Home base, on the grass east of the Monument. I stood up and pointed the camera straight down to take this, and Mary says I looked like a crane. Mary in the middle, Amanda on her stomach with her library book, and Cody with a red, white and blue ice pop that ended up mostly on his shirt.

You can see how brown the grass is. It hasn't rained right around here in weeks, and by 4 o'clock you could feel the heat coming up off the ground. That's everybody else's sneakers around the edges. We were close enough to our neighbors to share their chips, and we did.