Holiday Crisis Averted

I walked up to the young man stocking the soda shelves and said, “Kid, the fate of the Fourth of July is on your shoulders.”

I don’t know if Walmart employees are issued a panic button to push if confronted with “odd” customers, but the look in his eye made me believe he wished he had such a device.

“Here’s the deal. It’s not the Fourth of July unless I can pour strawberry soda over vanilla ice cream. I’d hate to have to tell all those folks who are waiting for fireworks to go off that you’re responsible for it not happening.”

He and a second stocker scoured the aisles and came back with the sad news: the Jackson Walmart had no strawberry soda in any brand.

(By the way, you can click on the images if you want to make them big enough to see the bubbles.)

Schnucks Saved the Day

Hoping to salvage the holiday, I went to Schnucks.

They, fortunately, had at least four brands of red soda on the shelves.

Cue up the firework displays. (For the record, this was taken in Middleport, Ohio, in 2015, while escorted by Curator Jessica, who is still young enough to get excited about things like this.)

After it was over, she asked how I liked it.

My answer was to play Peggy Lee singing Is That All There Is? 

More Fourth of July posts

A Garden of Fireworks

Middleport OH fireworks 07-04-2015

Not only did Curator Jessica make me get up early to shoot the Wilkesville Fourth of July parade, she insisted that it would be “fun” to watch the fireworks being shot over the Ohio River at Middleport, half an hour south of Athens.

It was chilly enough that a light jacket felt good. We got a parking place about a block from a decent vantage point, and I set up a tripod.

For you photo geeks, I locked the ISO at 200 because I wanted to force the camera to use a four-second exposure at about f/8. I usually pushed the shutter release when I heard the firework leave the tube. That would capture the rocket tail and most of the display.

I would have liked to have gotten at least one shot with the crowd visible in the foreground, but there wasn’t enough ambient light to capture them, and I was too lazy to walk back to the car for a strobe. Miz Jessica offered to go back for it, but I’ve learned that it’s not a good idea to trust your Road Warriorettes with the car keys. Sometimes they hold a grudge for some imagined slight during the day.

Fireworks photo gallery

Click on any image to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.