Our 4th went pretty much as planned.  We began by everyone taking turns reading parts of the Declaration of Independence.  I wondered if this was over the top but just wait until you hear/read what happened later.  ;)  Then we watched our traditional movie, Yankee Doodle Dandee.  At the end we had gentle rain outdoors.  yea!  DH soaked hickory and mesquite woodchips in the rain and got the grill going for our baby back ribs.  I had looked in an America's Test Kitchen notebook and modified a rub mixture to put on the meat, by just adding a little of this and a little of that without measuring anything. Mainly it was brown sugar with some garlic powder, chili powder and salt. I'm not sure what the proportions were but mainly brown sugar. The ribs grilled in the rain while dh ran to the store to get 2 bags of ice so we could hand crank the ice cream.  By the time he got back the ribs were done!  I had made a pasta salad with veggies and herbs from our garden.  I got some barbeque sauce out but dh wouldn't let me put any on the meat.  He was too impressed with the rub mixture I had put on! By then the rain had stopped and we sat at the kitchen table eating the most delicious ribs we've ever had and freshest salad we can remember, while watching water drip from the eaves and birds splash in the water.  Well, after dinner clean up we hand cranked chocolate chip chocolate ice cream!  Then the moment ds had been waiting for....relay races. Guys against the girls.  We ran with spoonfuls of water from the bucket to the glass.  The guys won.  Then I set the sprinkler for the back half of the backyard.  We are in a drought and the city is water rationing.  Fri is my watering day and I had watered half the yard in the morning.  We had only gotten .12" of rain that day.  We are still less than 5" of rain for the year.  While the sprinkler ran, we went inside and had time before the fireworks.  DH suggested we grab the poetry books and take turns doing patriotic readings.  So I got all my Country and America Ideals out and we each grabbed one and we each chose a patriotic poem to read.  DH went first and guess what he picked?  The Declaration of Independence! So that got read twice that day and once the week before at our unit celebration!  And we had studied it in depth for a week about a month before that!  We are getting to know this document rather well! ;)  At 830 dh announced it was time for us to put the books down and head for the fireworks.  The dc groaned!  As much as they wanted to see the fireworks, they wanted to squeeze in just one more poem!  I love it!  We took our yearly walk to the next neighborhood to the top of the hill which I can see from my kitchen window.  When we first moved here it was a grassy hill.  Now it is covered with houses.  The temperature was delightfully cool, storm clouds were billowing up in the far distance, towering prodigiously in the sky with varying shades of white and grey.  Parts of the sky showed blue.  When we got to the  top of the hill we watched the sun set and waited about 15 minutes for the professional fireworks show.  I finally walked down the hill a bit because I could hear the other professional fireworks show and wondered if I could see them at all.  But no, I could only see the glow over the rooftops.  Then the dc came running down the hill, telling me to join them in chairs provided by the sweet homeowners up the hill!  They had just come out with their chairs to sit in their driveway and view the show and saw dh and the dc.  They insisted that we have seats too!  Wasn't that sweet of them?  That is the most comfortable I have ever been watching a fantastic fireworks show.  Well no, that isn't true.  I was in Washington DC one year at the top  of the Kennedy Center restaurant where my SIL worked and surprise, there was an incredible fireworks show with the Washington Monument as the backdrop!  Nothing will ever top that!  But this came pretty close!  ;)

