An All-American 4th of July

We enjoy celebrating holidays—even celebrating holidays that are obscure or making our own holidays up.  Basically we are always looking for any excuse to celebrate life.  This is maybe why we enjoy the 4^th of July—Jules likes it because she gets the day off from work and Alex is crazy about fireworks. 

And of course with any holiday there is delicious food involved.  To celebrate the birth of our nation we had an all-American smorgasbord of hot dogs, corn on the cob, baked beans, and root beer floats.  Having root beer floats means we can use the surplus of root beer stowed away in our pantry and pull out our beer stein mugs—after all, presentation is everything. 

Jules, however, deviated away from being patriotic by spending the afternoon watching a British TV series based on some of Charles Dickens work.  Alex was slightly appalled to listen to British accents all afternoon on such an American holiday—it almost seems sacrilegious.  When confronts Jules replied—well if it wasn’t for the British we wouldn’t be celebrating this country anyway.  Alex refrained from working on her quest to learn Spanish throughout the day because that just didn’t seem right. 

That evening we headed to watch the fireworks.  We parked on top of a parking garage so we could see the display.  The fireworks were pretty spectacular, and we even beat all the traffic afterwards due to some “gutsy” driving by Jules (some traffic signs may have been ignored for the sake of efficiency.  Really, why does a no u-turn sign exist when it is not an intersection where it could cause a problem to make a u-turn?  As Jules rambled earlier, “The people behind me probably think I’m driving like an idiot because I am.”  And people wonder why she is so quite; they don’t realize she is preventing all kinds of foolish comments from spilling out. ) We made it back just in time to see a little bit of A Capitol Fourth before heading to bed.  This is a yearly tradition and one of those things on our bucket list to go see in person sometime.  Going once would probably be enough, and then we would be content watching it on our TV sets at home without all the crowds.