any power at all, merely got to stand at the desk and say hello to visitors, or staple and photocopy things, and might have had a little fun, but anyway, there was very little competition for library assistant positions and I applied and was accepted for the 1968-69 year.

Taken 8-13-2009

The school library was physically, as well as symbolically, apart from the rest of campus. The building and the walk to it are so much the same that it's almost weird. It's not the library anymore, but used for chorus and band. That shady walkway which ambles down to it, taking you away from the roar of the crowd, has not altered a bit.

Inside, two walls were almost all window and looked on woods as richly green as they are today. As a library in 68-69 it was, not dark, but sort of shady and nice. The librarian was a hip, cool young woman right out of school, who wore miniskirts. We hung around the checkout desk and stamped things and alphabetized cards and stapled stuff and generally had a serene hour a day in that wonderful, quiet little building where no one harassed anyone.

It was really good to see it again. I skipped the classroom buildings and the girls' bathroom where I would spend lunch hours eating crackers, to avoid the harassment of the lunchroom. Most of that is all renovated and doesn't resemble the old days anyway.

OK, OK! Emily was right. Revisiting it was good. Thanks to this delightful place, ninth grade was not as bad as seventh and eighth had been. High school (grades 10-12 in our system) was, actually, comparatively, great. Jerks seemed embarrassed to behave in quite so immature a manner as they had back in junior days, and while school irritated and angered me often, I never feared it again.

Fighting nature

My garden makes kind of pleasant, innocuous blog material, but that's because I avoid telling the parts of the story that are slightly more interesting but definitely more embarrassing.

I'm afraid I'm one of those wackos who took survival measures when Y2K was coming. In 1999 we were still in NJ in our wonderful Victorian house with its nooks and crannies, and I piled canned goods and a huge sack of Sam's Club rice into an odd little closet I kept shoes in. Later, when a local food drive arranged with the postal service for carriers to pick up donations, I dragged the 20(?) pound rice sack out to the porch and our poor mailman hauled it away.

c. August 1997, just after we bought the house.

But, no, I have not entirely changed my nutcase ways, because I honestly think that the ability to provide ourselves with at least some of our own food could become a necessity rather than a hobby. If we never need a food-producing farmette, the kids just might. Or might want one. The current economy being the mess that it is, I wanted to begin my learning process now. This place we're in now is not very good for a sustainable life, but it's fine for a learning laboratory. We'll have some acreage eventually. Why be a novice in 5-10 years?

This is part of the reason why I'm trying things that are more difficult to grow. I like some of the easier crops like lettuce and cukes well enough, but, bottom line, salad holds limited interest for me. I want to be able to raise serious sustenance vegetables that keep better and have more recipe versatility. I'd rather fail more and learn more, than succeed at things I don't care much about. Ideally, I'll have a greenhouse too, and have a small but steady production of salad veggies.

I'm as complete a novice at this as one can be. I've never been into gardening for pleasure. I have to avoid sun, which means getting out there at 6:30 AM to work on it while the yard is still fairly shady. I'm also not a morning person, so this is a radical shift.

I'm also not a detail person. Gardening, especially organic gardening, requires some vigilance and attention to detail. You can't just decide to take a few days off. Nature doesn't.

So I'm not exactly a natural-born gardener. An online friend once told me that if I ever joined her role-playing group, they'd probably dub me The Goddess of Convenience Foods and Take-Out. I have to fight nature, and by that, more than the predators and the weather, i really mean my own nature.

While gardening is kind of calming and satisfying even for my temperament, for me it's more a means to an end, than an end in itself.









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So! I planted my carrots and broccoli almost 2 months ago. We oughta be eating the stuff by now, but neither was the right crop for its location. They didn't die, they didn't grow. They all just sat there suffering in the too-long day of full broiling South Carolina sun.

Both are now in containers. I used to have ornamental trees in these two square planters, years ago. Each crop has a planter now, and both are perking up. Naturally, as soon as I put the carrots into a shadier spot, we've had nothing but cloudy days and downpours. I can move the planters to adjust for weather, so we may get some food out them!

The peppers are happy in the raised bed, though. They love this climate. We harvested 2 and had stuffed peppers, and Larry's (mumble...thriving...mumble) garden produced enough tomatoes for me to make a sauce that looked pink and wimpy, but that had the richest, most delectable flavor... o my! Home grown tomatoes demonstrate the blah-ness of grocery store produce to a mind-blowing degree.

And the rest of my big box garden is now an attempt at, believe it or not, a pumpkin patch. A weird but very sincere pumpkin patch. Larry had a couple plants that needed a spot and I thought I'd try it.

