Yesterday, I returned from visiting my parents up in Washington for the Fourth. Independence Day is, without a doubt, my favorite family holiday. My family is crazy for fireworks (fortunately, they are legal in Washington). On the Fourth, a bunch of our family and friends get together at our house on the bay and shoot off a ton of fireworks. Other families on the bay do the same, so the whole day is filled with explosions and screeches and then, when night falls, the firework shows start.

Our favorite day occupation is to tie helium balloons to a buoy and then use that as our firework target. We spent several hours trying to get one to no avail. Then, just as it was getting too dark to see and we were going to have to abandon our target practice, my cousin got two in one shot! Finally! After that, we could move on to more showy firework displays without feeling like failures. Whew!

While we put together a group of people who are pretty into fireworks, there are a few other gatherings that are even more mad for fireworks than we are. Our neighbors a few houses down the way usually spend into five figures on their little display and I am sure that a few houses across from us do the same. We spend the time leading up to their big shows lighting off as much of our own stuff as possible (there was a period of time that night when my dad turned his hat backwards and seemed to shed about 40 years, running around lighting just about every fuse he could find) and then we usually settle back to watch what the neighbors managed to get their hands on this year.

We had a few close calls with mortar tubes that fell over and shot in indiscriminant directions (we actually drilled most of them upright into our launch pad for just that reason but a few didn’t make the cut) or shells that didn’t rise far enough before exploding but nothing too bad. Our neighbors also seemed to have one of their sets go off sideways which was a little scary since I had seen them take two boatloads of crated fireworks out to their raft and was wondering if the whole thing was just going to blow up –- it was fine though. I think because we’ve grown up with fireworks and take some basic precautions we don’t usually have huge problems. Generally, common sense is enough to keep us out of trouble, or maybe we’re just lucky.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 7:43 am and is filed under tarakirk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.