Today dd and I went shopping, not for clothes but for books!  We needed to nail whether she will do R (rhetoric) or D (dialectic) for TOG next year.    She had originally suggested she'd do R literature and D history.  We went to 3 different Half Price Bookstores and found great resource books.  One is a gorgeous picture book of Washington DC for $1.  We are thinking of going there on vacation and it will help us decide what to do.   I also got an A Beka government book for less than $6.  DD will do government through TOG, reading original source documents as they were written, but this book will be great back up.  We found lots of other fun things too, but not anything on our Year 3 Unit 1 list.  So we went to a Christian bookstore because some of the books we need are Christian and are quite popular.  But no, this book had very few books and none on our list.  I was really sad, because I remember the day I used to walk into a Christian bookstore and there'd be a wealth of books. This particular chain has very few.  But I did purchase the Amazing Grace DVD with a coupon because we will be learning about William Wilberforce and John Newton.    Finally we went to Barnes and Noble.  Every time dd found an R book she got excited.  I kept asking, "So, will you actually read this?"  She'd look through it and say, "Oh, yes, this looks like my D books but more words.  That's doable."  So we got several books for Year 3 Unit 1, D (for ds) and R (for dd), with my teacher discount card.  Then we went to Lifeway Christian and I have fallen in love with that store.  It's a bit more of a drive, but they have books and books and books.  I got a D and R book there from our Year 3 Unit 1 list and more with my mega coupon!  Now I have to order the rest of our stuff on line.  And it looks like dd will do R all the way!

Now for the lesson.  I have been under a major learning curve.  Namely, my digital camera.  Again.  As we rehearsed for our unit celebration last week, ds did such an incredible job with his Patrick Henry speech, that I suddenly realized I had to video tape it!  And of course I video taped all their rescitations!  Last Sat we had the unit celebration and I videotaped them with dd's new digital camera, because she had a huge memory card and mine was almost full.  To capture them with their presentation in full costume, I held the camera vertically.  Then we had several days of going places with grandma who was visiting. The day she left, I settled down to blog about the unit celebration.  That's when the learning curve started.  I had used MIL's card reader to download her pictures to my pc.  Then I figured out how to insert dd's memory card (upside down I finally figured out) into my cpu.  Everything uploaded into Adobe but I cannot figure out how to move stuff from there to any other program, Photobucket or my blog.  I have only the very basic free version of Adobe and I have no idea why all the pictures downloaded to there, but they did.  I spent the entire day trying things out.  Does anyone know how that goes????? I remembered that I have Picasa which automatically downloads every picture on my pc so I opened that and all the pictures downloaded.  I spent time figuring out how to organize the pictures and moved them all to one album...but I couldn't rotate the videos, trim them, or figure out how to copy them to My Pictures.  Then I remembered I also have HP Photo Smart....well same story.  I also have ArcSoft Real....I think it's time to get rid of some of these programs, don't you?

 Finally I helped dd download her camera software to her pc.   In order to download it, I had to use my password to get to the administrator setting to download.  After I downloaded it, that was the only place it could be accessed.  Later dh fixed it. I have no idea how but he did.  In the meantime, we downloaded the video clips onto cd.  Oh, I forgot to mention that when I viewed the videos on Adobe, they were wonderful except for one problem...they were all sideways!  Can you believe it????  sigh.  Well, how to rotate?  Nothing at Adobe was working for me.  I finally downloaded the videos from the cd to My Pictures (where I normally access and upload pictures to Photobucket)  and that's when dh came home from work.  I told him about my day and he said, "Adobe should automatically download pictures to a separate file that says Adobe in My Pictures."  I looked it up and there was the Adobe folder in My Pictures.  Then I remembered him having me set that up last summer when I first downloaded pictures from my camera. I had forgotten all about it!  I opened up the folder and guess what?  There were all the pictures and videos all the time from MIL's and dd's cameras.  sigh........

Then ds told me I could rotate the videos in Kodak Easy Share Gallery, the program on the pc that came with my camera.   He showed me how that worked!  It took forever but it was successful.  Then I had one video clip that was too long.  6 minutes.  DS taught me how to trim that down.  Now it's distorted.  boo hoo  That was dd's Paul Revere's Ride rescitation.  Well, at least her liberty tea party video clip was good.  It was successfully rotated right side up and she's  standing there giving her little speech. Then she starts to serve tea...and I had to go and flip that camera horizontally! So when you see that video, it will start right side up but the pouring of the tea will be shown sideways.  Well, I think I learned my video lesson well and I should produce better videos in the future.  I'll try to get our unit celebration up in the next day or two.