Fourth of July update (Brian)

Hi everyone. Today we had a good Fourth of July. We started out with some tennis this morning with two friends from work. It was fun and I feel like I'm making progress on my serve, which is encouraging. Then we had two other friends over for some grilling. Here's a picture of that:



Then we hung out around the apartment some. While Hanneke was working on things outside, I did some gardening. I put in some new flowers, moved some grass to a new area, put in what will later be part of a small solar-powered waterfall, and did some trimming of other bushes. Here's the waterfall/pond, which is just a muddy hole for now:



Here is a bed of flowers Hanneke bought and I put in:



And here is a lantana bush we put in. They reportedly help repel mosquitos, but in any event they look nice and require little water:



After gardening and cleaning up, we went to a dinner where one of Hanneke's friends proposed to his now-fiance. Here's a picture from that:



Finally, we came home from dinner and lit off a few fireworks that we got in a pack from Walmart a month or so ago. The 1 minute video below is of the main one. It was a cheap pack, maybe $10, but I was surprised that Walmart-level fireworks do what the one in the video does. It was fun:



Not much else to report. In other good news, additional research indicates that only Palythoa species of the Zoanthidae genus potentially contains palytoxin and zoanthus species, which appears to be the kind we have, does not contain it. Still need to look into that more.

Hope you had a good Fourth. We look forward to seeing you all soon.