We're also dinking around with pest-discouraging companion plants, which is the reason for the marigolds, and the basil, which you see there to the left, between the pepper plants (and which contributed to my delicious tomato sauce). Nasturtium seeds are in those rectangular planters. Nasturtiums are supposedly good for discouraging certain bugs as well. We'll know a fair amount by the time we've got space for a mini-farm.

I'm learning in fits and starts.

Beware of your credit card company!

I'm sure my readers are all too smart to fall for this little -- I can't call it anything but a scam. But just in case you have not run into this, here's a caution.

If you pay bills online,

WATCH OUT for the date that the website defaults to, as being the "payment date."

Used to be that my credit card company's payment site defaulted to the current business day. ONLY if I logged on after business hours, or on a holiday, or weekend, would the default date flip over, to the next business day. And in fact, no earlier dates could even be clicked on the site.

But those were the Good Ol' Days.

Today I logged on to pay my bill. Just after lunch, at 1:00 PM.

If I had not looked carefully, I would have missed their little deception. My payment date was apparently .... Monday? August 3rd ??!

The bill was due today, and that meant it was about to mark my payment as late.

I thought : "Uh-oh! They've backpedaled the cut-off time to noon instead of 5 PM!"

They have this little drop-down calendar, about the size of a pea, next to the transaction. As mentioned, when their definition of "today" is officially over, that calendar has no previous dates. Your earliest choice is the next day.

But, those little sonuvaguns! (OK, that's not what I really said) ... Today was still coming up as an active option.

I had to arrow back to "Previous month" because, this being the last day of July, it had set itself to its August calendar.

Then I had to choose July 31st.

I paid, and I paid on time. My confirmation said so. July 31st was available all along, but they'd have levied some obnoxious late penalties if I had not noticed their scam and jumped through their little hoops to choose today's date.

Maybe readers are familiar with this practice, but just make sure they haven't snuck it by you !

Katherine

I got this faded and slightly damaged little photo in yesterday's mail, from my same-age cousin, Emily.

Until now, I had never seen a childhood photo of our grandmother. Not one. The most youthful photo I had was this one :


...in which she's certainly over 18, and probably 20-something. She and her sister are the two young ladies on the righthand side of the picture. She's standing, her arm affectionately linked through that of an unknown young man, and her sister is seated in front of them. The other members of this party - no idea who they are!

Of course I knew her only when she was well over 60, but the young lady she is in this outing party photo has always been as familiar as can be, in personality as well as appearance.

Grandmother was charming, witty, bossy, and absolutely NOT someone you lightly chose to cross. I could imagine her easily as that cheerful young woman of the outing photo, in her element -- she and her sister were the Belles of every ball, and she changed not a whit as she aged, loving parties and, as long as she was in charge of things, enjoying the matron role only a little less than she'd enjoyed being young and sought-after.

As Emily and I approached dating age, she once remarked to us, "I can't imagine anything nicer than a nice boy." Remembering that makes me smile.

Grandmother had two sons (Here she is with my dad, who is uncooperatively blurring the photo, 1929 or so):



...but when those sons married and each produced a granddaughter for her within a few weeks, she at last had -- she thought! -- budding debutantes to groom for social success. Our tomboyish ways were a great disappointment to her, and I don't mean that in a particularly cheerful way. I think that, to some small degree, it broke her heart.

Even the shot of her at age 18-22 is "Grandmother." The woman I knew. Someone we all found a bit overpowering, so we fortified ourselves by putting her in a "box" defined by all the family anecdotes: tales of her funny quips, the things she found outrageous, her liking for control. But the childhood photo -- that wide-eyed little girl? That's Katherine, and it's the first glimpse I've ever had of her, and that's kind of scrambling my head. But I'm so SO glad to glimpse her at all.

Bowl of Plenty

This is not even the first harvest. We've enjoyed a couple tomatoes and an earlier Japanese eggplant. We actually just ate them without my blogging them first! OMG!

My garden gets credit for the peppers. The rest come from the gardens under Larry's care.

The gardening books lie. "Carrots are easy" says one book. "Carrots like full sun all day," says another. What I'm learning is that we live in a subtropical area in which the instructions given by most books aren't applicable. The Ortho book puts us squarely in what it calls "zone 8" and the book is wrong. At least along the coast, the Floridian "zone 9" stripe ought to creep upward. A few carrots are eking out an existence in the box planter, but 12 hours of South Carolina sun is way too much for them. I will NOT give up on carrots. I like them. They keep. They're versatile. This is a learning experience! More will be revealed.

