they saved them....

So I was talking the other day about how apparently there weren't many people in my neighborhood shooting off fireworks? NOPE. They saved them for last night. Which, yes, really was the 4th, but was also a weeknight, the next day after which, people will have to be at work (people including me).

I'm guessing a lot of the people shooting off fireworks were either teens in high school (and therefore out of school) or people whose work doesn't require them to be at work before 10 am.

The noise was still going as of 11 pm and somewhat after. Lots of loud explosions.

And I know, it's a first-world problem: I lose one night of sleep and people are celebrating freedom, and yeah, I could be living in Northern Ireland circa 1988 or Fallujah today and I'd have to hear that kind of thing every night of my life (and I always wonder: how do people do it? How do people live where there's constant gunfire and explosions - and not just things that go boom and shoot glitter, but things that could genuinely kill - and not go mad? I would.)

But yeah. I really hope people shot all their fireworks off last night. It does seem ever so slightly jerkish to me to be shooting off loud booming things in a fairly dense residential neighborhood after 11 pm on a weeknight. I would never get my edger out and edge my lawn at 7 am on a Saturday even though waiting until after 10 am (the time I deem as 'fair game because people should be up by now') means I'm doing it when it's so hot I want to die.

(But, standard whine: I play by the "rules" and a lot of other people don't. I'm too nice for my own good sometimes.)

I still have a hard time getting used to Oklahoma's pretty much "anything goes" laws on fireworks - stuff is openly sold, even pretty advanced stuff. Some CHURCHES have fireworks stands for fund raising. Growing up in Ohio, most everything was illegal and if you COULD find Catherine wheels or small roman candles, you had to sign an affidavit that you were taking them out of state. (More than once my dad signed one with his fingers crossed behind his back). BUT we never shot off fireworks after 10 pm....

(We were also allowed to have sparklers, which kind of boggles the mind, now. Sparklers get as hot as the muffle furnace in which I burn the carbon off of soils to determine the carbon content. They get as hot as a welding torch. It amazes me I made it to adulthood with all my fingers and both eyes....)

Other than sparklers, I was never into fireworks. I used to joke that love of them was a Y-linked trait and I think in my family it had to have been: my dad liked them, his brothers liked them (even when they were in their 50s and 60s, I remember their great glee realizing they were at a beach house and could build a "chute" to fire bottle rockets out over the lake and see who could get the farthest trajectory). My brother liked them. But I never did, and my mom was one of those positioning buckets of water all around and threatening to dial 9 and 1 and have her finger in the hole to dial 1 again if need be. And yeah, maybe I'm a bit of a wet blanket about them, but I really don't like noise and I really don't like things that could set a house afire or cause major burns.

And yeah, you can use them responsibly, but a lot of people don't: I have seen people hold bottle rockets in their hand, light them, and then throw them. Given the standards of manufacture on these things (given what you pay for them), I'd be afraid the variability on time to explode would be really high and you couldn't predict how long it would be safe. And also, alcohol and fireworks don't mix, except some people do.

I liked the public displays okay, though I could have done with all visuals and no noise -I still didn't like the noise.

(There were a couple "suspicious" house fires in the area last night, makes me wonder if the "suspicious" is "tied to people being idiots with fireworks")