Quel délice!

Guess what I found waiting for me when I got home from work today!

That's right.  Unbeknownst to me, while I was dreaming wistfully about going to France and eating pastries and fizzy water to celebrate Bastille Day, Amanda was out procuring said delicacies!  (And, lest credit not be given where credit is due, I understand that she's had this in mind since I introduced her to Randolph's pastry shop some time ago -- well before my post this morning.)  So a tasty dinner of lemon-marinated chicken breast on ciabatta bread with hummus, tomato, sweet peppers and avocado, on a bed of spinach, was followed by a delightful little lemon tart.

But good food wasn't the end of our Bastille Day celebration.  A cool front had moved into the area during the day, dropping the heat and humidity considerably -- as in, on Tuesday we were over 100 degrees, but right now it's only 67.  Since an evening like this was too nice to spend working indoors, I decided to procrastinate work and help Amanda cross off one more item from her list of "to dos" while in DC; namely, seeing the fireflies. 

We'd seen a few isolated fireflies here and there as we've gone about our other activities (the Aretha Franklin concert at Wolf Trap, the trip home from Rehoboth Beach), but I wanted to make sure Amanda got to see the really lovely firefly configurations that I see when I go running.  Around my house are a number of paved trails that run alongside little creeks with dense vegetation on either side.  In the late evening, thousands of fireflies congregate in the leaves of the bushes and trees, creating a little, fairly-like wonderland.  Kind of like having little white Christmas lights everywhere, only tinier and more delicate.  It always makes me think of A Midsummer Night's Dream or Tinkerbell. 

Amanda and I headed out to what I figured would be the best place for fireflies and went for a short walk.  We weren't disappointed.  The fireflies were wonderful.  So, too, was the moon, which was enormous and almost blindingly bright (it's waxing gibbous; will be full tomorrow).  In addition to the light show, we were also treated to a full (and astonishingly loud) chorus of frogs, crickets, cicadas and other nightly noisemakers.  It was no promenade on the banks of the Seine, but as far as summer evenings go, this would be hard to beat.