Bang Bada Boom

It's Divali here. I had a 3 day weekend, which was nice. We didn't do too much, a little shopping on Monday, as Manju wanted Tuesday off instead of Monday. He needed to go to Tumkur (his hometown) to register his daughter's birth certificate. We got a nice painting for the living room. I don't know what we're going to do with all the artwork we are collecting when we need to go home. We don't have as much wall space in our house back in CA.

Oh yeah, on Saturday evening we went to a 1 year birthday party for one of my co-worker's children. There was a huge cake, and a magician. I got to be the guinea pig for one of the tricks. It was pretty fun, and I think our girls had fun even though most of the kids there were under 8.

There have been non-stop fireworks going all weekend. They start somewhere around 4:30 in the morning, and go till late at night, after midnight at least.
Boom,
bang,
pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,
BANG,
...

Some people have the kind that shoot off sparks, and some even have rockets which shoot fairly high into the air. All together a lot of noise and sparks.

On Monday evening we went to the Deville's and they had bought some 'crackers' as they are called here. We helped them set some off in the back yard, till the neighbors complained. I have to say, they were impressive. Our sparklers back in CA are about 1 foot long, and very thin. Some of these sparklers were close to 3 feet long, and about a 3/4 inch thick. They would go for a long time too.

After the neighbor got upset, we went out the front gate and set more off in the street, and empty lot/dirt road next to it. We got a whole collection of kids from the neighborhood. Marian started handing out sparklers to them and they had a ball. We shot off several firecrackers (again huge by my standards), and a bunch of sparkling fountains. All the while the neighbor kids were running around with sparklers. Then it was all suddenly over when we ran out of sparklers, and we had to go home. Cindy accused me of being like a big kid with the sparklers and fountains. I guess you could say I had fun...