Pyrotechnical difficulties?

Sometimes things don't go exactly as planned...

Today started off pretty well - DH, DD and I went out for bbq for lunch - I had ribs, which is always a good choice. I'll confess to having a weakness for them. (heeeeere piggy piggy piggy!) The afternoon was pretty relaxing - I did some stitching and watched TV with DD, and when it got dark enough, we went out to set off some fireworks.

Other folks in the neighborhood were setting off mortars and such, so we got to see a few above the trees, and a storm was brewing in the distance, so we started off with a bit of distant lightning. We lit off probably 8 fountains and 10 ground blooms before the wind picked up enough that it was blowing the sparks rather unpredictably around - including back toward us. At that point, we decided the prudent thing to do would be to head back inside and not try to interfere with God's own fireworks display. We used up about half our fountains, and maybe 1/5 of our ground blooms. And none of the rather large cache of sparklers I have. Still, it was enjoyable for a small show.

Once inside, we turned on the TV and watched the New York fireworks display - though why stations call them "fireworks spectaculars" when you only get maybe 20 minutes of fireworks in an hour of programming seems a bit misleading. The NYC show was decent, once they actually started showing the fireworks. Though the brand-placement "macys" on every set piece was a little distracting. After that, we turned to the Boston display on CBS.

I'll go ahead and say it now - the Boston display (what we saw of it) was great. CBS's coverage of it frankly sucked. I am VERY disappointed with CBS. First of all, they didn't cover the whole Boston concert - they started their coverage at the last 20 seconds of the 1812 Overture. It was extremely frustrating to me to hear the host thanking the artillerists for use of the howitzers when I didn't get to hear them myself. We did get to see David Lee Roth performing with the Boston Pops, and the patriotic singalong and "Stars and Stripes Forever", which kicked off the pyrotechnics. That coverage was okay, and the Boston Pops always does an excellent job.

Boston's fireworks are also very well done, or have been every year I've watched them, and I preferred them to the NYC display. NYC's songs were in general tending more toward the patriotic, but Boston's pyro-choreography was better. I especially enjoyed "What a Wonderful World", and Phil Collins "Take Me Home".

What was extremely frustrating to me was that CBS cut to ads about 10 minutes into the display. Oh come on...can't they go 20 minutes without showing an ad?? So I missed about 5 minutes of a 20-minute display. And when they were covering fireworks, they kept going to crowd shots, or switching camera angles to distant places behind people - someone walked in front of one of those cameras at one point, and another 30-second location was half-obscured by a lawn chair. Rather annoying.

I really wish A&E were still covering Pops Goes the Fourth...