Fireworks!

"Hi, my name is Gridley, and I'm a pyromaniac."

"Hi, Gridley!"

"It has been 43 hours since I last blew something up..."

"Wow!" "Good job!" "Way to go!"

This 4th, a bunch of us gathered at a friends house. Most of the guys brought fireworks of some sort. I'm still exploring the commercial fireworks idea (mostly because for all practical purposes they're only available once a year), but almost everything I'm finding out is fun. I am very glad to finally live in an area where fireworks are legal.

This year I brought a small mortar (we also had three large ones, and did some coordinated launches with the three big ones), three small multi-mortars that I believe are generally called "fountains," 18 little cardboard tanks equipped with sparklers, rocket propulsion, and small reports (in two varieties), a single-shot mortar that launched a parachutist 'army man', a 25-shot "Saturn" whistling rocket, plus some tiny boxes of smoke bombs, pop-pops, booby traps, and 'lightning flash'es. Aside from having apparently grabbed white smoke instead of colored, everything was fun. We set up a bunch of the tanks at once and had a semi-successful battle.

The weather cooperated very nicely - rain on the 3rd to soak everything down, clear on the 4th.

We were not even close to the biggest pyros in the neighborhood, much less the area - while sunset did technically occur even as late as 11PM the sky still looked like dusk. The entire valley was lit by at least a dozen major point sources. A couple of them seemed to have unlimited money, and at least one of which I'm pretty sure must have been semi-professional.

John Adams in the musical "1776" has a line: "I see fireworks... I hear the cannons roar..."

Happy Birthday, USA!