The Johnny and Billy Blues Band, singing “I Walk the Line.”
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beb said on July 3, 2010 at 11:57 am
Obviously, they were dressed by their mom.
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Deborah said on July 3, 2010 at 2:34 pm
But you gotta admit they’re cute. Perfect summer day in Chicago, a little sweaty, the pollution index is up to orange and looking out over Oak Street beach it’s shoulder to shoulder (or thigh to thigh). Lots of sails out on the lake. I bought a couple of bunches of basil at the green market and some fava beans. I’m going to make a batch of pesto and some kind of salad with the fava beans. Any suggestions on that?
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Hexdecimal said on July 3, 2010 at 2:41 pm
@2 – Serve with a fine Chianti.
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MarkH said on July 3, 2010 at 3:17 pm
But, Nance, how did they sound?
Another beautiful weekend in the Tetons, 75 degrees & partly cloudy. Off to the Silver collector car auction in Teton Village, again this year to drool and not spend money. Then off camping and boating at Jackson Lake for the 4th.
Hope you all have a great holiday.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on July 3, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Are fireworks over the Tetons redundant?
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beb said on July 3, 2010 at 4:28 pm
Deborah, is the Oak Street beach visible from your apartment or from the greens market. If the former I envy you. If the latter, still good.
I only know fava beans from ‘Silence of the Lamb.’ I’d stay away from anything or anyone containing them.
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Deborah said on July 3, 2010 at 7:52 pm
Oak street beach is visible from our bedroom windows. My daughter, Little Bird, read somewhere recently that it is the 11th coolest beach in the world according to some survey. It is pretty impressive, if you are facing east and close to the water you don’t even know you are in a city, you only hear the water lapping against the shore, no traffic or anything, and then you turn around and there is the spectacular view of the city of Chicago. From our living room/dining room we look out onto the lake which is an ever changing view. We have a second bedroom in the middle which looks into the building next door, so not so great.
You should try fava beans Beb, they have a delicate taste that works well with pastas and such. I love them. It’s actually pretty late in the season to still be able to get them fresh from the green markets here. They probably won’t be there next weekend.
By the way Little Bird is meeting her boyfriend’s family this weekend in Northeastern Michigan. She was very nervous about it, but I heard from her today and it all seems to be going well.
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Deborah said on July 3, 2010 at 8:26 pm
And Hexdecimal we had our salad (with scallops and fava beans) along with the pesto I made from the basil I got this morning at the green market on ciabatta (spelling?) rolls that I also bought at the green market. We ate out on the esplanade, a sort of deck that’s raised from the ground level adjacent to our building (between the two buildings that make up this development designed by Mies Van der Rohe in the 50s). And I took your advice and got a nice chianti. The esplanade is along Lake Shore Drive facing a harbor they call the playpen. On days like this hundreds of boats hook up there and party. It gets pretty wild, people get drunk and injured and even drown. A few years ago I watched them retrieve the body of an enormous guy that died out there. The divers were having a terrible time getting him out of the water. These folks party hard.
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prospero said on July 3, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Jeff, nope. Fireworks are awesome wherever. You mean natural vs. man-made. God made people that could figure this shit out. Maybe it’s just gilding the spectacular natural beauty. But it’s gilding, and that’s worth a good deal. Over the Tetons? Better than ever. Over the Alps or the Canyon, Jefe!! Amazing.
Is Yellowstone better because it’s less obvious than the Canyon? NFW. I love these places. I love Lake Powell, and that’s man-made. It’s also the best place to swim there is. This whole man-made whole-earth bidness is sorta complicated.
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prospero said on July 3, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Deborah, I seriously doubt there’s a proper spelling for ciabatta. Good taste in bread, though.
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Deborah said on July 4, 2010 at 6:04 pm
Fava beans round two – Leftover pesto from yesterday with the rest of the fava beans, sundried tomatoes, and walnuts on homemade pasta with a bottle of Corvo wine from southern Italy. We’re suckers for red wine even with seafood, as with the scallops yesterday. Conventional thinking is that you’re supposed to serve white wine with seafood but that’s not for us. It’s supposed to turn stormy here in Chicago soon (hopefully), it’s hot and sunny now but that could change any time. Great beach weather, but too hot for regular city activities. we’ve been holed up inside in our high-rise perch all day with the air cranked up as high as it will go. And we normally hate air-conditioning.
