Sparks Fly

I know, it's been forever last Tuesday since I wrote here. I'm sorry about that.

Part of it is insanity at work eating up lots of both work time and (supposedly) personal time.

Some of it has been dealing with personal things that have absolutely no place in a public forum. (Though I will say thank you to those of you who have offered support, even without knowing what's going on. I'm sorry to be keeping you all in the dark.)

And some of it (let us be honest) is sheer, unadulterated laziness. (Ah, there's the Liz you all know and love.)

This is not a return to the regular schedule (work insanity continues into next week, at minimum), but I'm kind of stuck waiting for someone this morning, so I figured I'd at least touch base and let you all know I'm not dead yet.

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July! Do I even have any non-American readers? If so, I hope you all had a nice Wednesday, but we-all had us a national holiday yesterday. A holiday traditionally celebrated by eating grilled, potentially carcinogenic meat, tons of unhealthy food, and then drinking alcohol while watching large, loud explosions. I think the idea is to recreate the general sensory experience of the Revolutionary War, when we... Okay, I was going to fill that in with an patently incorrect history summary filled with modern references (e.g., bombs created by cheap Chinese fireworks factories) and in my head, it's hysterically funny, but I'm so reliably bad at history that I worried some of you might think I was actually that ignorant. And also, I'm so freaking exhausted this morning that I can't figure out how to put the words together.

And why am I so freaking exhausted this morning? Because yesterday, to celebrate Independence Day, we all drove up to Jenn and Brian's to eat steaks the size of my head (I know I'm prone to hyperbole, but I'm not even joking about that) and drink beer and hard cider and watch Brian and his buddy Travis set off a gajillion fireworks. (Okay, that bit was hyperbolic. But only a little. The man was using a propane blowtorch to light fuses!) They were loud and fun and pretty, everything a fireworks display should be.

Also, the kids got to blow through a stack of sparklers. I mean a stack. 'Cause when Brian went to buy fireworks, everything was buy-one-get-one, and the sparklers were cheapest in packs of twenty. That's not twenty sparklers, mind you. That's twenty boxes of sparklers. So we had around forty boxes of sparklers. They didn't go through all of them, thank goodness, but they still went through a lot.

Anyway, fireworks and sparklers until well past 10pm, and then we had an hour and a half drive home, so I didn't get to bed until around midnight. And that's why I'm so freaking exhausted this morning.

There will be pictures on Flickr, eventually, but all I had time for this morning was downloading a few of my favorites so I could post them here.