Fireworks, Guided By Voices and a Bear

This blog entry is a bit late in coming, but it seemed necessary to share my first 4th of July experience and all that it entailed. We decided we would travel back to Pennsylvania to see Kristen's family and because there was work to be done on the freezers at Jenis, I wouldn't have been able to work anyway. We had one of our more pleasant drives east this time, helped by stopping a couple of times; in Zanesville and in the PA state capital of Harrisburg. The trip was, though, even more exciting for the sighting of a black bear on the PA Turnpike. He seemed pretty unconcerned with the speeding traffic alongside him, as he just watched it go by and then scooted off into the woods.

Come the 4th of July, we decided that instead of heading downtown to the main Bethlehem fireworks display we we would drive over to see a more intimate display courtesy of friends of Kristen. PA law states that you are not allowed to launch fireworks that leave the ground and so all the fireworks we had the pleasure of seeing were "grounders". As much as the noise and colors they gave off was fun, even better was the introduction we were given to each by name, before they were lit. Examples included: Wrath Of The Beast, Moonlight Madness, Frog Prince (the one shaped like a frog's head in the picture above) and my personal fave, "One Unbelievable Fountain". The display was a fun time, enlivened by some sort of spinning effort that sent a few rockets towards the crowd of neighbors sat a good distance back on lawn chairs.

Another reason for heading back to PA was to get to see Dayton, Ohio's Guided by Voices... in Philadelphia. Around 10 years ago when I picked up a used copy of "Do the Collapse" in the Replay records in Bedminster I didn't really know what I was starting. I also didn't know that they were about to break up and stop playing together a couple of years later.... and then a few years later that Kristen and I would be living in Columbus, OH an hour or so away from Dayton. After gathering a mere fraction of their back catalogue I was pretty excited that they reformed a year or so ago and waited for them to come over to England. They never did, apparently Robert Pollard isn't too keen on flying. Finally they re-united and started playing shows a couple of years ago, and this year started in releasing new albums, two of three so far.... this year! There seemed no reason not to see them when they announced a summer tour, even if we couldn't make it to any of the three Ohio dates they were due to play.

Even with them playing a bunch of songs from the two of their three new albums, there was still plenty of room for them to play "the hits". Shocker in Gloomtown came early and made me very happy indeed. They came back two or three times, and played something over 40 songs which is certainly value for money. Even though he's pushing 55, Bob still busted out a good few high kicks (here at 1:33) and put away a fair amount of Miller Lite. One thing he couldn't keep up with though was Mitch Mitchell's cigarette smoking ability. I didn't try to keep count, but that he had a cigarette roadie to supply him between, and sometimes during, songs might give an idea of how many he got through! Hopefully it won't be another 10 years before we see them again.

The Power is Out, Save the Ice Cream!

We were making the best seller, Salty Caramel on Friday and our supervisor had just commented how quickly we were going and how this should always be the way it is. Then the lights went out. The power didn't come back all night. In between a lot of sitting around and waiting, people that get paid more than me tried pretty hard to come up with ways of saving millions of dollars worth of "artisan" ice cream. There was a freezer team and a number of refrigerated and freezer trucks and we tried pretty hard to load them up as quickly as possible. I got off about 1am and found out that the power returned the next day and the ice cream was saved, excellent. 

Houses and businesses either side of the ice cream kitchen were fine and it was only when I got home and had to pull a huge branch from our parking spot that I realized the storm might have been quite a big deal. It transpired that the storm winds had hit heights of 80 mph. On the Saturday morning we went out for a walk around the neighborhood. Some streets not even a few hundred feet away from us had huge trees down and here and there a few crushed cars too. While walking around we talked to more people than we have in the 8 months since we've been here. We stopped by one of the record shops (the sign above) and we stopped by a store with one of the owners standing on the street corner advertising the free (melting) ice cream, we both picked up a Twix. We continued stepping over branches and crossed different streets, and turned around in a few places as we couldn't get around the 100 year old fallen tree. We eventually got to Lost Weekend Records and had a good long chat with the owner. He seemed to think that it was only him, the Hustler Store and the supermarket that had power in their section of High Street. As we walked towards home we said hi to a load more people in a sympathetic kind of way and overheard the two men with chainsaws being offered "cold ones" by some chap on his porch watching the clean-up.

The Crew game was delayed by an hour while they tried to get power to all parts of the stadium, much to the chagrin of one caller to a local radio station we were tuned to. "Why do they have power crews at the stadium?.... 85% of Americans probably don't even care about the game on the pitch (as they call it)..... there are old women without power..... it's wrong I tell you....." Or another caller; "this storm is God's wrath on us for the decision of the supreme court to uphold Obama's health care decision...."

Back to the game and the guy above was doing his best to be a part of military appreciation night, or just a bit early on the 4th of July. Real (ahem) Salt Lake looked much the better team and passed the ball really well, but failed to convert any of their chances and before they knew it they were 2-0 down to the Crew. That was how it stayed, the fireworks went off and we walked home in the rain, thankfully without the 80 mph winds.