I still haven’t decided if this Blog is purely professional or still borderline personal, so here is a non-work-related post. I might decide it’s rubbish and delete it in a few days, but for now, it shall live. Anyway.

Happy new year! Yesterday Lilly and I had a tiny fireworks excursion for the occasion, partially in the name of her brother, who is out in The Gambia, West Africa, in the Peace Corps. He is a fan of fireworks.

We managed to find this tiny fireworks stand (pictured above), run by vaguely redneck-ish (but friendly!) people. We figured we’d start small for our first fireworks excursion and only got a few little bits and bobs, and I took a few nice pictures – more than I would post on Flickr in one chunk, so I thought why not write a blog about it!

Here is our bounty: We got some colourful sparklers, some jumping jacks, some ground bloom crackling and some happiness fountains.

The Happiness fountains were the best. The woman at the stand suggested them to us when Lilly asked for something colourful. They were. The packaging was just as good though:

The package’s description was Emits showers of sparks shoots flaming balls and reports. We were sold, especially on the reports (what?). They also managed to spell their own URL wrong too (legned), but I can’t be too critical of that as shamefully, I have done the same on a record cover I did a couple of years back. That taught me to proofread!

And here we go:

I like this as it reminds me of jellyfish

Here is Lilly manning my new Flip Mino while I manned the Nikon

I managed to attach a ground bloom crackling to a chain dangling from a tree, using the stick from a burnt out sparkler. The results were pleasing! I like the picture as I realised yesterday to not be afraid of High ISO speeds, even if they are really grainy!