*I slept better last night. I think part of the key is not to watch medical dramas close to bed time. (I had watched an old re-run of "St. Elsewhere" the night before, and while I enjoy the show...now that I think about it, they were referring to one of the patients going into renal failure and listing the symptoms in the episode I saw).

I find especially when I'm distressed from the heat and am kind of tired and feel like I have to "run constantly just to stay in place" a la the Red Queen (which is what summer school is like), I'm more susceptible to forms of distress - I also can't watch too much news or what is going on in the world gets me down.

* I'm slowly working on the various ongoing projects and trying to convince myself that I must finish at least one thing before starting something new. I did a bit of handquilting last night and then switched over to knitting on the second sleeve of the Cobblestone pullover.

* I'm thinking I need to do something "fun" for the upcoming holiday weekend. I'm not sure there are any nearby fireworks celebrations (I could drive over to the casino parking lot and, I suppose, watch the one they are putting on which is intended to be for the benefit of their patrons).

I sort of miss "civic" fireworks displays. They don't do one in the town where I live - they used to do them out at the lake resort, but it got sold and is currently closed. When I was a kid growing up, in the town where my family lived, the fireworks were shot off from a location that we could see from my bedroom window. So we used to clear off the top of my dresser and sit on my dresser and watch the fireworks free of mosquitoes. (Then they moved the location and we had to go down to the town "green" to watch the fireworks, which was nice too).

I'm not really big on driving somewhere at night where there's going to be bad traffic. My night vision is not the best and I get frustrated when there's a traffic jam to leave somewhere like after a ball game or a fireworks display.

So I'm thinking maybe taking Friday afternoon (I have some research work to finish up Friday morning - I could have done some of it yesterday afternoon but I was just too bummed out) and going to Denison and going antiquing. I haven't done that in a while - just gone to the little antiques shops; it seems mostly my trips down there are a semi-frantic "Gotta get this item" or "need to stock up on groceries" trips lately.

* Speaking of fireworks, where I live, fireworks are legal (at least the small ones). Part of the reason I stay close to home on the 4th is that usually we're in a drought (as we are this year) and I worry about a stray bottle rocket landing on my roof or something. So I suppose I'll stay home with the hoses set up just in case.
Charlotte was speculating whether the down economy was going to lead to fewer people going out and buying fireworks to shoot off. So far, there have been none (save for one loud boom that might also have been someone slamming a car door) in my neighborhood; I'm going to listen Friday and Saturday night and see what it sounds like. Some years it's been like a war zone and with my poor tolerance for noise, it kind of made me shaky and unhappy. (And made me realize how grateful I was not to be an Iraqi civilian, or someone living in the crime-ridden sections of US cities, or in the Balkans, or in some parts of South America. (Or, I suppose, in some of the border cities of Mexico, now, seeing there is so much drug violence).