mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2025-07-06 11:40 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2025-07-06 11:40 pm
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July 4th!
I'm certainly not celebrating America's birthday right now.
But the 4th is also Alex's and my anniversary, so we celebrated that as usual. 16 years!
Our main "tradition" is making a fruit salad of Just The Good Fruits:
The Good Fruits in question!
Two peaches (one was very good, one was very meh), a nectarine (average), cherries (from our neighbor, which was nice of her), strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, two different mangoes (the small one was REALLY good, the larger one was fine but kind of bland), bananas, and mandarin oranges. The pear did not go in the fruit salad, because it didn't feel ripe.
I always like processing mangoes, because:
It's like a little hedgehog, lol.
The completed fruit salad.
We headed up to another city for their fireworks show, the one we've gone to a couple times in the last few years as well. This year we didn't get anything from the food trucks, and just ate our fruit salad and the other snacks we brought. It was warm, but not horribly hot. We got some wind for a bit, but no actual storm came through. We mostly ignored the cover bands that were performing, and picked an ebook to read for a couple hours, ha.
Bella! (This picture from Alex.)
Bella is fortunately extremely chill about fireworks. She didn't even jump at the first one. She sat and watched the first few, and then just seemed bored, haha. She just wanted snacks, and could not care less about the noise or anything. I am 1000% fine with her being bored instead of anxious about them. We were lucky with Cy when it came to fireworks too.
The fireworks themselves were pretty cool. As usual, I'm not a fan of the clips of "patriotic" songs that they're set to (though some of them aren't patriotic so much as just having "USA" in the lyrics.) But again, the finale was set to the 1812 Overture, which always remains cool. I may or may not have been imagining governmental buildings being blown up.
-
I need to devote some time to like... life admin, ha. I'm not sorry that I've managed to Do Things on my time off from work, since that was obviously the point! But I've also done nothing except those things, ha. I need to catch up on some regular life stuff, get caught up here, etc.
But the 4th is also Alex's and my anniversary, so we celebrated that as usual. 16 years!
Our main "tradition" is making a fruit salad of Just The Good Fruits:
The Good Fruits in question!
Two peaches (one was very good, one was very meh), a nectarine (average), cherries (from our neighbor, which was nice of her), strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, two different mangoes (the small one was REALLY good, the larger one was fine but kind of bland), bananas, and mandarin oranges. The pear did not go in the fruit salad, because it didn't feel ripe.
I always like processing mangoes, because:
It's like a little hedgehog, lol.
The completed fruit salad.
We headed up to another city for their fireworks show, the one we've gone to a couple times in the last few years as well. This year we didn't get anything from the food trucks, and just ate our fruit salad and the other snacks we brought. It was warm, but not horribly hot. We got some wind for a bit, but no actual storm came through. We mostly ignored the cover bands that were performing, and picked an ebook to read for a couple hours, ha.
Bella! (This picture from Alex.)
Bella is fortunately extremely chill about fireworks. She didn't even jump at the first one. She sat and watched the first few, and then just seemed bored, haha. She just wanted snacks, and could not care less about the noise or anything. I am 1000% fine with her being bored instead of anxious about them. We were lucky with Cy when it came to fireworks too.
The fireworks themselves were pretty cool. As usual, I'm not a fan of the clips of "patriotic" songs that they're set to (though some of them aren't patriotic so much as just having "USA" in the lyrics.) But again, the finale was set to the 1812 Overture, which always remains cool. I may or may not have been imagining governmental buildings being blown up.
-
I need to devote some time to like... life admin, ha. I'm not sorry that I've managed to Do Things on my time off from work, since that was obviously the point! But I've also done nothing except those things, ha. I need to catch up on some regular life stuff, get caught up here, etc.
no subject
And yeah, for us the fireworks started at 9:15, so we weren't home until really late by the time we waited out the traffic at the end. I would have had to work the next day, except that I took this as my vacation for the summer. (Even on years that I do work the next day, we often still go... but definitely more of a struggle, ugh.)
I'm glad that Darji did okay with the fireworks! I feel like none of our asshole neighbors who shoot them off every night care about the weather - they'll be out there in the rain still doing it, ugh. Or if it's raining too hard, they'll just wait for it to let up and then start shooting them off around 2 or 3 in the morning. So annoying.
I have heard about all the flooding down there. I think the most recent death toll I saw was 104? 27 of those were the girls from the camp that were killed, I think? I'm sure the deaths will climb more, since they won't even confirm an estimated number for how many people (outside of that one camp) that are still missing.
The rain would probably be more helpful if it was spread out instead of just flooding one area!
The national weather service DID provide warnings... but none of the local Texas officials were willing to pass those warnings on, apparently. They did try to claim that the NWS didn't warn them, until the NWS showed the timestamped reports they'd provided. I think there was one "well, so many warnings end up being false alarms, we just sort of ignored them..." answer, but mostly they've just refused to say why they didn't actually provide the warnings they were supposed to.
I did also see a report about how they were recommended to put flood detection and early warning systems in back in like, 2017, I think it was? But they didn't because they said it was too expensive.
It sucks, because this is a lot of "finding out" after the "fucking around", but it really wasn't 20-some kids going to summer camp that deserved to be killed for it.