Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Independence day with friends
We went to The Compound. That's the weekend home of our friend who has a Class 3 firearms dealer's license. That means he can collect automatic weapons. I shot my first Uzi (made popular by Miami Vice) there, and a 1919 tripod-mounted .30 caliber belt-fed Browning automatic machine gun (the one in the pic is semi-auto). You may have seen one of these in Rambo ;)

Anyway, Doug, the owner of The Compound has a fun Independence Day gathering. His crazy family comes in from long distances to attend. Mostly just the men. They are craaaaazy. They like to get liquored up before shooting off the fireworks, for extra excitement. They have bottle rocket duels. You can count on multiple people getting burnt. It really is ridiculously funny though.

Doug's wife feeds everyone dinner, then comes the liquor, then after dark the fireworks. Last night was the first time since Emma was born that I was sorry I had to leave somewhere to take her home to put her in bed. I knew what fun I was missing. But we were good parents and had her home in bed by 8:30 p.m. No fireworks for us.

Here are some new decorations to liven up the place...


One of Doug's brothers who comes from South Carolina for this...


Here's Grace climbing into her chair. They had just laid a stone patio and put up a canopy over it. There was tons of dust where they had swept limestone dust into the cracks between the stones.


Here are my daughter's dusty footprints on the picnic table seat.

Written at 7:37 PM by Highlandgal.
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