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Dexter said on July 5, 2010 at 12:55 am
I had a peaceful 4th, now that the wacko neighbor moved away. I took the dog to a hillside and watched the planes take off and land at the local fly-in breakfast here in town. I have been trying too hard to follow the World Cup and baseball, and the Tour de France started Saturday, and I forgot about it , but I watched it today, racing through Belgium . A couple of bad crashes ruined it for Mark Cavendish, who is one bad sprinter, meaning best in the world. Lance Armstrong is in 4th place.
Jeff Borden, whoa! The New Big Red Machine kicked the Cubs all over the field, slaughtering those Cubbies. Those Cincinnati Reds are for real, it seems.
What a glorious evening it was for bike riding. Nobody seems to be in town, I had the streets to myself, and I knocked out 12.5 miles, all of it hassle free. That made my day.
Thank gawd I have hundreds of channels and I do not have to watch “To Catch a Predator” with Chris Hansen on msnbc. I am so sick of those re-runs…is the economy so bad that msnbc can’t afford some newer programming? I would rather watch someone droning on with the news, like Linda Ellerbee or Tom Snyder used to do decades ago.
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Laura Lippman said on July 5, 2010 at 9:44 am
I checked in here as I do every day and was charmed by the 4th of July reports. We feel obligated to open our home to friends because we have a great deck-top view of the fireworks. Tried to simplify the party this year — ordered food and sides from a local barbecue place, made only things that required pouring stuff into bowls and stirring. This yielded: pimento cheese, queso dip and Coca-Cola fudge cake. I hear some places had to cut back on fireworks, but our broke-ass city put on a great show and we could see at least a half-dozen other displays to the north, south, east and west. And a worryingly close ad hoc one a few doors up.
Now I’m about to start work. No federal holidays for the self-employed. Not that I’m complaining. Oh, and I don’t know how to do linkage here, but one cute Johnny Cash performance demands another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDbAxhV2ofM
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Carolyn said on July 5, 2010 at 10:24 am
OK, following Laura Lippman here so the pressure is intense, but I’m compelled to give you summer revelers the traditional South Florida version of the Fourth.
Quick ocean swim in the morning before the storms started.
Quixotic drive to minor league baseball game, arriving at our seats just as the groundskeepers pulled the rain tarp over the field. Game is called after two hours of thunder and lightning.
Back home, we walked to the water to watch the city of West Palm’s fireworks in the distance. We stood under umbrellas in a pouring rain.
On the bright side, the temperature stayed below 90.
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nancy said on July 5, 2010 at 10:29 am
I made a cherry pie, and posted a picture on Twitter and Facebook.
“What a lovely pie,” everybody said.
What we did to that pie, Jake LaMotta did to that handsome boxer. It ain’t pretty no more.
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Deborah said on July 5, 2010 at 11:15 am
Some rude person in the neighborhood has set off one loud firecracker every morning at about 4 or 4:30 since Thursday. This morning was no exception. I think he’s on the roof of the low rise building across the street when he does it. You can not imagine how that sounds reverberating off of all of the surrounding buildings. I hope that’s the end of it. We didn’t watch the fireworks last night, there was a crowd on the esplanade looking towards Navy Pier. Instead we watched Katherine Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi in “Summertime” and then started Felinni’s “Amarcord” but fell asleep in the middle of it. Not exciting but very relaxing.
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Dexter said on July 5, 2010 at 11:18 am
nn: Oh no you DIDDENT ! 🙁
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moe99 said on July 5, 2010 at 12:46 pm
In Seattle, the fog descended along with the cold wet weather yesterday, so gave up going to the fireworks. If you can’t see them, why bother? Instead, curled up and read a book on my IPOD.
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Deborah said on July 5, 2010 at 1:35 pm
I changed my Gravatar to a Mad Men Avatar I just made, but it’s not showing up here??
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beb said on July 5, 2010 at 1:39 pm
I’m always fascinated how, when Nancy posts on Saturday, usually a cute picture like the one above, it seems to kill the over-the-weekend dialogue here. But then I’ve never done a count of comments over a number of weekends when Nancy doesn’t blog on Saturday vs the number of comments on the Friday + Saturday blogs when she does.
Our 4th was spent at Greenfield Village but with 90 degree temps and a cloudless sky we were quickly done in by the heat. The DSO was playing that night but we couldn’t hang out that long. There was also a old-fashioned baseball game being played at a remote field, but by the time we heard about it we were too burned out to make the trek. Old Rules baseball is fun to watch. More action, and no gloves – ouch!
This morning I’ve been reading my usual political blogs but one and all seem hopeless depressing. So I stopped early and turned to NN.C for a pick me up.
