7 Year-Old Me Would Have Really Enjoyed This

I'm not sure what year it was and I'm way to lazy to figure it out, but when I was young(er) we had a storm that knocked the power out for days.

I LOVED IT.

We stayed warm with the woodstove in our back room and cooked on camp stoves, eating and hanging out by candlelight. At that age I would sometimes pretend that I was Laura Ingalls in the Little House on the Prarie books and this made my games even better. I'd also sometimes pretend I was Heidi, crawling up to my bed of hay in a barn loft. I therefore thought having no power was the best thing ever.

Flash forward to the past three days, during which I went crazy. On Monday I had some relief when I went with my friend Anna to the mall, which was partially lit up by generators. We were in a desperate search for coffee, but we ended up having a blast trying on ridiculous clothes and all kinds of makeup samples under emergency lighting. It was so much fun.

Then, however, all my babysitting gigs were cancelled. Like, all of them. This meant that I actually had nothing to do with myself. It kind of made me sad that I felt bored. I'd never really had that problem when I was younger.

Of course, I'd always had Claire to annoy when I got bored, which was typically my first choice of activity.

(Sorry, Claire!)

But now I'm looking toward the best weekend ever because my sister AND my roommate are coming to visit. And I

CAN'T

EVEN

WAIT!

Fourth of July. In Pictures. Plus Awesomeness.

I was inspired by the Queen of Photoblogging, Stimey, so NOW YOU GET PICTURES!

Yeah, so, this past weekend I went here:

You can almost see my house from here! Almost. Stalkers.

With these people:

Don't they look like fun?

Granted, I have been doing the majority of things with these two people since the age of 6. And see? They're wearing bathing suits. That is actually all we wore--we put them on the second we got up and hardly took them off until we fell asleep--because it was ridiculously hot and we needed to be able to jump into the water at a moment's notice. 

It was awesome. 

I was also the only one who got sunburned. 

Jerks. 

(I like to commiserate. Also, I used to never burn. That was Claire's thing.)

We swam and kayaked and read crappy women's and homemaking magazines that reinforced all my feminist media-indignation and swam some more and jet-skied and tubed and rode in boats. 

I also wish I could get outraged at the commercialization of restrictive gender roles while lying in a comfy lounge chair more often. It is really the best way to do it.  If I were to ever design a Women's Studies degree program, I would have most classes be taken in scenic locales or at least during happy hour. 

Anyway, so on fourth of July we represented our allegiance to the democratic ideals of the United States of America by wearing sundresses. 

Please ignore the fact that my eye is being wonky in this picture. 

Why does this happen to me? WHY??

Patriotism is kind of a weird thing, yeah?

But it is also great, because it inspires small town America to make ridiculous things on trailers and parade them around islands. Like this:

Yes, that young girl is rather unenthusiastically roasting a fake pig. 

For America.

After seeing the excellence of these floats, I tried to make my friends more classically American. So they posed like this:

America= delicious food. 

Then we set off on an epic quest to find fireworks, the closest of which were a half hour away in Lenox. We found the site and were blown away by the number of cars there. Try hundreds. 

We wandered up to Tanglewood, eager to stake out seats. We suddenly heard a crowd roar. 

"Oh," said friend Katie. "I guess there's live music too."

"No, that can't be live," said Anna. "Because that was Carol King." 

A new song began.

"And yeah, that's James Taylor. So it's not live."

We sauntered in past many people I thought would stop us, and we found out three things: 

1. It was live. 

2. It was Carol King.

3. It was also James Taylor. 

You cannot tell it is them in this picture. But I've decided it proves this happened anyway.

I KNOW, RIGHT?

Some nice people let us squeeze our blankets in by their feet and we watched the end of the concert and the encore, plus a lot of intoxicated middle aged people slow dancing or waving their arms off-beat. It was magical. 

And it ended with fireworks. 

And for your storybook ending, I got to go home from that...to here:

I guess what I'm saying is, God Bless America.