Welcome To the 5th...

Rocket girl

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Lord am I beat!! It stays light in Montana till quite late so home fireworks don't really get serious till around 11:00. By 10:30 we had determined that the lighters were useless, it was too windy for a candle, and the matches were all old and too humidity-soaked to light anymore. So off Dave went to WalMart (the only place in town still open on the 4th of July) and bought a small propane blowtorch. Then, so to speak, we got cooking with gas! We finished ours not long after midnight, but there were still fireworks going off in the neighborhood at 1:00 or 2:00 am.

Best shot of the night and J took it

This morning I had a piano lesson at 8:00 am and needed to get up at 7:00 to practice.

Dad, we need a blow torch...

I didn't make it out of bed till 7:30, and even after a half hour of practice I was still terrible at the Rachmaninoff concerto I've been working on since May. *sigh* I'll kill it next week--along with Beethoven's Prelude in C. I cannot tell a lie: After my piano lesson I went right back to bed and slept till 10:30. For a further bit of honesty, I could easily have slept till noon. I think it's something about the Montana air (back to that whole lack of oxygen thingie.)

One of the parachuters

Polson City fireworks

But I dragged myself/sprang (it's kind of a lively zombie move) from bed at 10:30 and rousted the girls so we could go clean up firework debris and I could move our cars out of the neighbor's drive. The neighbors on both sides go away for the 4th so they and their dogs can escape the noise. I wanted to have their yards cleaned up before they got home. One of the fireworks we set off shot a hundred little men hanging from parachutes into the air and they drifted up to two houses away in every direction that wasn't the street where they would have been easy to pick up.

My best photo of the Polson fireworks

Rocket to the moon

My duties this morning were to clean the street (it's a bigger area than it sounds as right in front of our house is a diagonal intersection where two streets join) by handpicking as well as sweeping. I also moved the cars. Then I left Kyla and Jessie to the rest of the bordel (in one of the French senses of the word--not the English) and I am inside cooling off. Dave wants to try a new restaurant for lunch, and then I'm going to take the girls out to the lake. I think it will be a challenge to spin my four ounces of fiber for the Tour de Fleece today.

Quel bordel!

Jessie as Carol Burnett

Jessie as Charlie Chaplin