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Well, yes, of course I went to the annual Independence Day fireworks display in Wakefield.
We have gone to watch that particular celebration every year since we moved
to Rhode Island. In fact, we saw it at least twice before that, times when
we came over from upstate New York to visit Nancy's parents after her father
retired and they moved to Rhode Island.
This is a big event -- financed by the Town of South Kingstown Parks and
Recreation Department -- the annual concert and fireworks at Old Mountain
Field in Wakefield. Old Mountain Field is a town park... we have no actual
mountains (remember, the highest point in the entire state is only a bit
over eight hundred feet above sea level) in Rhode Island, but the park
is at the base of a hill.
I goofed off much of Independence Day, just sitting around reading... Nancy
and I had lunch out on the back deck and I sat there for a couple of hours
after lunch, just reading and relaxing.
I didn't even really fix anything for dinner. We decided to have a green
salad (this is the time of year when all of that lettuce in the garden
is growing faster than we can eat it) and get a pizza -- to be specific,
a "Jeremy Special" pizza.
When I got there to pick it up, I discovered that in the short time since
I had phoned in my request, Jeremy had become swamped with orders (and
so my pizza had not yet been made). It was interesting to peek into the
kitchen and watch him working through cooking all of the various orders
(pizza, calzones, wings, fries, sandwiches, fish & chips, salads, etc.)
keeping everything straight and having the different parts of an order
become ready at the same time. [Today I asked him how he manages to organize
and control all of those variables and he said he thought of it as being
like Tetris -- with different sized blocks -- but instead of (imaginary)
physical blocks, they were blocks of time -- so he's playing a mental game
of Tetris with blocks of time instead of falling multi-colored blocks....
an interesting analogy.]
Eventually my pizza was ready and I headed back home -- only to discover
that I was stuck in the going-home-from-the-beach traffic. People day-tripping
to South County beaches were now attempting to return to Providence (or
Warwick or Cranston, etc.) and so there were delays at every traffic light
(and all the while this delicious pizza odor was wafting up from the box)
-- but I was able to take a few local shortcuts and escape from the homeward-bound
hordes.
Nancy and I had to quickly scarf down our pizza and salad and then head
into town to watch the fireworks. We made it to Old Mountain Field with
just minutes to spare before the dazzling display of pyrotechnics began.
This is always a good show and every year it seems as if it gets better
and better. This year we were expecting an especially good show as they
had decided to eliminate the ground displays (which could be seen by only
a few hundred out of the many thousands who flocked to town for the show)
and put all of the money into the rockets bursting in air.
Wow!
What a show! This had to be the best fireworks display I've seen. The (multiple)
grand finales were spectacular, awesome, incredible, really amazing (yeah,
throw a few more adjectives in there). The pictures on the right are just
a few snapshots I took during the show -- I have none of the really magnificent
stuff because it would have just overwhelmed the camera. (Okay, also I
had filled the memory card -- and even if I hadn't, I was too busy watching
to take pictures during the last few magnificent minutes.) Fireworks technology
just keeps advancing and advancing.
I can scarcely wait until next year! |
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I tend to look at my site using Mozilla 1.7.5 and Firefox 1.0.1 -- but
lately I've taken a few looks at it in Internet Explorer and it appears
that things don't look quite right in IE -- the font is larger and that
throws off the balance of text and pictures. I tried View => Text Size
and found mine was set on "Larger" so I changed it to "Medium"
and that made it better -- in fact, it might look better in IE now, than
in Mozilla (at least in terms of arrangement and spacing on the screen...
Strange.)
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