Presidents Day Celebration

You know what I hate?

I hate it when I send someone an email which clearly requires a response – and I don’t get one. I mean if you want me to bugger off I am ok with that. Just say it. But not responding at all, well that’s just rude.

Maybe there should be a bugger off button in your email. Like right by the delete X. If you hit the bugger off button it would automatically send a response that says F U and then delete the original message. That would make the world a better place.

Speaking of making the world a better place I had a disturbing weekend. What with all the civil wars, demonstrations, flooding, earthquaking , magnetic pole swapping and sunspotting I almost went out and purchased ammunition. You know, for the end of the world. I was thinking that I would rather face the end of the world with ammunition than without. I decided that when I read ‘The Road’. Yup, don’t want to end up like that guy.

Right, so I did say almost. It was a strange, strange, Glenn Beck moment.

And then things got more disturbing.

So we have this gingerbread house that we built for the holidays. Well it is still sitting around our house because someone promised the 7 year old we would blow it up. It was either the chemistry teacher mother or the slightly imbalanced father.

Yeah, so I decided it had to go on Monday.

What better way to celebrate Presidents Day than to blow something up right?

Well I scoured the house for blowuppable materials and the best I could come up with was black powder. Yes, there is black powder at my house. I know, I know, that’s fucked up – but sometimes I like to play Daniel Boone.

Anyway, yeah, I took enough black powder to kill about 2.5 elk and put it under the gingerbread house and made a little black powder trail to where I was going to hide behind the barbeque.

I knew it was a moderately bad idea all along, but at the same time I was pretty sure I would escape mostly unharmed so I rolled with it. Besides, my son and the neighbor kid were there egging me on and there is no kind of peer pressure like the kind of pressure you get from your own kid. (Who ironically isn’t supposed to be your peer).

The neighbor kid recorded it on his iPhone. I may be on facebook or youtube as I write this.

Have you ever seen on tv when they make a long line of gun powder and they light it and it fizzes along until it hits the powder keg? Yeah, well, it doesn’t really work like that. Pretty much the all of the powder ignites at once.

Anyhow, there was this big flash, a foooooosh sound, and a crap load of smoke.

I learned two things. One, 2.5 dead elk worth of black powder isn’t enough to blow up a gingerbread house if you don’t seal everything up real well. Two, the combination of burning black powder and burning gingerbread smells a lot like ass. And continues to smell like ass two days later.

Oh, and burning black powder stains concrete.

Next time I think I will use fireworks. Or maybe just throw it away.