Thursday Morning

Remember when I used to come up with clever titles for blog entries? Those days are gone, my friend. I SOOO could not think of what to call this post. Although I do think it’s high time we turned July 5 into a lesser sort of holiday, kind of like Boxing Day. That way there’s not all this pressure on the 5th to get out and do something elaborate, but you do have a sanctioned excuse to rest. I just read a bunch of books set in Ireland and they were forever going on about Boxing Day as though it were some beautiful rest cure for Christmas. Then they also have Easter Monday. I think. Anyway, someone has “Easter Monday”. And it’s not official but we’ve got Black Friday as the “day after Thanksgiving.” Now, that’s kind of backwards, though, at least around my house, because Thanksgiving is the quiet and restful day, while Black Friday is the day of going to the mall to watch other folks lose their minds. It’s become a sport for us. Maybe this year we’ll even place bets on which people are gonna crack.

Sorry. None of that was what I meant to write about. My brain just got stuck in this loop. Moving on…

Yesterday was the best Independence Day I’ve had in awhile. We got to go to Casey’s house to watch his fireworks display. Let me tell you all something right now. That man takes his fireworks seriously. And by seriously I mean that I live 3/4 of a mile from Nashville Shores. Three times a year (Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day) I take my Adirondack chair to the end of my driveway and watch their show for 15 minutes. Casey’s show was more impressive AND it lasted for two hours and change. For real.

Before the fireworks I had the creepiest thing happen. I met this guy named **Declan** (That’s not his real name, but I don’t hand out real names on the internet. That’s bad juju.) Anyway, meeting Declan was both cool and weird.

Because Declan is just like me, if I were somehow turned back into a ten year old. And turned into a boy. (At least I think he was 10. He may be 9. It’s hard to tell with kids like us. Because we’re tall and we talk like miniature adults.) Declan and I apparently both got the “don’t talk about politics” speech before the party, so we were banished to the kitchen where we–yes–freely discussed politics. The best non-firework related party moment was when he asked me if I ate only liberty. See, he’s a vegetarian and so the natural assumption would of course be, upon hearing that I was a libertarian, that I ate only liberty. And anyone speaking to me for any length of time and familiar with KIBO will know that yeah, it would seem like I eat liberty.

So that was cool.

Also cool, yet weird, was finally getting to talk to Casey in person. Do you all know how odd it is to have exchanged long emails with people for more than a year, have long debates in comment sections, follow their every move on Twitter and then finally say “It’s nice to meet you”? Yeah. The Internet sure has made life odd, don’t you think? Casey is very cool in person, and also very into explosives. So that could either mean that he’s genuinely cool OR that I’m afraid he’ll blow up my house. In this case we’ll go with genuinely cool.

So this 4th July was awesome. It beats other 4th of Julys hands down. I didn’t even have to come up with a new Epic Movie Marathon. (Other years we’ve done LOTR, Star Wars & Jurassic Park. Prior to Casey’s invitation this 4th was looking more and more like Tarantino’s year.)