What would I do with 200 peanut butter cups?

Ah, the long weekend is finally over and I have a few precious minutes to myself while Number One Daughter watches something loud and obnoxious on the TV downstairs. Our weekend seemed packed with activities, but that is only because I can never usually persuade anyone to leave the house, especially not in 100-degree weather, so whenever we do manage an outing, it feels like we've just done something really daring and bold. On Saturday, we drove into downtown Annapolis to meet my husband's cousin and her family, who were in the D.C. area for a few days for a diving meet. She had expressed in an email to David how excited the kids were about seeing Annapolis, so naturally David wanted to ask them to just drive to our house and hang out here for the day instead. I convinced him that while, yes, having them come here would make it more likely that we could actually spend time talking with them and catching up, it would be rude to deny them a chance to see something they're looking forward to. David is wary of taking Devon anywhere, and with good reason. One never knows just how acute her crankiness will be on any given day and how it will manifest. Whining? Crying? Minor violence? French sanitation worker-style strike? This day it was mostly whining, with some crying mixed in, but she saved it all for after lunch, for which we were all profoundly grateful.

But such was her unhappiness after mealtime, she vehemently protested being photographed, which is why you cannot see her face:

Some chocolate gelato afterwards helped, but only briefly.

That evening Harper got to go watch fireworks at the beach with her friend Isabella, and then after—are you ready for this—THEY HAD A SLEEPOVER AT ISABELLA'S HOUSE. Nothing is better than a sleepover, in Harper's opinion. I hate to think what that means for her teenage years.

Sunday was Blow Up the Wading Pool Day!

Monday was the local 4th of July parade, and we left after half an hour because of the heat and the politicians. When did those people start to infiltrate parades as a way to campaign for office? And one of them, I can't remember who - they all blend together into one big pulsating mass of asshole in my mind, had a truck with karaoke music blasting and some old geezer with a microphone "singing" Neil Diamond's "America." Except, you know how it's about immigration, and the chorus goes. "They're coming to America"? Pops was singing, "We're taking back America." Because, you know, your Irish grandfather TOOK IT AWAY FROM US. The next asshole had a live band and they were playing "Baba O'Reily," so I'm not sure what that was meant to signify. Probably something about farm subsidies or cap and trade. Or pot.

Honestly, shouldn't a 4th of July parade be a little less about electing assholes and more about kids on bikes?

Of course, if one of the assholes could ride a unicycle, I might be persuaded to vote for him after all.

That night we had friends over for dinner, and I was so busy cooking a ridiculously good meal, I didn't take any pictures. But I had two big glasses of tinto de verano, which makes up for any other shortfalls.

In quilting news, I have long intended to organize my scrap boxes, and my first plan was simply to separate them according to color. But after seeing this blog, and some of the beautiful quilts she has made with scraps, I decided to cut up my scraps into squares. I choose the size of the squares according to the size of the scrap, cutting any leftover pieces into smaller squares until I am down to mere slivers. Then the squares are stored in bins according to size. I also have a bunch of squares that I purchased on eBay when I started quilting and still hadn't figured out how to use a rotary cutter yet. And while I think this is a worthwhile pursuit, and will allow me to make some nice scrap quilts in the future, I have a long way to go:

Those two boxes hold, judging from how badly I was bruised as I tried to wrestle them out of the closet, approximately 1300 pounds of fabric. Some of the pieces turned out to be large scraps that my mother had given me, and among those, I found a plastic bag with...well, you know what? I'm going to save that for the next post or we'll be here all day.

Now I am going to brave the 30-second walk to the mailbox to see if the mailman brought me something pretty to give to the nice ladies at the bank. If I don't post again for a week, have somebody check in the driveway for my dried, burnt carcass.