pop! whiz! bang!

Fireworks give me warm memory fuzzies.

Not sure what warm memory fuzzies are. I'll get back to you on that.

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In other words, I have fond memories of going out with family as a kid to see the local fireworks displays on Victoria Day and Canada Day. It was a huge event -- took all afternoon to get six hyperactively excited children packed into the family van with lawn chairs and blankets and layers of clothes for the evening chills and juice boxes and cherry and licorice twizzlers.

Then the chaos of getting to the park and trying to keep all six hyperactively excited children corralled began -- picture a local park in the dark with hundreds of kids hyped up on a school-free day of sun, probably too much coke and other assorted sugary holiday food items being absorbed into their blood streams, and then you'll just about get what it was like for our parents to keep things under control.

Okay, we weren't that bad. But it probably wasn't as pleasant an experience for my parents as it was for us kids.

Once we got older we'd stay home and have our own little fireworks display in the backyard -- not nearly as dramatic as the city show but a lot more up close and personal -- diving to avoid rogue firecrackers, that sort of riotously dangerous fun.

Over time we even halted the backyard pyrotechnics and we took to clambering up on the roof of our house to watch the fireworks going off in town. Gave our mother heart palpitations, I'm sure, but you're invincible at 16, everyone knows that.

Now we're all older and far too mature and wise to hike to the top of a two-storey house (right guys?). My last Victoria Day in Canada was spent with some family members who shall remain nameless in the church parking lot next door setting off a couple subpar firecrackers like a bunch of teenage hooligans.

But we're not teenage hooligans, despite what this picture may look like. We're responsible adults with jobs and car insurance. Remember that.

And now I'm in Michigan, where the sale and use of stronger and louder residential firecrackers has been legalized -- and our neighbourhood is putting their rights to really good use. Excessively good use. 

In Ontario, you're only allowed to set off firecrackers on the actual designated holiday, along with the two days before, and the two days after. Here in good old Michigan, there have been firecrackers going off behind our house every night for the last three weeks. Three. Weeks.

I fear my warm firecracker memory fuzzies are fading... and fading fast. I'm going to bed with earplugs tonight.