List of all fireworks displays & events in Des Moines and surrounding areas:

Des Moines: Yankee Doodle Pops will be held tomorrow, Friday, July 1 at 6:30 pm by the Des Moines Symphony at the Iowa State Capitol Grounds.

Enjoy an old-fashioned Fourth at Living History Farms this holiday weekend from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday and Monday. Sunday is an All-American Ice Cream Float Day with free root beer floats, Civil War era music in the bandstand from 1-4, games, and a children’s craft. On Monday, enjoy an old-fashioned Fourth with a historic Independence Day celebration in the town of Walnut Hill including pie eating contests, foot races, spelling bees, watermelon seeding spitting contests and more! Games begin at 11am, then enjoy a concert by the Walnut Hill Choral Society at 12:30 followed by a patent medicine show at 1:30. At 2 pm, join in an 1875 vintage Independence.

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**Photos courtesy of American Heart Association – Central Iowa Facebook page**

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Metro Arts Jazz in July is a month-long festival that celebrates jazz and art with free outdoor concerts across Greater Des Moines. Each year, interested jazz musicians apply to be a part of the series. The selected list includes returning musicians from Central Iowa and national acts with Iowa ties. Each concert is a mini-festival experience with local artists, children’s activities, and food and drink vendors.

Hopefully you can make it out to one of the concerts in the upcoming month.

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An ounce of prevention, Benjamin Franklin said, is worth a pound of cure. When it comes to our health, we could use many ounces of prevention. Obesity, diabetes and heart disease, just some of the health problems that plague us, eat up millions of American health care dollars, yet in many cases these costly and harmful conditions could be prevented. Kenneth Thorpe of the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease and Jonathan Lever of YMCA of the USA make that compelling point in their recent editorial on the Kaiser Family Foundation website.

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David Spreadbury and Joy Schiller show that healthy eating is delicious.

David Spreadbury, Ph.D., chair of the biochemistry and nutrition department, and Joy Schiller, director of DMU’s Wellness Center, teach a very popular healthy eating elective in the Wellness Center kitchen. These two heroes of health also periodically offer lunch-hour cooking demonstrations and discussions, such their session this week on incorporating plant-based dishes in one’s diet.

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You read in the blog about this weekend’s Des Moines Arts Festival, a veritable visual feast not to be missed. Making the festival even better is “the other art show,” the ArtFest Midwest, also this weekend in the air-conditioned Varied Industries Building at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.

Professor Gary Hoff paints still-lifes and much more.

ArtFest Midwest is especially special to DMU, because the more than 200 Iowa and regional artists featured at this ninth annual juried fine arts event will include Gary Hoff, D.O., FACOI, FACC, chair of DMU’s medical humanities and bioethics department. This cardiologist is loaded with talent: His works include paintings, portraits, pencil drawings and more; he’ll display oil paintings, his preferred medium, at this year’s ArtFest.

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