Andy Robbins : Seamless Images The Circles of That Sea Are Laws

Fourth of July

OK, I haven't checked Facebook in over 24 hours.  Amber and I were considering deleting our accounts but I think if I just take it off my bookmarks I won't look at it anymore.  It's just become too much of a pointless, masturbatory time drain.  I have pretty much everyone on my account hidden anyway (if I didn't care what you were doing in high school do I care what you're doing now?) - if you're reading this you're probably one of the few people that I don't have hidden on Facebook.  So, I guess I will keep the account because people do email me on it sometimes, but otherwise...I won't be commenting on what you had for lunch or what movie you saw last night quite as often.

So, speaking of pointless, masturbatory time drains, on with the blog.

We had a nice Fourth of July.  Zia spent the week with my parents and after wearing them out, they brought her back down to us.  She takes hundreds of pictures on her camera and most of them are pretty good, but it takes time to sort through them all and she wants prints of almost everything (including the series of close-up images of her hair tiers).  Here are a few of her pictures.

My parents and I went for a hike up to the Black Mountain fire lookout, one of three fire lookouts still in existence in the Bighorns.  It was about the right length hike, even though climbing up wore us out a bit.  The road to the trailhead was pretty sketchy thanks to a month of rains.

It was cold and rainy and foggy as we walked up.  It cleared up a bit, but never entirely.

You can see the lookout on top of the granite stacks here.

Questionable bridge to the lookout.

The outhouse has a nice view.

We had dinner at Amber's parents'.  In this picture it sort of looks like Amber is on fire.

I bought a lot of fireworks, sometimes based almost solely on the names.  Giant Octopus and Death Trap were two examples.  How can you pass up those?

Ian demonstrates how not to launch bottle rockets (he had a hood to protect him).

Lincoln was scared of the fireworks at first but slowly accepted them.  The first one is of him waving his hands around in panic.  But once he put on his special goggles (he's been taking naps with these lately), he was OK.

We bought mortar shells again this year.  The Sky Plasma ones were good like last year, but we also shot some others called Golden Dragons.  They were pretty but they didn't go up very high before exploding in gigantic bursts.  We rained fiery debris down on the house and trees for 2 hours with those - luckily nothing started on fire.  All my pictures were crap.

Sparkler mayhem (always the most dangerous part of the evening).

Amber worked yesterday but we went to the Tongue River Reservoir in Montana briefly.  It looks a lot like a reservoir.  The water was very high.  There were picnic tables underwater.

So, there you go! These blogs always come to a screeching halt.  Heh.