I took a couple of days off, as you may or may not have noticed. No real reason for it, just didn’t feel like writing anything for the last couple of days. I suppose this is just a warm up period for next week, when I will be on vacation. I suppose I will likely write something down during our five days in Las Vegas, but I really doubt that I will try to upload anything, as there is a connection fee and per-minute surcharge from every major hotel on the strip, and we will be on the strip. There is also the matter that typing on the keyboard of a laptop computer really makes my wrists hurt, so I never do it for long, but that really won’t matter with the internet impossibility.
• Yesterday was the fourth day of July. That might not hold a lot of weight in most countries, hell even in the USA, but it is our symbolic day of freedom. I was really happy to wake up th is morning and find that there were no terrorist acts on the US soil. The threat of terroristic attacks has been on high for a long time now and what better day could the terrorists choose than our symbolic day of freedom?
Thankfully, the day has come and passed. In addition to no terrorist attacks, there were no firework related fatalities (at least none that I found on a news search). So that is a double wahoo for the day. There was an unfortunate spike in the “drunk driver’s” arrested over the weekend, but that is to be expected since 1) Every sober man knows that they shouldn’t drive on this weekend, and 2) every cop knows that same exact thing.
Locally, the fireworks display this year was by far the best they have done in the ten years that I have been living here. Normally the display will last a few short minutes, so by the time you hear the sound of the first, you are outside to see the light of the last, or so it seems. This year there were actual fireworks. Probably a twenty minute display. I had not seen so many since I was very young and living in Oregon. The only SNAFU to prove that it really is florence was the fact that after the big finale of the fireworks, after everyone waits ten seconds or so to make sure, one single one went up in the air popped, and fizzled out in green. So instead of the “grand finale”, we had the fizzle of green.
• I had rather a humorous conversation with my mother the other day. It seems that she can remember the celebrations of independence day, but she can’t really remember the injuries that I (and so I assume my brothers) sustained on that day. When dad and mom were together, so that would be until I was about six-seven years old, there was always a bucket of cold water nearby when we started to light our snakes and sparklers and the such. Snakes and sparklers are pretty lame though, so we started bending the sparklers and trying to see if we could make two or three headed snakes. I don’t remember exactly what happened, or exactly how, but I do remember that one of the sparklers got twisted to another sparkler and we lit it at both ends. This was the second time that I had gotten horrible burns on my fingers from one of them, the first being youthful idiocy as I just grabbed the wrong end. Are other families that different? Did I grow up in the only family where horrible burns were a part of the celebration?