4th of July in my Neighborhood

Hope everyone who celebrates it had a happy 4th of July. Personally, I think we had the best fireworks show in Vegas. Our neighbors had done three separate 2am trips to Pahrump to buy the good stuff over the last two months – and believe me, they really dropped some cash. There were enough fireworks to sell to friends and still shoot off rockets continuously from 8pm until 2am the morning of the 5th.

There was plenty of food (steaks, crab legs, pork kabobs, grilled corn, chicken), plenty of booze (Bud Light, Tecate, and Hennessey) – probably shouldn’t have mixed the booze and illegal fireworks, but nobody was seriously hurt…even after a few rockets were put in their launch tubes pointing down and exploded out towards the crowd at ground level. All in good fun. :) The only casualty was a rather tall, untrimmed palm tree one street over – it went up in huge flames when a stray spark landed on it. The owner wasn’t even setting off fireworks, but we definitely weren’t the only ones in the neighborhood with high-flying illegal sparks.

I party-pooped around midnight. I’m told I missed some of the biggest displays – they started wiring rockets together so 4 or 5 would go off in succession (apparently you have to be rather drunk to do this). The street looked like a war zone the next day. I think a few neighbors pitching in a few bucks each so the local do-anything-for-cash guy would clean up. Honey was hung over, which means he drank A LOT of beer. I made pancakes and we lounged about the rest of the day. (Mmmm, pancakes.)

In photo news, we’ve done two test shoots lately. (Test shoots are for trying something you haven’t done before with all parties understanding nothing usable may come from it.) The ‘Lolita’ shoot with Eve wasn’t bad and also wasn’t amazing. I guess the shoot to familiarize a fellow photog with lighting at night went well – I stayed inside to work on a piece for guerilla knitting (see examples here or Google to your heart’s content).