I went to one 4th of July event this weekend - an afternoon cookout and croquet game.  It was refreshing to be with a group of people that treat a game of backyard croquet as an outlet to be an obnoxious wise ass ham.  A cooler of beers helps.  I hope no one noticed that I ate most of the delicious grilled Tandori chicken.

Oh and for those of you spreading rumors that a) the gnat problem is gone, and b) the gnats won’t bite you if you rub vanilla extract on your body.  You’re wrong on both counts.  Exhibit A (notice the cloud of gnats in the foreground):

Snagged this from Obama’s Flickr stream, which has a bunch of him and Hillary working the crowd in matching clothes.

Is there a public bathroom over one month old that doesn’t have a defaced hand dryer?

Fellow Fairfield blogger Missy pointed me to this amazing photo of a funnel cloud touching down in Iowa earlier this week.  I cannot imagine the terror, awe and beauty of seeing this thing for real from my front door as Lori Mehmen did (the photographer).

See Mitchell County press for more on this photo.

A day after getting her Henna Tattoo, the top layer being crumbling and Penelope helped scrape it off.  What’s cool is that over the past couple days since then the ink has been darkening.  This is supposed to happen but still it’s cool to watch.

Done by local Mehndi artist Sarah Alderfer.

Made using my daughter’s belly button, Big Huge Labs and Flickr.

There’s a great group on Flickr called Song Chart. It’s a collection of charts that represent a particular song. This group came onto my radar as I’ve watched one of my Flickr friends dive in this past month and create some of his own. He recently posted a couple that are some of my favorites in the pool:

We Are The World

Purple Rain

Check out the entire pool:

What a wonderful day it’s been today.  I was out in a t-shirt earlier soaking up sun, stomping in puddles and snow, and even road my bike a bit.

A totally bizarre and entertaining look at growing a beard by dubstyle as posted on Flickr.