At preschool today, the grandmother of one of Laurabeth’s kids brought her some candy from Japan.

I like the taste.

I woke up at 5am and spent an hour watching the eclipse. It was too humid and hazy to get good photos, but it was still fun to watch.

We had a kid over, so I took pictures.

We survived nine hours of shooting a wedding! Now we’ve got 1300 photos to sort through.

We got a Hyundai Sonata to replace Laurabeth’s ten year old Chevy Prism.

I enjoy driving the Sonata when she’s not - Besides air conditioning (so happy), it has a powerful 3.3L V6.

We decided on the Sonata after also test driving a Jetta, Elantra, Mazda M3, and Mini Cooper. The Mazda M3 was underpowered and just didn’t fit right. The new Elantra’s test drove nicely but looked odd and the older Elantra’s looked getto. The Jetta was cool, but we had reliability concerns. The Mini Cooper was great fun for the weekend we had it, but was out of budget and might be expensive to maintain down the road.

The Sonata was just right.

The store was out of roses. I bought Laurabeth a sunflower instead.

It’s our wedding cake topper.

My grandmother gave Laurabeth and I some of her beautiful china. We built shelves onto the wall to hold them.

We drove up to Williamsburg this weekend in a rented Mini Copper. Laurabeth learned to drive a stick shift in the parking lot of a mall somewhere off I-85. After twenty exciting minutes of practice she was able to handle it!

We went to Busch gardens - favorite activity was the water balloon catapults.

We stayed the night with my grandmother and then went to historic Williamsburg.

I found a sign for a ”Glass armonica” concert. I’d heard of it as the instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin. The concert was pure magic.