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Deborah said on July 5, 2010 at 2:37 pm
OK it’s working now. I restarted my computer and cleaned out my history. Can you tell I’m kind of bored? It’s good not to have go in to the office but it’s too hot for me to do anything outside. The storms haven’t happened yet. I’m hoping it will cool down. I actually prefer February in Chicago to this. I can’t believe I just said that.
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LAMary said on July 5, 2010 at 4:28 pm
We did what we’ve done for the past three years. We picked up some Vietnamese grilled pork sandwiches and sat on a quilt in Almansor Park in Alhambra. Alhambra does great fireworks, maybe because the largely Chinese population expect it. They did invent them. It was really packed in and outside the park and we were lucky enough to have a family with five sweet little kids sitting near us. The oldest one looked about 8 and the youngest wasn’t 1 yet, although he was good at walking. He decided he liked my sons and he kept hugging them and grinning a lot.
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Dexter said on July 5, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Mango peach frozen yogurt parfait + 94 degrees F. = contentment.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on July 5, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Just got done being one of 28 co-grand-marshals — our village invited any Eagle Scout or Gold Award Girl Scout from past or present to jump aboard (and the parade theme was “100 years of Scouting”). Better than being one of the GMs was having written a column about it in advance that brought out a 92 year old woman who earned her Gold Award in 1935, and an 82 year old fellow who earned his Eagle in 1945 and went on to learn how to do night landings on carriers, 51 of them, before going on to become a physics professor after Korea. Plus some young men and women from just last year’s crop gave us a jolly flatbed full of grand marshaldomness!
Then I went back to work making fresh cut french fries to pay the bills so the next round of Eagles and Golds can climb the trail . . . if I never deep fry anything again, I will be content. But the biggest joy of today was looping back from the end to join my wife as we watched our son in his first time with the school marching band. “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” “This is My County,” “Washington and Lee Swing,” and “YMCA” — how long is our parade? Twice through all that, plus the GHS fight song, and “YMCA” to the final corner. Don’t know the distance, but I walked it twice today and jogged it once, which had to be close to the 5K they did this 8 am.
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Deborah said on July 5, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Thought it would (hoping it would) be canceled because of storms. We’re heading out to a friends BBQ. Wishing everyone is enjoying what’s left of the holiday. Back to the salt mines tomorrow.
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brian stouder said on July 5, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Jeff, sounds excellent!
We went to gramma and grampa’s place in the country (Cass County), and did the 4th of July thing. Our 14 year old (soon to be 15) is DELIGHTED to be able to remain there this week, baling hay and feeding cows and mowing gramma’s big yard (riding mower = bliss) and doing whatever else comes up.
On the 4th, the tradition that has grown up is that we each (sons-in-law and daughters) get a sack full of fireworks, and then shoot the stuff off one by one. We have noted, over the years, that some of the stuff is really good (either impressive or funny or long-lasting); and some of the stuff is just not up to snuff.
A few years ago, we actually made up an excel spread sheet with all the names of the various fireworks, and then had everyone rate them as they were expended. Then, we made a point of buying the ones that pleased everyone the most, in the years since.
Really, I thought that we’d find that the somewhat colorful names (Purple Haze, Ecstasy in Green, Rockin Red White & Blue, etc) changed year to year, or else were re-used on different things – but surprisingly enough there IS consistency year to year.
One item (out of probably 25 or more discreet item names) got a perfect score (Jump, Jive and Jam), and it was one of the $8.00 ones.
Years ago, before all the babies came into the extended family, we’d shoot this stuff off helter-skelter, and people would occasionally have to dive from their chairs; but in recent years, we’re much more responsible
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on July 5, 2010 at 11:26 pm
Somebody else cried at “Toy Story 3,” he chuckled . . . (see the nnall Twitter feed). If I think about it too closely, I start sniffing again. Which is my allergies acting up, and I need another benadryl. Yeah.
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Dexter said on July 6, 2010 at 1:03 am
There is much discussion on sports talk radio around Detroit of Bob Probert, the toughest hockey skater I ever watched . He was so great. He was just 45; he passed out on a boat on Lake St. Clair and was pronounced dead in Windsor shortly afterward. It reminded me of when Norm Cash, the great Detroit Tiger first baseman slipped in his boat off Beaver Island 24 years ago and hit his head and fell into Lake Michigan and was found the next day in fifteen feet of water.
Probert fought a couple demons and lost, and lost his job with the Red Wings when the Wings couldn’t take it anymore. I hope he found peace in his brief retirement years.
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