She blowed stuff up REAL good!

We had a bit of a late start today, since we both stayed up so late, but we eventually got out and about. We made a stop at Lowe's to get a thing or two, including sand and patio bricks. Ken wanted to put a mini-patio off the small garage door, mostly for stability for the steps. He's working on that now, and it's looking really nice! Another thing we got was an additional squirrel baffle--let's see if that will keep the squirrels (and the raccoons) off of the suet feeder!

It's another beautiful day, and we'll be having our favorite summer meal tonight: steaks on the grill, a big baked potato, and a big salad with blue cheese dressing. Isn't it cool that we both love that? But that's a ways off, and I promised you some pictures.

 

Apparently, a while back my Dad mentioned to my sister (Diana) that he's always loved fireworks and firecrackers, but as a kid growing up during the Depression, they could obviously never afford things like that. So Diana got him this one. Can you see what it's called? Yep, the Bad Ass.

Needless to say, I think we all got a kick out of this...most of all my Dad. And he's the one who lit it.

Also, it turns out that just as I inherited my love of office supplies from my Dad, Diana inherited her pyromaniac tendencies from him! Di had some M-80's, and Dad was tossing 'em around, just having a great ol' time.

 

This is my great-nephew Jared, my great-niece Maddie (aren't they cute?), and my sister burning those "snake" things. That's me just to the right of my sister.

This important thing I want you to notice here--if you can see the detail--is that my shoes exactly match my shirt. Pretty darned impressive, eh?

 

 

This is one of the fountains Di had. I was using the special setting on my camera for fireworks, and this is one of the few that turned out to look fairly neat. One thing I discovered about that setting is that the shutter speed is much slower than automatic. (Makes sense, now that I think about it. That way you get a lot of the little fiery tendrils captured.) So you can't just press the button and move the camera--you have to hold it in place for a second or two. Thus my mostly blurry shots! However, lesson learned for next year.

Di told us that one of her favorites has always been the Unicorn Fountain. (They last a long time, plus she collects unicorns, so there you go.) She looked all over the place for them this year, and they weren't being sold in the area. She had a couple left over from last year, and she found a distributor listed. She Googled them and found out that the distributor is based in Muncie, Indiana, about 2 hours southeast of here (and home of Ball State University, my alma mater). She called this distributor, but they don't sell to the public, only to stores...BUT they did have the name of a place that sold the Unicorn Fountains to the public.

So Diana and Tom made a road trip of it, driving down to Muncie to buy her Unicorn Fountains (along with various other things to blow up)! On the way back, they stopped at Fairmont, Indiana, home of James Dean, and checked out the local historical museum and Dean's grave.

Now you see that I'm serious about my sister being hardcore when it comes to her fireworks!

 

And finally--she gets a bigger picture for this one--here she is with a portion of her fireworks. There were just as many to her right. She had Roman candles, various fountains, huge sparklers (some that screamed when you lit them), a cool pinwheel one that she nailed to a tree, bottle rockets large and small, and a few of the really big shells that shoot way up and then explode in a fountain. I don't even want to know what she spent on all of this, but you know what? She LOVES doing it and has a ball, so I say more power to her!

I swear, she just cracks me up. She has more fun than a lot of kids do!

I'm afraid you can't really see it in this picture, but she also has a couple of small bottle rockets stuck in her hair like antennae.

Yeah. I know. But we love her anyway. She makes the rest of us look fairly normal. <grin>

 

Tags: Fireworks, Muncie Indiana, Ball State University, Fairmont Indiana, James Dean