Me and The Arts

I tried to take advantage of the cultural opportunities that college gave me -- never mind the uncultural opportunities -- with disappointing results.

Piano 101 wasn't so bad, but I think I needed to study an instrument while I was young, and by "young" I mean 6, not 22. My brain had a lot of trouble with the digital dexterity needed, but I was glad I gave it a try. Embarrassing though it was to plink "Thoughts at Twilight" for a faculty jury, since that was the standard final exam for music classes, I got through it, curtsied as required, and got an A for effort.

Art 101 was another matter. The biggest disaster of my college career. I don't think right for drawing. My brain rejects attempts to translate the 3-D real world into 2 dimensions. I struggled through the class and gave an immense sigh of relief when it ended.

It's kind of miserable to be able to form pictures in one's head and just not be able to realize them on paper (or canvas). But I lucked into living in the digital age, so I have access to Art For The Rest Of Us, i. e., manipulating clip art :





...with a photo program.

And if I were a real artist, I could probably do a better job of even that, since the final product can defy physical reality without my even perceiving it.
My calling this picture "final product" is probably inaccurate, since I'm sure I'll tweak it a lot more before I'm done!

Then it got interesting

Nude. By C. Cosentino

I was up very early shoveling garden dirt, my muscles are sore, I was tired, and I was not in the mood to go to Brookgreen Gardens, or anywhere, but Larry wanted to photograph a particular sculpture, so I decided to fight my general unenthusiasm, take my camera and come along.

A bright, sunny day is actually lousy for picture-taking in Brookgreen. Very little shows to advantage when its own textures are overpowered by sun-dappling. so I didn't fire up the camera in the gardens. But on our way back out, we stopped at the current sculpture show in the indoor gallery and there I found some cool stuff to photograph.
Background: Girl with Sweater. By B. Lucchesi
Foreground: WPA Guitar Girl. By N. Kaz.

Only something was very wrong. The LCD window on my camera blacked out. I could shoot, but I could not see what I was shooting until after I took a picture. Then I would get a playback.

There's a little viewfinder, but -- just to add one more obstacle! -- I was looking at this whole indoor sculpture show through very dark prescription sunglasses, because they were all I'd brought. With the glasses, the view in the finder was too dark and without them, it was too blurry.

I know! I know! 8~) Keep reading.

So to distract myself from freaking out over whether my camera was broken, I decided to play around with shooting through pure guesswork. And that is when things got interesting! No lengthy setups. No framing or fine-tuning. Just click click click, then see what got captured.

Many shots are just what you'd expect -- weird, blurry, a corner of nothing identifiable. But some were pretty cool anyway so here they are -- each picture in this post is exactly as I shot it. Sized down, but not sharpened, cropped, or contrast-manipulated in any way!

This photo is the biggest disappointment because you get no sense at all of the guy's facial expression. The title is Trust. Sculptor: LeaAnn Cogswell. He looks like he's scowling, but he's actually looking sideways and is very worried about something.

[Correction]: Girl with Dark Eyes, by S. Layne.

Projection. By R. Reutimann.

Sumo Wrestling Toads. By S. Worthington

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Once we got back outside I kept it up and did some garden scenery too.





Here (below) is Larry rescuing a large grasshopper, which you can't see because it's now under the leaves.


And yes, I figured out what had happened to my camera. Stuffing it into my purse pushed a button I never use. "DISP." Apparently you can turn the display off. Why anybody would want to, I have no idea, but it sure was a relief to push it again and have the display reappear!

A village Fourth

Murrells Inlet has a nice low-key Fourth of July celebration and the centerpiece each year is the boat parade. Locals decorate their boats with red, white, blue, and often gold drapery and flags, and make a traditional circuit through the marsh.

The time varies from year to year, based on the hour high tide occurs -- this photo was taken at about 6 PM -- and the boats are spaced so far apart that you can't get many in one shot. Actually, if you look beyond the boat in the foreground, you'll see (dimly, I'm afraid, because zooming with my camera fuzzes out the quality) other boats ambling around in the harbor awaiting their turns.

They never come down as far as our neighborhood -- the water isn't deep enough -- but we watch from my parents' porch, in between conversing, laying down placemats, eating fried chicken and just lazing around with (in my case) a Pepsi on the rocks, and a book.

And after dark, fireworks will issue from the same place up the inlet, where a cookout and celebration are going on at the harbor park. We might go out to the front porch and watch them pop above the trees.

Hope everyone else is having as enjoyable a weekend!