Fourth of July Party

Angela, Tina, Heather, and Company Picnic in Our Backyard

It's been a pretty enjoyable day—the part after church, at least. I woke up at 10 this morning and frantically put together pieces for a lesson. I basically decided to do an overview of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But it wasn't very well organized. I had too many long quotes and I neglected to think about the ability of my audience to understand those quotes. I should have just summarized them in my own words. Plus, with committee meetings at 4:15, I didn't have a long time for the lesson at all. I think a few people in the audience who really like their history enjoyed the lesson, but I think I put most people to sleep. Anyway, Ruston and I re-organized home teaching and planned the campout for Presidency meeting at 11:00. Ward council was short, and sacrament meeting was surprisingly well attended, but everyone left after that. So thankfully not too many people got to watch me make a fool of myself. After church we finished getting ready for the BBQ. And then a ton of people showed up around 6—way more than I was expecting at least. People like Jonathon and Mark's band members showed up, as well as Becky and Wayne and lots of people from the ward (including Mike and Jared). We just barely had enough food, but it was all good. Mark did the dogs and sauerkraut thing. Krista made a German style potato salad, while Heather did her own potato salad. Both were delicious. We provided the hamburgers and salad (thanks to Theo's shopping efforts—and to the very large quantities of random food items we found in our fridge as we cleaned it yesterday—5 bottles of pickles and ketchup, unclaimed cheese and vegetable items, assortments of juices, and so on). All and all it was a very successful BBQ event, and we have the added advantage of a much cleaner fridge. We laid around and talked until ward prayer, and after that we came back and shot fireworks. Only the cops came after two bottle rockets and made Mark douse all his fireworks in water. These were expensive fireworks that he had purchased in Wyoming. So that was sad, but luckily, Theo hadn't brought his out yet (he had purchased an even larger quantity of fireworks in Wyoming), so after the cops left we cautiously lit those. We were thinking we'd only have a short window of opportunity before the cops came back, but they never did. We figure he had a quota or something and we were just unlucky because we were on a main street with a ton of people in wide open view. And we lost some spectators because of the whole incident, so maybe he decreased the risk of something going wrong with a large crowd of people. Anyway, Theo's fireworks provided more than an hour's worth of entertainment, and pretty much all of the neighbors were out in lawn chairs watching us. There was even applause after particularly well-orchestrated combinations of fireworks. Tons of fun. I stayed out of the way for the most part, spending most of the night either filming or safely out of the way on a blanket (which wasn't that safe, I guess, because some of the firework shrapnel actually came back and hit Angela and me) but it was still fun. And the weather was perfect. No bugs at all—even though we spent the entire evening outside in our backyard. I can't tell if it was the smoke or my bug spray efforts from a few weeks ago. It was a really great way to spend the fourth of July.

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Posted July 04, 2004 (11:36 PM) | Comments (1)