Roll the stone away, let the guilty pay. It's Independence Day.

(In your best game announcer voice:) Welcome to this year's edition of "Will the City of Moses Lake catch the field on fire?"  Every year the City of Moses Lake puts on a BBQ, concert and fireworks display for the city.  Every year, they take preventative measures so that they don't destroy any of the plant life around the site where they set off the fireworks.  And every year we get to play this lovely game.  Any bets?

Yep, fire galore.  It's great.  During the show, you can tell that some of the aerial fireworks didn't quite get off the ground.  And then the smoke billows and soon you see the orange glow of a fire reflected in said smoke.  Yep, they didn't disappoint - it was quite a long lasting fire.  According to Vaughn (who walked down there) the fire mostly destroyed the cattails on the edge of the lake.  Fire crews couldn't take their trucks close enough to extinguish the fire without getting the trucks stuck in the marsh-y lake muck, so they mostly just let them burn and put out anything that went beyond the cattails.

Today was a good Fourth of July.  We got up at 9 and started cleaning out the garage.  It's liberating to throw away trash and expired garden supplies.  In exchange, we get some usable space in the garage.  Albeit, we only got through about 10% of the stuff, but it's enough to give us a little encouragement.  Best part for me was finding some lawn safe weed killer.  YAY!  It was like my birthday.  There was a spray bottle and some concentrate, so I get to de-weed the lawn!!!  Yes, I know.  My life is that sad - I'm excited about more yardwork.  Anyway, we worked on the garage until about 1pm.  It was 4 hours of rather hot and strenuous work.  But absolutely worth it.

Pam and Nolen stopped by in the mid-afternoon.  They usually come to our house for the fireworks display, but they weren't going to be able to come.  So they stopped by earlier to say hello.  We had a delicious meal of salad, baked potatoes, and steak.  Yet again, we are thankful we found the cast iron skillet method of cooking steaks.  Doesn't it look delicious?

Then we went outside and pulled up chairs to wait for the fireworks to start.  Joshua and Vaughn came over just as the show started.  Josh lay down on the lawn, and just then a deer came around the corner of the garage and bounded across our yard and right over Josh's feet.  Poor thing must've been so frightened by the fireworks.  It happened really fast, too.  One second Josh was lying down, the next the deer was jumping across the yard, and the next it was gone.

The fireworks show was pretty good, but of course the real entertainment is the fire they almost inevitably cause.  We watched that for awhile until they had it almost put out.  Long day, but a really good one.