Fireworks

It’s coming to the time of year when people get together and barbecue and light fireworks. Ahh, the Fourth of July. I love to go and watch the fireworks. We usually have a cook-out for our family and friends and then walk over to the park and watch the wonderful fireworks display they have. And then we go home and go right to bed since it is usually a week night. This year we don’t have to worry about that since it’s on a Friday. Which is good since our neighbors usually keep us up until all hours of the night setting off their own arsenal of explosives. It usually doesn’t bother me that much when it’s on July 4th. However, when you start 2 weeks ahead of time it gets a little old.

Last night, we started hearing the boom of fire crackers at about 7pm. Again, perfectly fine with me as long as you stop when it’s time for bed. Well, needless to say, they didn’t stop at bedtime. It wasn’t until 10:15 that it started to bother us. Big John gets up at 4 am so he treasures his sleep at night. I told him that if they were still going at 10:30 I was going to go downstairs and call the police. So sure enough, at 10:30 I got up and went downstairs and looked out my window to see who it was. It was our next door neighbors. There were 4 kids out there with no adult supervision at all. They looked to range in age from about 6or 7 to 15 or 16. They were not being very smart about it, throwing the bottle rockets at each other and toward the houses and trying to blow up the road closed sign in front of their house. They were essentially being normal boys that needed adult supervision. So I called the police and reported the disturbance and told them the address of the house next door. Then I went and watched out the window. I wanted to see how the boys would react when the cops came pulling up. Well, about 30 minutes went by and there were still no cops. So Big John got out of bed to see what was taking so long. He ended up calling the cops again and the dispatcher told him that he was about the 5th person to call in the last 2 minutes about it. So she said that our local town police were in the next town over assisting them with an emergency but were on their way back now.

The town we live in is pretty small. We live on Main St. so everything in town is on our street. There are 2 bars about a block away from our house. Right after Big John got off of the phone we saw the kids' mom staggering down the sidewalk coming from the bar. She told them to knock it off and get in the house.

SILENCE AT LAST!! We went up to bed and didn’t wait to see if and when the cops finally showed up. But I heard a car door about 15 minutes later so I figure that was them. I hope they put the fear of God in those kids and the mother as well. She should’ve been home with her kids instead of at the bar all night. What if something would’ve happened? Those kids could’ve blown their fingers off or worse. And there she was at the bar.

Big John has decided that if they do it again he is going to get some firecrackers and set them off on their front porch when he leaves for work in the morning. I think it’s a good idea!!