June 21, 2008
Day 5
10:30 on a Saturday night. I'm sitting on my front porch, enjoying a 60 degree cloudless night.
Well, I'd be enjoying it more, if it weren't for the morons with their fireworks.
See, here in Michigan, fireworks that leave the ground are illegal. We're allowed to have smoke bombs and sparklers and cones and spinners and all the "kid's" fireworks, but no bottle rockets, no Roman candles, no mortars, none of the fancy "blow-off-a-body-part" stuff.
The problem with that is the following: our neighborhood is less than an hour's drive away from the Ohio state line, and you can buy any kind of fireworks you want in Ohio. So every year about this time, we start to enjoy the sounds of explosions and whistles and crackling in the skies above our house.
The geniuses firing these things off don't put much thought into where the refuse from these missiles will land, either. One summer I filled a trash can with the cast-off remnants of rockets that landed around my house. Some of them were still smoldering as they landed on my brown yard, the victim of a summer drought and a homeowner happy to obey the water restrictions and the ensuing lack of yard maintenance.
Every year I sit in my living room, gazing out the window, threatening to call the cops on these disturbers of my peace. Every year, I fail to do so. In fact, last year the kids and I walked down the street to watch someone setting them off. That promptly ended, however, when one of the launch tubes blew over and fired it's shell right through the crowd of kids watching on the curb. The shell bounced off someone's truck and went off in the yard next to us, no more than 30 feet away.
Well, the fireworks have stopped, and apparently the mosquitos have decided it's not too cold to be out after all (one fresh bite on each knee), so it's time for me to head back inside.
P.S. Yeah, it sounded cranky. I'm getting old. Get off of my lawn, even if I don't want to mow it! Still haven't, btw, we were out of the house most of the day. Maybe tomorrow.
Posted by zaren at June 21, 2008 10:32 PM