Painting the sky

For the Fourth of July each year, a large group of us gather at Dave's, socialize, eat burgers and hot dogs and dishes that people bring, and then we launch fireworks.  Only about a dozen of us actually work on the fireworks show; the rest of the crowd watch and often cheer.  I've written many times before about what it's like to stand under the fireworks and stare upward as they paint the sky, so I won't repeat most of those ramblings here.  What struck me so powerfully again tonight was how much I love this show and how quickly it ends.  I know from observers that the show ran between 20 and 25 minutes, but to those of us doing the lighting, it felt more like five.  Being under the fireworks, standing among the explosions, is so intense, so completely consuming, that time just races away.

I love it.

I'm glad the audience likes the show, but I'd want to do it even if the only people there were the members of the launch team.

Nothing else is quite like it.

I am at the beach

No place is as sure to make me happy as here.  I am so very glad to be here.

I'll write more tomorrow, but for now, I will leave you with two more pictures from the fireworks show, this time courtesy of Derwood.  As always, click on a picture to see a larger image.

Those Fourth of July pictures I've been promising

are now available here. My thanks to Gina for supplying them.

Still photos can never even come close to capturing all that happens during a fireworks show; for that matter, video can't, either. The experience of being right there with the fireworks and the noise is something qualitatively different. That said, Gina's pictures are lovely and provide a sense of some of the individual rounds and a few of the more complex groupings that we fired into the heavens that beautiful Sunday evening.

How big explosions begin

This full, wrapped pallet, which stands over seven feet tall and weighs over a thousand pounds, is most--but not all--of the fireworks that we will blow up on the Fourth of July. We're talking more than half a ton of colorful, explosive goodness. Twenty-eight boxes (twenty-four here, four that came loose) crammed full of fireworks. Over 90 devices--not counting the small stuff we'll light to explain fireworks safety to the kids and to warn the crowd that we're starting. With them, the count is right around a hundred.

Oh, hell, yeah: we are serious about our fireworks.

The first step in creating the show occurred a while ago, when we ordered the 'works. Today marked the second milestone, as they arrived and we moved them inside.

I'm already excited about doing the show.

If you live in this area and are interested in attending our giant Fourth party, drop me a line (there's a contact form on my Web site), and we can probably work it out.

It'll be a (literal) blast!

An excellent show indeed!

I love the Fourth of July. I love celebrating our nation's independence, and I love thinking about the people who set on course what I still believe is the greatest nation in the world.

And, of course, I love blowing up a lot of fireworks.

We gathered at the Drake's, where we always hold our party. Step 1 was unloading all the fireworks from the deathmobile; as you can see here, Kyle and I did indeed survive the ride, and so did the many boxes of 'works.

After helping with party setup, we all then sat about, chatted, drank, sampled various tasty foods, and generally took it easy until it was time to grill the meat.

For a party with about a hundred people, we grill a lot of food: about 84 hamburgers, 72 hot dogs, and 12 veggie burgers. We used to do it on my household grill, but it was really inadequate to the task.

A neighbor of Dave's saved us a huge amount of time and hot, sweaty work by loaning us a very large cooker, which we now use. Having this enormous cooking surface makes it possible for us to grill all the food in about an hour. The photo here shows but one of several times we fully loaded the grill.

By the way, Kyle and I had the best burgers of all: double cheeseburgers fresh from the grill. Wow, were they good!

After a little rest, we did show prep, then waited, lit sparklers, and finally it was dark enough for the show itself. I have no photos to share--I'm hoping someone there will email me a few--but from my vantage point directly under the fireworks it was awesome and primal and amazing and wonderful and worth every cent.

I am always amazed that anyone who sees this show does not beg to join the launch team, but I guess most people are considerably smarter more sane more reserved than I--and that's a good thing, because without them, we'd have no audience.

I hope your holiday was every bit as good.

If you hear about a minivan blowing up,

it's probably Kyle and me (in which case I wouldn't expect any more blog posts).

All the fireworks in the previous entry, roughly a thousand pounds of them, are now packed in our minivan. (I can't see out the rear window, and the vehicle is riding low on its shocks, but the 'works are all inside.) In addition, in the same van are three plastic bins of related supplies, such as safety glasses, flashlights, and, yes, lighters and matches. Oh, yeah: We're also carrying two bags of sparklers and small fountains.

Kyle and I will be driving said deathmobile to Dave and Jo's tomorrow (Saturday) for the fireworks show. I expect to make it safely; we've done so for many years.

If we do explode, however, it will have to go down as one of the more colorful auto accidents of all time.

Kinda makes the drive more exciting, doesn't it?

Wish us well.

If you live in the RTP area and you like fireworks

send me an email, because we're having a great fireworks party out at Dave's on the Fourth. There's food, of course: I'll be providing and cooking hamburgers, hot dogs, and veggie burgers (don't blame me; some people want them!) for all those in attendance (usually 70 to 100 folks), and most folks bring a dish to share. When it gets dark, however, the real fun begins: we set off a lot of fireworks!

We do this show the old-fashioned way: we manually light the fireworks. A small crew of insane suicidal fun-loving folks places the individual works on launch pads, lights their fuses, and runs like hell carefully retreats to a not really maybe barely safer location and watches the fireworks from the best seat in the house: underneath them.

I'm looking forward to it--and assuming I survive I will, of course, post a report here.

