July Events 2019

Jordan and Elyse bought new jeans and found some paint to decorate them for the 4th of July. They both sat down on the parking pad to paint the patterns. Nice work!

Trip to Bent Tree, July 3

Elyse and Jordan wanted to go to the Bent Tree lake and beach, so we made a pleasure trip up -- our last few trips have been work trips. Elyse and Jordan on the dam with a view of Lake Tamarack. I had to get Grandma Brenda out there to join them in this beautiful peaceful setting.

We always love seeing the waterfall, but then left the girls to play in the water and watch the geese.

We then had a picnic lunch over by the beach. Elyse and Jordan spent some time on the beach while Brenda and I just relaxed and read a little.

Fourth of July

Jordan got the grill going and started the grilling of steaks for our 4th of July celebration dinner.

Uncle Mark arrived and joined Elyse and Jordan at the grill.

We were delighted that Mark had the day off and could join our celebration. Elyse and Jordan's patriotically decorated jeans added to the spirit.

With the girls' grilling efforts, we had a fine family steak dinner to celebrate the 4th!

Jordan and Elyse got Uncle Mark to sit down on the couch for conversation for a while before he had to take off to prepare for an early call on Friday morning.

Lots of folks recommended the Mt. Harmony cemetary when we asked about a place to see fireworks. So we joined probably two dozen cars parked around the hills of the cemetary with this view of downtown Atlanta at 9:10pm. We hung around until about 10pm and saw a lot of fireworks, but it was not a good place to photograph Atlanta fireworks because of the great distance.

This is as good as I got with photographs of the fireworks, shooting with f=300mm on a tripod, about 1/120 s and iso 6400. The white circle bottom right is the Ferris wheel at Centennial Park, which can be seen as a white dot in the photo above. You can see that the downtown buildings are considerably higher than the reach of the fireworks, which surprised me. This display was at 9:58pm.

July 6

You're not going to get elegance, shooting birds on an ugly suet feeder, but it is fun to see the different positions the birds take. I did cheat as much as possible to erase the chains and other parts of the feeder. We have enjoyed three catbirds so far this year. The house finch and cardinal are regulars. We only rarely see the redhead woodpecker.