My favorite things 27

Faithful readers of this blog may know that I am a flag junkie so you can imagine how exciting it was for us to buy a 20-foot flagpole for our front yard six years ago this week.  And what a nifty flagpole it is.

Instead of raising the flag with a rope, the traditional method, with this model you raise the flagpole!  It telescopes into five-foot sections, so you start with a very short pole, hook your flag onto rings with clasps, and then raise each section one by one.  When each section gets fully extended, you turn the pole an inch and it drops down into a groove that keeps everything in place.

Our house is set back from the street and the street numbers, although they're six inches tall, are affixed to the wall and unless you know where to look you could easily miss them.  So it's nice now to be able to tell people "we're the house with the big flagpole."

After we got the flagpole and wore out our first 3x5-foot flag I upgraded to 4x6, and when that wore out I wanted an even bigger one, but was told that the wind forces up that high are too strong for a bigger flag, which would apparently fill like a sail and float our entire yard away in a gale.  Didn't want that to happen, so we're making do.

Happy Fourth of July!