The Glorious Fourth

We spent a lazy afternoon at the home of friends for a BBQ and some chat. And then home before dark to mount the fire-watch. At the moment - the November elections may change this - Tomorrow's City Today, where I live, move, and have my being, allows fireworks of the hilariously named "safe-and-sane" variety.

This year the fourth of July pyromaniacal fever was somewhat more subdued than usual. You might not have thought so had you been here; it's a relative judgement. Instead of Stalingrad it was more like, say, the Anzio landings. The urge to set fire to things and blow them up was still there but most folks in this town will still remember this from last March. [Even more on the Big Bang here.] The sheriff's office remembers too, and was out in force. So the rockets and the cherry bombs and the low-grade explosives still went off but there was a touch more circumspection about it. And it seems to have stopped altogether – both the legal and the illegal devices -- by about 10:00 p.m. Legally, I believe they had another hour to blast away.

Of greatest interest to me, of course, was the happy fact that no incendiary devices landed on the roof; the Ancestral Manse still stands.

And speaking of fireworks, did Blogspot take a mortar round to the server last night? It seems to be taking an inordinate amount of time to post anything today.