Long Holiday Weekend

Our Fourth of July Weekend lasted until last night -- Rick took the day off yesterday. So we're just getting back to the swing of things today.

Over the weekend ...

-- I sewed a sleeveless dress using Simplicity 3775, which I've sewn a couple of times before. This time I left off the ruching around the waist since I thought it would be too hot. The fabric is some 4-way stretch knit from joAnn.



The plan was to whip this together to wear to the Muny Friday night, since Friday was hot and a sleeveless dress sounded cool. But I decided it would be really quick to just zip it up on the serger ... fail. The threads tangled repeatedly, the needle broke, the blade stopped cutting all the layers of fabric (I suspect it's dull). I felt like the serger and I were doing battle. And eventually finished the dress Saturday night.


-- We went to the Muny to see Kiss Me Kate. It was hot out, the male lead was average, the female lead was quite good, the gangsters were excellent. The dancing was the best we've ever seen at the Muny, which was a nice surprise. The girls and I had watched the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton version of Taming of the Shrew earlier in the week as a lead in, which I appreciated while watching the musical as it really was easier to follow. And we went with friends who really like Cole Porter (who wrote the musical), so it was a fun evening.

-- We went to Aunt Vi and Uncle C's to swim quite a bit.


-- We also made it to the public pool, although you can't try such crazy things off the diving board there, like jumping onto rafts, doing backbends off the board into the water, etc. etc.

-- We went to the fireworks with a friend.


We decided not to go to the Arch, choosing a more low key celebration out in the county in a park (but this year we had a better idea of where to sit and where to park).


The kids spent time waiting for the fireworks taking dozens of pictures of each other


and also took dozens of pictures of the fireworks.


-- We stayed up late and watched Galaxy Quest, which I'd never seen before. Actually, we ended up watching it twice since Rick skipped it the first time because he wanted to get to bed (although between Thalia dropping the large metal popcorn bowl on the wooden floor -- which made an unbelievably loud ring -- and the major cat fight about 45 minutes later in the upstairs hall he didn't get any extra sleep anyway).

-- We also went to see Green Lantern, which was really fun -- great space opera. Thalia noted that the Lanterns were inspired by the Lensmen. We spent much of the rest of the weekend discussing how much we wanted a green ring and a lantern.

And also the usual grilling, sleeping in late (like, you know, 7:30am), reading, etc. Overall good, busy weekend.