It is that special time of year to celebrate our country’s birthday by blowing off a limb, burning down a house, blinding a child, torching a car… or perhaps actually dying for the cause. In the pursuit of our inner six-year-old child, let’s annoy our neighbors, frighten our pets, and keep firefighters and ER staff busy cleaning up after our search for the bang.
My least favorite week of the year.
Those will certainly be Fourths, or 4th-adjacents, to remember.
Week? You’re lucky. In my neck of the woods, we have fireworks 3 times a week, all year long. It gets worse for New Year’s, Chinese New Year’s, 4th of July and sports finals.
The folk behind us started lighting them last night. We have had lots of rain, so I am less concerned about wildfires. Dog is unhappy. I understand.
Not news worthy (yet), but some people on the street behind me set off a few fireworks this evening. A sudden thunderstorm prevented much from happening.
I am moderately grateful that the pops only started this Friday. I am not enjoying it, but periodic pops starting only a week early is better than many years. We’re in a lull between summer afternoon/evening thunderstorms, which means it’s been darn warm for us, and drier than ideal, so I’m really hoping for a bit more rain before the holiday.
Thankfully this year we’re having guests at home for some (moderately) excessive eating and drinking, so I’ll have an easier time of it, and no one in the house has to go to work the next day, so my tolerance is going to be higher.
And I’ll have to spoil the crap out of the one cat who is of a nervous disposition. And I wouldn’t want to be working in any sort of emergency care considering all the firework and/or alcohol related disasters I expect to be thick on the ground.
Getting a jump on Friday.
I hate fireworks with a passion, except for professionally staged exhibitions on special occasions. But fireworks in the hands of imbeciles are both dangerous and extremely annoying. When I got a “please re-elect me” email from the Premier of Ontario which mentioned the various ways I could communicate with his office if I had any concerns, I fired off an email suggesting that he just outright ban private use of fireworks.
Here in Canada, we had some of the usual mayhem around Victoria Day (May 19 this year) but Canada Day (July 1), which is usually a prime time for imbeciles to set off exploding objects, was strangely quiet. There were some distant fireworks on June 30, and then some louder ones on the evening of July 1, but they didn’t last long. It’s way to early to hope that there’s been some sort of clampdown, but hope springs eternal. There are definitely a lot of regulations governing where and when they can be set off, and maybe they’re being enforced more strictly.
I’m unable to embed images, though I’ve tried to learn. But here’s a link to series of X-ray photos of hands which have been (probably permanently) damaged by firecrackers. If I had seen this when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have played with them.
One thing I don’t miss from Portland is the truly big airburst fireworks in our neighborhood. They terrorized the cat and triggered PTSD symptoms for me. One of the assholes lived right down the street, but I could never identify who it was. He would go out at about 0300 or so every night for a week and let off one big bang to wake everyone up in the 'hood. Fucker.
Here in our apartment building, we only hear muffled booms in the distance and usually sleep through most of it. But in the last couple of years there have been major incidents downtown of people using them as weapons and there have been serious injuries. The cops are really cracking down on these assholes.
I wonder how many residence fires and fatalities are created every year by Christmas trees?
Or turkey fryer fires! I get anxious every year when my neighbor sets his up in the backyard.
Setting it up in the back yard is probably fine (unless it’s really dry); setting it up on the back porch, OTOH…
We had one of them. He stopped after he blew off a couple of fingers and got charged for making pipe bombs out of fence rails.
That was back in AZ, land of four-season wildfires, where fireworks were illegal and houses burned down every year. We used to hear fireworks going off for at least a week every Fourth, New Years and Cinco. We would put the extending ladder up so we could look at our roof before going to bed.
Here in WV, fireworks are very legal. If we had a mind to, we could just go to the local supermarket, buy a family pack and set them off in our front yard.
It is so quiet here. Folks take the families to the big public displays and set their little displays off before and after. Or they go to the lake. Folks around the lake probably don’t sleep very well, but the most that will happen at the neighborhood cookout is someone will hand the littles some sparklers.