Fourth of July

Spotted this while waiting for a ride out to Ben and Laura’s house.

Hanging out in their backyard, we stole some of the kids toys and started playing catch.

Chris retrieves a foul ball.

Hehehehe.

More catch.

I’m getting fascinated by antennae, it seems.

Ben, cooking up the goods.

Mmmmmmmmmmm. We had an excellent meal. Lots of beef, onions, corn, fruit salad, and mashed potato to kill for. I put down a ton of food, and were it not for my small sense of restraint, I’d be there still.

Chris catches the Foxtail (a toy whose existence I only found out about today). It’s basically a soft baseball/tennisball, attached to a long, multicolored tail of fabric.

We ended up playing a game in the alley, and had a scoring system. You basically whip this thing around by the tail (you almost expect Goliath to appear in front of you as you’re winding up). The other team tries to catch it by the tail. The father your hand is from the ball itself, the more points you get. Catch the ball straight on is like 1 point. But if you catch it by the tail and you’re holding the last segment of colored fabric… that’s 15 points.

That sucker’s hard to catch!

Afterwards, hanging out. Shortly after this, the guys hiked over to the newly constructed street-hockey court, and ran into the neighborhood settling into the street for the fireworks show.

We found a patch of ground that was vacant, and brought a frisbee with us. We threw that around for a good while until it got too dark to see (and kept on throwing a while after that).

On the way back, the crowd had gathered to a pretty decent size. Big mix of folks, and everyone looked super exited to see the fireworks.

We found out later that, if you’re standing in the alley by Ben and Laura’s house, you have a totally unobstructed view of the fireworks. According to them, some of their neighbors had elected to forego setting up by the park area, and set their chairs out in the alleyway.

Inside, we fell to playing some charades. But man. I’m someone who’s played a decent amount of this game, but both Laura and Chris were on this whole different level of competitiveness. In fact, everyone was pretty serious about “winning.” Which made for some fun games.

Afterwards, our teams tied 1-1. We decided to leave it at that. Chris and I were on a team, and Laura and Justin were on the other (with Ben being the swing man). There were some genuinely tense moments during our play, but those all dissipated fairly quickly.

I *LOVE* the fact that everyone’s so competitive. I haven’t heard/offered smack talk like this in a long time.

Of note, I got lots of praise for my acting out of “Mr. Belvedere.” I was able to make like a bird, then pointed to my wing, and then made a “break” motion, all of which Chris got. Then I pretended to play a guitar, and Chris got my reference to the 80’s supergroup “Mr. Mister.” From there on, I just did a bell.

That’s right. I’m bragging about charades. I…

SHUT UP.