Sunday, July 05, 2009

One busy 4th

A long, fun, tiring day...

First thing, my wife dropped me off at the start of the John Carson 2-miler. There is an Einstein Bros. Bagel place there, so she picked-up breakfast to bring home to the kids.

While I ran the race, she went back home, fed the kids and came down to the town green to occupy our chairs so they wouldn't get moved again. The race is the first attraction for spectators of the parade.

The end of the race is very close to where they were sitting, so after the race I came over and made sure that they were all well-situated. I ate some snacks handed-out at the end of the race: Potato chips, watermelon, orange juice and a piece of watermelon thus composed my breakfast. After my snack, I decided to jog the two miles home and saw from my stopwatch that the race had only begun one hour earlier.

I got cleaned-up and changed, then just relaxed for a bit by checking out the internet tubes. To my pleasure, the results of the race were already posted to Cool Running! Sweet. Then I got the dog and walker her back to the town center. We got there just as the parade ended, but this was fine since Meenah got a needed walk and I was able to help bring stuff back to the car--parked nearby.

Once home, grandparents and in-laws soon showed-up and we had lunch. We had a simple lunch of watermelon, chicken salad, blondies, strawberries and chips. Then, off to the swim and tennis club. The kids swam and played with the toddler in the baby pool while a game of Scrabble was had by the adults. It was late in the afternoon by the time we left the pool.

Dinner prep was hectic even as many of the items were prepared ahead of time: We had potato salad and roasted potatoes since Aja cannot abide mayo. Grilled corn-on-the-cob, grilled shrimp, grilled flank-steak, Italian white beans in a ragout, green salad with home-made roasted garlic dressing and bread.

There was still time to go see fireworks! Every year Acton puts on a big show in their NARA park. It is a nice setting: There is an amphitheater and this year there was a band doing Rolling Stones covers. The park is hilly, but there are only small decorative trees and the places between and nestled by the hills are sloped only enough to prevent the ground from being soggy. One whole side of the park is a pond of several hundred yards in length. It is a very nice setting for a big event.

While waiting for the fireworks to begin, we looked at the stars come out. I noticed a satellite crossing the sky. The brightness was occillating as it tracked along. I couldn't decide if the cause was high level clouds or perhaps it was rotating space junk.

The park itself doesn't have much parking, but there is a path through some woods that leads to a huge office park. So, people can park there and then walk through the woods. The organizers make it easy by stringing-up lights along the path. Well, it is easy in theory, but try and keep track of kids, in the woods, with 10,000 other people all trying to go down a path 8-feet wide. It is fun for people who can kind of go-with-the-flow. For people who are panic-prone, I can only imagine the 1000 deaths they must go through.

We were home an hour after the last firework went off*. We gave the kids some cookies and milk and then they washed-up and hit the sack.

*As we walked through the woods, several times a rocket or two would go off. We don't know the cause, but suspect that officials discovered (a few at a time) of shells that didn't get fired. They probably figured it was best to just set them off. People along the path would make jokes like, "Hey, what does this button do"? and so forth.

2 comments:

Trooper York said...

Nothing is better than the 4th of July with the family.

dbp said...

You got that right. It was a real family-bonding type day. The girls all want to run the race next year.