Twas Independence day today. My family went to chestnut park in the morning for some exercise, and at 5pm I went to lynn's apartment to have a barbeque with compass folk and davis high friends. After food and some games, we walked over to community park at 8 something to watch the fireworks.

We ended up setting up our blankets at the very front of the massive crowd. It's the closest I've ever been to the fireworks. We walked around, relaxed, and played cards there until 9:30, when the fireworks began. During the show, two different fireworks malfunctioned somehow, and exploded very close to the ground. Luckily, nothing else went seriously wrong, and the malfunctions didn't seem to cause any problems or damage. The finale this year was pretty intense, and was better than I remember the finale being in the past.

After the fireworks, we walked back to lynns place, and slowly people started going home until finally ben, ditha, lynn and I remained. We sang some jazz, sang some movie songs, and sang some disney songs, and then bounced.

One of the games we played at lynn's place before the fireworks was mafia. I was a cop, and during the first night when we were supposed to "sleep", I took out my camera while the mafia was awake and started taking photographs blindly. I didn't look at the photographs until I got home. Interestingly enough, I got two incriminating photographs of a mafia member. In the first, he was shielding his face from my camera, meaning his eyes were open and he saw that I was taking pictures. In the second, he was looking around for someone to kill.

What ben is doing in one of the pictures is what he did on a day three years ago entitled Violent Block Day. What we did was hilariously funny to us at the time, but less so now because of the numerous school shootings in recent years.