Fourth of July

It’s been a couple weeks since July 4th happened, but I haven’t written about it yet.

I had to work on the fourth, naturally. The day before we had had a going away party for Evie who is now working at Reagan airport. There was a ton of food and Megan came with her new baby.

 

Work was actually pretty slow on Sunday during the parade (which I didn’t know about), though it picked up considerably in the afternoon. I was working dog tags, and Shelly had given me festive eye shadow.

 

After work I went down to Alexandria and stopped by Whole Foods to get a salad for dinner. Then I met up with Stan and Carla (Jeff, by the way, was in Norfolk all weekend).

We went up onto the steps of the Masonic Temple, which seemed to be a popular option, including with this really absurdly muscle-y guy:

We were there at 8, and by the time the fireworks started it was very crowded. As the sun began to set, you could start to see fireworks along the horizon.

Finally the big show down by the mall started, and it turned out we were not at all in a good spot. We moved around so that we could take not-very-good pictures of the fireworks (which still looked big even from so far away).

We almost left but then suddenly a much closer, much more awesome fireworks show started in another direction. My camera ran out of batteries, so there are no photo attempts from it. We suspect it was from Ft. Belvoir, but we’re not sure. We were basically able to see two good fireworks shows as well as tiny bursts from many other ones on the horizon. It was a really cool place to be.

After everything seemed to be finished, we walked back to Carla’s place and watched the excellent (read: terrible) movie Troll, in which Harry Potter Jr. (seriously – this was from the 80s, too, so maybe it inspired JK Rowling…) helps a witch battle the troll that is possessing his little sister and taking over their San Francisco apartment building (it has a sequel too, apparently).

I then went back home, nearly running right into some fireworks being shot off down the block along the way. I couldn’t stay up to wait for Jeff to get home (he got there at about 3 in the morning) since I had the final day of the Folklife Festival to go to in the morning. Basically, it was a great fourth of July, and continued Jeff and I’s streak of usually not being together on July 4.