Our Fourth of July weekend was wonderful. We went to the Mathias home for a swimming party and barbecue and then to the fireworks at Lake Benson afterward. The event there was amazing; not just because of the fireworks, but also because the North Carolina Symphony was there. Christian took some pretty amazing fireworks pictures and we had a very nice time sitting around talking while the crowd dispersed a little before we left. The Thursday before, Kelly’s friend Danielle came to Raleigh from Statesville (her dad came for an appointment here), so she spent the weekend with us. Danielle’s mom, Terrie, brought two skirts she had made for the girls out of Goodwill ties when we meet so they could pick her up in 
Greensboro at a beautiful park there. The skirt went perfect with the Fourth of July blouse Kelly stitched for hereself. Of course, the kids all have a good time when they get together. Finally, we had our monthly potluck after our meeting on Sunday at the Steppes. All in all, it was a great weekend.
That being said, I spent way too much time working on computers over the weekend. I dragged an old computer downstairs to use in place of the USGS computer. I bought a gig of memory to get that going at a reasonable pace, loaded 
(almost) all of the software I need on it and then, after reading the series of comments from last week about backing my stuff up and getting scared that I was going to lose stuff again! I went ahead, bit the bullet, and bought three years of Carbonite, the online backup service. I have decided to do a hybrid version of Troy’s backup plan. His plan is to buy SD cards for his camera, then never erase them, just keep adding images to them. He puts them on his computer in addition to keeping them on his SD card. He only erases the pictures he does not want on the SD card and, when it gets full, he just stores it away as his backup. I am going to do that, then store them on Carbonite and a terabyte hard drive, too. At any rate, I am almost back to where I was when the computer broke a few days back.