Sometimes when I think of what we used to do on the Fourth of July, I'm amazed I'm still alive. When I was a kid, we rode our bicycles all over town without wearing helmets. We staged mock battles in our back yard with BB guns. And on July Fourth, we bought the biggest and most lethal fireworks we could get our hands on. I don't remember our parents giving us any talks about safety. We were on our own. I'm sure children were maimed left and right, but I ended up being one of the lucky ones. I survived putting cherry bombs in the center of toilet paper rolls and throwing them in the air as high as we could after we lit the fuse. Our favorite game was to make a cannon out of a piece of old steel tubing and use M-80s to shoot soda cans filled with sand ridiculous distances. We would also take entire packs of firecrackers apart and use the powder to make much bigger firecrackers. It was all recklessly unsafe but enormously fun.I lost interest in fireworks years ago. I don't think Janet and I have been to a fireworks display since we got dogs. Our first dog didn't mind the sound of fireworks, but all the subsequent ones have been terrified of them. For Dot and Dash, there was no difference between a fireworks display and a bad thunderstorm. Over the years, I've grown to hate the sound of fireworks because I've seen the fear they can cause in dogs. Apparently fireworks are still fascinating to people, since I've been hearing them for the past three days. There are ordinances against setting off fireworks within the city limits, but I don't think people pay any attention to them. This evening, the park behind our house sounds like a war zone.
It rained last night, so I was able to give Dash a nice morning walk before the weather turned steamy and oppressive. It wasn't long before the temperature went from 75 to 95, but the brisk early morning was nice while it lasted. After breakfast, I decided to wash the cars. Janet's car has been idle for a while and it was even dirtier than mine. The pressure washer is great for cleaning cars. I managed to wash two cars in the time it used to take me to wash one. Janet asked me to take her car when I ran errands today, so the battery wouldn't become run down. I probably should have done this last week, since the car was a little hard to start. Every time I drive a different car I realize that I still like my big V-8 engine. I've always had big cars that get horrible cash mileage and I probably always will. I bet my carbon footprint is still lower than yours though, because I rarely go anywhere.
Now that I've upgraded my computer, my hard drive is almost full, so I'm thinking of replacing it with a much larger drive. This task was easy when I used to use the old tower Macs. I'd just open the case, unscrew the drive cage and pop in a new hard drive. The whole process took about ten minutes. The one piece iMac I use now is much more difficult to work on. I don't have the nerve to pry off the glass in front of the screen, gently remove the LED display and try to find the hard drive buried inside. To trade the internal drive for something better, I'll need to go to a repair shop. Then I'll have to hope that Time Machine is able to restore my system and files to the replacement drive. It's all much more complicated than it needs to be. It's too bad Steve Jobs isn't still around. Steve had respect for people like me and designed computers you could work on yourself. Times have certainly changed.
The fireworks are getting louder. Dash is still asleep, so I don't think he hears anything yet. Maybe he's becoming deaf like Dot did toward the end of her life. Hopefully, when he wakes up to take his evening pills, things will be calming down again.
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