What Now

I had every intention of a very photo-heavy post about the 4th. I actually had my camera and actually got pictures of everyone doing thier holiday thing! However, my camera (dear little Kodak...how I love thee) decided that it was not going to jive with my work Macintosh, so the pictures were loaded at home and I never got around to posting from the Co-Pilot chair in my home office. So, in lieu of photos, you get descriptions. Woo-Hoo!

I worked both Monday and Tuesday. It was by choice, so I wasn't cursing anyone's name for having to be here. I'm the only person in the Marketing department who is not considered full time, so I don't get either vacation or sick leave to take at my leisure. So if I take the day off - they take the pay off. I don't mention this to be bitter, I mention it to explain why I would choose to work instead of play! Anyway, since I have pretty much caught up with all of my work, I was able to take it easy while I was here. I had a few little things to take care of, but I pretty much puttered around, learned some new crochet stitches, and listened to audio books. Too bad every day at work can't be like those! : ) After work, Steve picked me up and we headed out to Josh's house.

*Picture of Josh's house number "218"*
Although Josh lives in one of those neighborhoods where you have a mixture of $500,000 homes all the way down to more modest garden homes, he still refers to his end of the suburb as "The Hood". Pretty much that means his house cost around $150,000 or so. He's also the only one of us who lives far enough in the country to where fireworks are not illegal. He had invited us over for a barbeque (as he calls it...silly yankee) *picture of my foot with the grill* and so we all sat about while Greg and Shannon *picture of them cooking* grilled Bubba Burgers. I thought we might have lost Greg in an unfortunate lighter fluid accident at one point. The coals weren't catching very well, so he walked out and grabbed the bottle of lighter fluid. He proceeded to squirt a hefty amount onto the coals with no luck. Shannon and I turned to talk to one another and we hear "WHUMP!" and a sick orange glow covers us both. I had the feeling we would look around and find nothing more than a vaguely Greg-shaped pillar of ash, but he managed to escape from the fireball with only a few less eyebrows!

After the food was the fireworks! I absolutely LOVE watching fireworks! I prefer the big fancy professional ones, but the ones that the guys were shooting off were entertaining! I tried to take some pictures of them, but even on my fastest setting, all I got were some pictures of black sky. I used the video setting for most of the evening, so I got some really great footage of little sparks of light and then people running away from them. I had just turned off the camera when I heard someone yell a curse word. I looked up and one of the big flowering ones had fallen over. Steve, Greg and Anthony had made it safely back to the lanai, but Josh was still out there with the firework. All I remember from that was sort of a slow motion bloom of sparks illuminating Josh as he ran away from it. You know those movies where Arnold Swhatsyoumacallit runs away from a big explosion in slow motion and everything, including the sound is slowed way down? Nooooooooooooooooooooo... That's what happened. We were all laughing so hard by the time he got to us, we couldn't do anything else for a long time. Poor Josh! Luckily he was unscathed. When the finale came around, I got some pretty good footage, but a bug picked that time to fly directly down the front of my shirt, so after a couple of seconds of fireworks, you hear me squeak and the camera just goes all over the place from there.

Once we cleaned up, we all trooped inside to watch TV. It was a fun evening! I'll have to figure out how to post video for you to get to see some of what we did.