And the rains came

The forecast had called for rain all weekend. The mid-day sky had been clear and blue, but as the late afternoon turned to early evening huge masses of dark gray and black clouds rolled in and prematurely darkened the world. Finally, a magnificent storm hit us, with lightning and thunder and rain falling thick and hard. After forty-five minutes or so, the storm slowed to a trickle, then spent the rest of the evening unable to make up its mind about how to behave, turning from torrents to drizzles to no rain, all in a pattern none of us could know.

Normally, I would have loved this night. As I've said before, I adore thunderstorms. I even enjoyed this one to some degree.

What stopped me from really loving it was the fact that tonight was our fireworks party. We had over twenty-four-hundred bucks of fireworks, more than 1,200 pounds of explosives, staged and ready to go, and the storm came.

We'd prepared as best we could, of course: We'd covered the staging area with tarps, put the devices on the tarps, and wrapped them in yet more tarps, all tucked into each other and weighted down with bricks.

The water still got in, as we found out when the shower abated enough that we decided to shoot in the drizzle. It was a difficult show. Roughly a third of the fireworks wouldn't go off, our lighters and matches wouldn't hold fire, and coordination was a nightmare.

Despite all that, however, we managed a pretty darn good performance, with some outright spectacular moments. As always, those of us on the launch team stood under the fireworks and had the best seat in the house. The noises, the smells, the amazing light shows: I love it.

I do wish, though, that the rain had come after our show, but so it goes. It was still, on balance, a good time and a good show.

Redefining over the top

Tonight, we prepped for the Sunday fireworks show. Because of my hurt back, I couldn't lift any of the boxes, so all I did was direct traffic, leaving me feeling completely and utterly useless and a failure. The others did great work, however, and we ended with two vans loaded with over 1,200 pounds of fireworks. The show should be spectacular!

We then retired to my house to eat take-out Chinese and watch a DVD. In keeping with the explosive nature of the 'works, we opted for a Takashi Miike film, Dead or Alive, that none of us had ever seen. (If you don't know Miike and you enjoy strange, ultraviolent Asian cinema, you must check him out.)

Dead or Alive redefined what over the top means to me--and I have seen many, many, many over the top movies. This strange beast of a film is weirder, delivers more violence, and breaks more taboos in its insanely long opening montage than most films ever achieve. Over and over and over again one of us would exclaim our disbelief at some new bit of screen weirdness. I won't spoil the ending for you, but I must note that just when you thought it could not possibly go any further, it takes another gigantic step into strangeness.

You either desperately need to see this movie, or you should never let it near you. You'll have to decide in which camp you belong.

Bad PC, good dinner

While I was stuck flat on my back trying to recover from the back problems, my main home PC blue-screened and died. I foolishly left a few bits of very important data on its main C: drive, which is hard to recover because "it" is actually a pair of striped 160GB 10K-rpm drives. Guys at work are going to tackle it for me, because I can't afford the time right now, but I'm pissed at myself for not following my own rules and backing up regularly.

Dinner tonight, on the other hand, was very good, courtesy of the fine folks at Four Square restaurant in Durham. We've been going there for many years, and the food has been consistently above average or better. The setting, an old Victorian house, is also quite lovely. If you're in the area, check it out.

Speaking of being in the area, if you are and you'd like to come to our massive fireworks party, email me (there's a form on the site) and I'll tell you about it. It's an open party and always a blast (both literally and figuratively).

A few Fourth photos

It's late, but I've had a few requests for photos from yesterday's show, so I'm going to post those and then get on to the work in front of me.

Gina took something on the order of 200 photos of the show and the party, and she captured some amazing images. I had a hard time choosing from among them, but I finally settled on two.

The first one shows a view that stretches from the launching area high into the sky. We stand maybe ten to twenty yards back from the launching fireworks, so our view is, as I mentioned, intense. Gina took hers from a more sensible position in the audience.







This second picture shows the sky partway through a round. Aren't fireworks grand!






The folks in this photo are the launch team--pre-launch and post-setup.






Finally, courtesy of Dave, who graciously cleans up the next day, check out the giant mound of empty fireworks. Still cool, even spent.

Launching

The fireworks show went well tonight. I think it may have been our best ever. The large crowd seemed to enjoy it, and I know the firing team did.

Afterward, I obviously looked as exhausted as I felt. Someone asked if doing the show was tiring, and to keep the answer simple, I said, yes.

That wasn't the whole truth.

The work is tiring, but not particularly so. What really takes it out of me is not even the adrenaline rush, though that certainly doesn't help.

What leaves me spent is the sheer emotional and sensory intensity of the show.

When the fireworks are shooting upward, when the sky fills with light, when the thunder of the shots vibrates you to your core, and you're standing right there underneath it all, your senses and your body communicate in a way that bypasses your conscious thought processes. Something more primal happens. Some of us, myself included, scream from time to time. You know at a very deep level that you're in the presence of forces that you may seem to control but that could at any moment turn on you. It's primal, rich, exhilirating, terrifying, exciting, all-enveloping, and ultimately overloading.

I love it.

And, boy, am I tired.

Fireworks are my friends

Each Fourth of July, we have a big party in the country and set off a lot of fireworks. I'm not talking the little stuff you buy at roadside stands; no, we shoot 500-gram aerial repeaters and a lot of them, almost 1,200 pounds this year.

Today, we moved the order from the pallets where the shipping company left it into its secret hiding place. The names of the devices are amazing: The New Hotness, Crazy Exciting on Steroids, Sweet Thing, B.C. Extreme Freestyle, and many more. How can you not want to experience The New Hotness?

I can hardly wait for the Fourth!