God Bless America!!

One of my favorite holidays is Independence day. It is not a day where I get anything, or really do a whole lot of special stuff. I just love my country. I love that I was born in America and that I get the priviledge of being an American. I love most of what our country stands for and the freedoms that we get to enjoy just by the Providence of God.
I appreciate and applaud our service men and women who serve or served our country both at home and abroad. Thank you for your service. Our country would not be what it is without you (and the sovereignty of God, of course).
I have always loved fireworks. I remember as a kid in Washington State, my dad would buy fireworks galore (before they were illegal), and we would have a party lighting them. The neighbors would congregate in the street and we would all light off our fireworks long into the night. It was a wonderful time.
Then fireworks became illegal and we started going to the city's fireworks show. That was the best show around. People would come from across the state for the show, even from Seattle.
Now that I have my own family, I am trying to carry on that tradition, not with buying and lighting off fireworks, since they are illegal, but with grilling and going to the local fireworks show. We had a good time. We found a nice place where we could park our car and take our chairs a few hundred feet and plop down in them for a couple of hours and avoid the major crowds and traffic. Our kids even got to do a few sommersaults on the soft grass in front of us, while watching out for the many sparklers (why those aren't illegal, I don't know).
I also love to watch people. I was enjoying watching the people trying to park their cars in the margins of the roads between entrance ramps. They would back up on the entrance ramp so they could get the best seat without leaving their cars. All this while other cars were trying to get past them trying to get on the highway.
Our local fireworks show was great and did not disappoint. While watching the amazing artistry in the sky, I just thought how I would love to go to a fireworks factory to see how they measured the ingredients to get the right shapes to appear when the fireworks exploded in the ball of fire in the sky. It amazes me how many different shapes they can come up with.
Looking forward to what the manufacturers concoct for the fireworks next year.