{"id":196,"date":"2000-07-31T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2000-08-01T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/2000\/07\/31\/issue-22\/"},"modified":"2000-07-31T23:00:00","modified_gmt":"2000-08-01T06:00:00","slug":"issue-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/2000\/07\/31\/issue-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 22"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"header\">\n<table border=\"0\" width=\"90%\">\n<tr>\n<td class=\"issue\" width=\"35%\">August 1, 2000<\/td>\n<td class=\"issue\" width=\"31%\" align=\"center\">Issue 22<\/td>\n<td class=\"issue\" width=\"33%\" align=\"right\">Orem, Utah<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<h2>In this issue:<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"#flame\">Flying Sparks and Flame<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"#campfire\">Living in a Campfire<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> \u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n<h2><a name=\"flame\" id=\"flame\"><\/a>Flying Sparks and Flame<\/h2>\n<p class=\"byline\">Eric (05 JUL 2000)<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;So, when do you think we&#8217;ll take our kids to see fireworks? When they&#8217;re twelve?&#8221; I asked Shannon on Independence Day. We&#8217;re pretty strict about bedtimes at our house, so Ethan rarely sees 9:00 PM (and then only when he&#8217;s rebelliously fighting sleep to watch the neighborhood go by outside his window). Gerrit is usually long gone by 8:00 PM.<\/p>\n<p>Add to that the fact that Gerrit was suffering from infections in both ears and both eyes, I figured it wouldn&#8217;t be this year, at least.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I guess you could take Ethan tonight, if you want. I can stay home with Gerrit, and I wouldn&#8217;t be upset or anything,&#8221; Shannon replied.<\/p>\n<p>So Ethan got to stay up later than we&#8217;ve ever let him so that we could watch fireworks.<\/p>\n<p>He was already looking a little droopy when we left at about 9:30 PM, but he started to get excited when we drove by neighborhood knots of kids with sparklers and fountains. I told him that was small fry.<\/p>\n<p>We drove up to BYU, and plopped a blanket down on the small arc of grass just north-east of the Alumni Center (south-west of the Marriott Center). The annual &#8220;Stadium of Fire&#8221; was just down the hill, so it seemed like a good spot.<\/p>\n<p>We weren&#8217;t alone, either. There were lots of other people, some of them putting on a pre-show with rows of fountains out on the traffic islands. Ethan passed the time playing peek-a-boo with a co-ed who sat near us with her date. I had to reel Ethan in, though, when he started throwing pine needles at them, shouting &#8220;Fire show!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Finally the show began in earnest. It has been a while since I&#8217;ve seen a fireworks show, and I think I saw some new things. There were spirals and rings in addition to the traditional spherical bursts. There was also a shimmering curtain of gold, and some fireworks that seemed more appropriate for Halloween: ghost shaped streaks that looked like souls headed for heaven. They even made a spooky moaning noise as they fish-tailed into the sky.<\/p>\n<p>Ethan was interested for a while; he even stood up and shouted at one point. Ironically, it was during a quiet moment, so everyone turned around and looked at him.<\/p>\n<p>But after a while, pulling up grass seemed more interesting, so he started dumping handfuls onto our neighbor&#8217;s box of Cheez-Its.<\/p>\n<p>Finally the show was over, after an impressive finale. The most amazing thing to me, though, was this: That thunderous bursts of multicolored flame and sparks couldn&#8217;t hold our boy&#8217;s attention for even thirty minutes.<\/p>\n<h2><a name=\"campfire\" id=\"campfire\"><\/a>Living in a Campfire<\/h2>\n<p class=\"byline\">Eric (01 AUG 2000)<\/p>\n<p>When the sun rises these days, the light isn&#8217;t the cheerful golden that spreads across the walls and carpet, but instead, an eerie reddish glow. This morning, it even smells like smoke throughout the house.<\/p>\n<p>There hasn&#8217;t been a cloud of the water-vapor variety in the skies for days, but there&#8217;s a constant haze as forest fires burn in seemingly all directions.<\/p>\n<p>And driving by the Geneva Steel Mill the other day, with its belches of brown smoke, I imagined some executive inside saying, &#8220;Quick pump out all the really dirty stuff &#8212; no one can possibly blame the poor air quality on us now!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>All in all, it&#8217;s just not a great time to be an oxygen breather in Utah County.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<div class=\"footer\">\n<p class=\"copyright\">Copyright \ufffd <a href=\"mailto:ericsmith@email.com\">Eric Smith<\/a>, 2000, All rights reserved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>August 1, 2000 Issue 22 Orem, Utah In this issue: Flying Sparks and Flame Living in a Campfire \u00a0 Flying Sparks and Flame Eric (05 JUL 2000) &#8220;So, when do you think we&#8217;ll take our kids to see fireworks? When they&#8217;re twelve?&#8221; I asked Shannon on Independence Day. We&#8217;re pretty strict about bedtimes at our &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/2000\/07\/31\/issue-22\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Issue 22&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-familynews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esmithy.net\/sparks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}