Last night a cover band filled the entire lake area with noise until almost 2 -- they were pretty good for a cover band, but there was no sleeping until they were done... a few fire crackers after that... I'm just cranky from lack of sleep. Yesterday evening I drove over to pick up E with the top down -- noticed boys on the road but didn't think too much about it until I saw them launching fire crackers that went over my car... fantasized for a moment about what would happen if one landed on me...
I have been going up to S.I. rez every year after July 4th w/e for years and years to count the fingers of a boy I know who is just a nut for fireworks. He tried to light one in my car, one year, as it was out of the wind. Another year he lit a rocket that flew in his mother's bedroom window, burning up her bedroom. I don't go up to DO anything -- esp. now that I am pretty useless from the m.s. But once a tradition is started...

E and I went to Geraldine's house (Annie, Chris, and Geraldine's house, really) last night -- had nice BBQ with lovely salmon, ribs, lentil salad, potato salad, and strawberry shortcake. In attendance were... um... Ann, Chris, Geraldine, Phil, Grace, Bruce, Anne, Hannah, Robert, Bethany and spouse, uh... and some other people I reckon, whose names I misremember. It was fun. Afterwards we went off to see if we could spy any explosions, but although we saw many, there was no concentration, so we went home. I'd taken the "E" book with me, and people read it and gave approval but no critiques.

That super-noisy "cigarette" is back -- I just haven't heard it, probably, this summer until now -- but wow, is it ever a destroyer of tranquility. My friend Aleutwoman emailed this story to me the other day:

"When I lived in a cabin in a meadow off of a gravel road in Canada, I enjoyed the peace. The
young fellow down the road had a horribly noisy dirt bike. Zoom, roar, screech, all spring,
summer and fall. Then, one day in early winter, I was helping out two students in the 5th grade
school class. The grand experiement was:
Something about challenging beliefs. If you know, or think, your vehicle's gas tank was
"sugared" what can you do? (Apparently this was an issue with kids in the area.)

So, the rumored rural-myth, and potential solution, was to pour warm water into the gasoline.
The rural myth says, warm water mixes with the sugar and not with the gasoline. Then temperature
drops to below freezing, the sugared-water freezes, the unfrozen clean gas can be siphoned off
and used. (An old snowmobile myth from the frozen northland.)

So, "we" did that by adding a pot of boiling water to a jerry jug which did contained gasoline
which we had sugared. Then we sat and looked at it. Hum-m-m, what now? Didn't quite know what
to do after that. The water did go to the bottom of the jerry jug, and eventually froze. We
couldn't tell if it had taken the sugar out of the gas. We decided to talk to the Petro-Can gas
man when we went to town. How would you tell if the sugar had left the gas and dissolved into
the water. We left the experiment sitting all by itself in the snow, way out in the front yard
--- away from the house in case it wanted to blow up.

We got back from town, noticed foot prints in the snow leaving the gravel road, leading to the
spot where the jerry jug had beenn. A square dent in the snow was all that remained as a trace
of the jerry jug. Imagine that, someone stole our grade 5 experiment! And our scientific
conclusion was: No. The warm water doesn't dissolve the sugar out of "sugared gasoline". We
believed this to be a scientific fact because the kid down the road with the dirt bike, took to
walking. Seems he'd gotten some "bad gas", and his engine seized. Awww. "