4th of July

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Yesterday was Independance Day here in the States. It's a huge deal and in the state of Florida fireworks are legal. It seems the preferred way to celebrate the holiday is to go out into the street and make a raucous clamour with explosives. One has to admire that.

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Over the past several weeks large tents have popped up all along the road side selling all kinds of fireworks, big and small. From Roman candles to large mortars. The vendors at these make shift shops are true carnies.

Ah the good old days when no child was too young to play with explosives.

There were Cane toads jumping around, one even had the audacity to jump onto my foot, which was promptly washed, to remove germs left by the filthy little blighter. Those critters may have seemed worth saving from Titanic like ice cubes as babies, but now that they are growing up and revealing their true toad like ugliness, they are completely out of favour.

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The highlight of the night for me was when the Colonel got onto his 3 wheel recumbent bike, (which we joke about as a silly looking oddity), taped some Roman candles to the handlebars, chinese firecrackers on the back and rode off the down the street. I was bent over double laughing as he rode past a family with rambunctious children going crazy on the lawn, and lit the Roman candles. They burned loudly and brightly, sending out balls of brightly coloured sparks. The Chinese firecrackers sounded like gunfire.

Poor Colonel, as he was riding along sparks were flying. He has several patches of 2nd degree burns on his leg, which just made it all the more hilarious for me. Like all great artistes, he was suffering for his art. The kids across the street tried to get him to put on a glitter cowboy hat to enhance the effect but that was too much. The Colonel was happy to give some cheap laughs by attaching firecrackers to that comical looking bike, but wearing a silly hat just not going to happen. Shame, it would have been too funny.

It's funny looking enough without fireworks being strapped to it!

For our July 4th Celebration the Colonel made a beer can chicken. I had never heard of this before. It's obviously an American treat. A chicken is cooked with an open beer can stuffed up it's orifice. How unladylike. During cooking the liquid is released into the chicken making it tender and flavoursome. He bought a special purpose built cooking tray for the process. As horrifying as the sight of a headless chook sitting upright in the oven was, it did taste very good. Succulent, tender meat, a culinary treat. For dessert I didn't exactly go to a great deal of trouble. I just took the left over fancy New York cheesecake out of the freezer and let it defrost. What a lazy cow. The Cheesecake was quite a disappointment I must say, chocolate overkill and it was so dense and uncheesy if that makes sense.

This was my second July 4th since living in the USA. Last year the Colonel was in Iraq and I was here by myself so this was the first time I had participated in the festivities.

All July 4th Postcard images taken from www1.american.edu/heintze/postcards.htm

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