Friday.  Happy 4th of July.  We are spending our 4th quietly at home.  Well as quietly as possible.  We have neighbors who shoot off their own fireworks.  I have noticed that the fireworks season has been somewhat abbreviated this year.  In past years they started nightly barrages in early June and continued through the later part of July.  We hadn't heard many explosions until last night which, thankfully, were few.

Interesting thoughts on unplugging from the electronics on the Essential Herbal Blog.  We haven't completely unplugged deliberately but episodes like the outage we had on Tuesday makes us think about how much of our lives are dominated by computers and cable TV.  Thankfully we had power so we turned on the little radio/CD/cassette/vinyl player and we had our shopping trip to occupy us.  And later in the day I put on a stack of our DVD/bluray movies.  We have resisted the "smart" phone craze as much as possible.  Our phones can access the internet but we don't use it.  We don't text but convincing family that we don't want them to text us has been a losing battle.  I don't know what our options will be when we our phones die and we need to find new ones.  We don't walk around with our phone glued to our ears or with our eyes on the screen ignoring everything else around us.  But we do wonder about how much discomfort a total withdrawal from our devices would cause.

In the garden--harvested rosemary, sweet basil, and purple basil which are all in the dehydrator right now.  Harvest half-a-dozen strawberries which are in the refrigerator waiting for enough more to go into cereal.