Independence Day Report: Culinary Treats and a Chance to Read

I'm not taking today off because it's going to be a fairly quiet day at work, with lots of administrative staff taking vacation time, and I want to be there to support the faculty and students.  So my 4th of July was constrained by the fact that I'm working today--there would be no road trips and no staying up all night to set off fireworks.  Of course, even if I took today off, I wouldn't have been up late to set off fireworks.

Early yesterday, I thought about the variety of ways I could spend the 4th, a day off in the middle of the week.  I went for an early morning walk to the beach.  The sunrises have been amazing these past few days, but I've observed them in the car.  Yesterday's sunrise did not disappoint.

I came home and did some writing and had breakfast:

It looks so healthy, doesn't it?  And it is, in a way, with the berries.  But they're on top of pound cake and drizzled with whipped cream, the real stuff, with full butterfat.  Yummmmm.

I made a quick run to the grocery store and then decided that I wanted to spend some time by the pool reading.  I read a bit of Jill Lapore's amazing book These Truths.  I've been making my way through it slowly.  It's that rare book:  huge, but every page has so much to savor.  It's a great book for Independence Day.  I've made my way to 1939 in this book that I started in October.

In the afternoon we went to see some friends.  We played cards and cooked together.  I thought I might be posting pictures and details of our experiment infusing smoke into our beverages.  We had a plan that involved a handheld smoker and rosemary:

But the handheld smoker has something wrong with it, so eventually, we just burned the sprigs of dried rosemary.

I was much more pleased with the dessert we created.  One of our friends had requested a dessert that said 4th of July.  I immediately thought of the cakes of my youth, decorated to look like a flag.  I was inordinately pleased with our result.  This picture is a bit blurry, but you get the idea:

And so my culinary day ended as it began:  with berries and whipped cream and cake.  But this time, to be different I sprinkled coconut on the cake.

We got home in time to sit in the backyard and watch the fireworks at the beach.  We couldn't see all of them, but Hurricane Irma's destruction of some of the tree canopy means that we can see some of the show from our house.

I finished the day by reading, but this time, I read Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.  Sadly, it seems more relevant now than when I first read it just after it was published.

Now it's time to have a repeat of yesterday's breakfast (only today I'll make it slightly healthier by having yogurt instead of whipped cream) and then off to work:  there are caterpillars to care for and students to feed and instructors to support.