Fourth Of July: The Beginning

Happy 4th of July everyone. Bring on the fireworks.




This morning we all got up and got ready to participate in the annual community parade. The parade (if it can really be called that) is simply a fire engine that drive around the neighborhood and the kids bike / scooter / get towed along behind it. The kids get streamers and decorations for their bikes / scooters / carriages and then an ambulance brings up the rear.


If you'll remember Quinn was leading the pack through most of the parade last year riding his bicycle. This year, he decided he was going to take his scooter. Huge tactical error on his part. I'm not sure what the deal was, but as fast as they went in the fire engine last year leading the parade (and I remember thinking the pace was pretty fast), they had to be going faster this year. I ran almost the entire thing and we still fell behind. I will leave open the possibility that I'm simply getting older and can't maintain that pace anymore, but I'm pretty sure the fire engine was almost going the speed limit through the neighborhood (a slight hyperbole, but it felt that way).


I was impressed that Quinn manage to stick right behind the engine for as long as he did. To his credit he was right there behind it up until that quarter mile of going up a slight incline. And during that climb the fire engine stepped on the gas and sped up. With only being on his scooter this year and the fire engine moving at such a faster pace he just couldn't keep up.


I've already informed him that if we do this again next year, he's taking his bike and they'll be none of this scooter stuff. To give an indication of how much faster the fire engine went this year, last year I lost sight of Ginger and Catherine around the point of the fire turn, this year I think I lost site them almost as soon as we left the parking lot and got on the road. Ginger later informed me Catherine got trapped behind someone that couldn't get over the speed bump in the parking lot and that set her back to near the end of the pack almost immediately.


Now having said that Catherine gets huge props because this is the first year where she actually completed the entire course and didn't end up taking the short cut that cuts down the length of the parade by about half. She also didn't show up until about 10 to 15 minutes after Quinn finished the race (and I think he was a couple minutes behind the fire engine).

So after both kids finished the parade they had a Popsicle and we all rested for a little bit before heading home. In case you're wondering about why the pictures are so grainy, that would be because I screwed up the camera settings again. I swear I'm going to look into getting a D200 or something if they have multiple programmable customized settings. If I could turn the camera on and simply hit a couple of buttons and know that I'm in the correct mode, that would solve a lot of these problems I have. This one came about because last night there was a rabbit out in our front yard that was pretty fearless (barely even moved unless you came within 10 feet of him). So I got the camera and set the ISO to 1000. The pictures were still too dark (which is why you didn't see a rabbit picture last night, which presupposes I guess that you read this each day, otherwise I suppose you simply might not have seen yesterday's post and thought it had a rabbit picture, but didn't care since rabbit pictures have to be pretty common one would think).


And how did I manage through all this? I felt like I was dying after having finished the parade. I don't know where Quinn and Catherine get this much energy. Must be a youth thing.