It's a Brownie!

This July 4th was quite relaxing for us. Last year, we were visiting Chicago for the first time and were running around like crazy tourists between the architectural boat tour, the Field Museum, the Taste, and the free John Mayer concert, then dinner in Grant Park, then back out toward the waterfront for fireworks. The year before that, we kayaked all morning and then hit three parties and stumbled back home around 2 in the morning. The two years before that, we were backpacking at White Pine Lake in way-Northern Utah... and before that, there were parades and fireworks, but the details are fuzzy.

This year, we had a lazy morning. I finally memorialized my daisies on Polaroid, and Trav ran to the local grocery and grabbed us fresh donuts for breakfast. We spent the afternoon with family at my dad's cabin, played in the inflatable frog pool, took some pictures, enjoyed each other's company, and ate really good steak. Later that night, we went to a big, ruckus-filled party at my aunt-in-law's house. She's done it for years and it is aptly named Avenues of Fire. She lives in Salt Lake City's Avenues area and the "fire" part comes in at dusk, when the fireworks begin. Four adults (including my husband) and two very well-watched kids lit all the cones, up to six at a time, for 45 minutes straight. There were probably $400 worth of pyrotechnics there this year. It was pretty awesome, and a great end to our first lazy 4th in a long time.

Now, to get to the meaning of the photo above. While at the party, my uncle Doug surprised me with two Kodak cameras. One is the Handle, a short-lived Kodak instant film camera that I'll have to troll ebay to find some film for, and the other is this beautiful little Brownie Hawkeye Flash. It's nice and clean, the shutter works great, and there were 11 flash bulbs in the box, but the coolest part is that buried in the box was an unused, unopened roll of classic Kodacolor-X film expired in October, 1970. I'm running it through the camera now and hoping it's still good. Doug has now added three cameras to my collection and I couldn't be more happy. Thank you, Doug!

I hope your Fourth was as nice as mine!