Happy 4th, y'all!

We had a wonderful four-day weekend, which we kicked off by watching the Cubs lose 0-12 to the first-place Reds. *sigh* It's always nice to be out at Wrigley Field, anyway. Keeping in mind that Wrigley represents most of what's right with baseball, I'd like to present a reminder of what's wrong with baseball: groupon.com (recommended by Funundrum, by the way) was offering $7 tickets to a minor league game being played at Wrigley, and they had to accompany their offer with the following disclaimer.

Note on Cubs.com fees: Fees and tax are not included, so customers will have to pay a per-ticket convenience fee ($2.73), per-order processing fee ($3.75), and an optional print-at-home fee ($6.25) on top of the Groupon price. Free ticket pickup is available at will call.

That means that MLB is charging fees that effectively double the cost of two people wanting to go watch baseball that's low on big salaries and probably higher in sincerity and skill than that afforded by your standard Cubs game. Lame. Now back to your previously scheduled holiday weekend wrapup.

Saturday saw a great day at the beach with our friends, followed by a BBQ at Ed's place. Once there, we organized an impromptu BBQ for the next day at our house. It was attended by some long-standing friends and a couple of new ones, including a German guy named Marcus who happened into our little mess of a group by way of renting out Ed's spare room for the summer. Two days in and he'd already attended a couple of cookouts, a beach thing, and fireworks. We're going out with him on Sunday for the World Cup final -- Marcus is our Designated Exotic Foreign Friend for the summer. Pictured above: Designated British Friend Justin, apparently willing to set aside centuries of unrest between his country and that of Designated Exotic Foreign Friend Marcus. We are also not yet sure how many soccer jerseys Marcus owns. So far he's two for two.

The city of Chicago canceled the downtown fireworks this year, instead holding slightly smaller shows at three locations along the lakefront. The northernmost barge was moored directly to the west of our place, which is immediately next to the park bordering the lake. Our fortuitous placement influenced the impromptu BBQ -- once we were all stuffed with teriyaki burgers and coconut cake, we simply walked east with our adult beverages until we couldn't go no mo. Getting back home was just as easy and pretty much cemented our house as Independence Day party central from now on. I might have to give up the idea of our annual Christmas parties, but this should be good enough. I'm just happy to know enough people that we can have anyone over to begin with. This year it was just four others, but Chris is betting on closer to 30 next year. We'll be able to look back on this post and see, won't we?

These are actually very large pictures, which I'm posting 1) for my two readers' benefit and 2) so I can grab them at work and use them as desktop pictures.