Fourth of July

Fourth of July is one of my very favorite holidays. I love Christmas and Thanksgiving because you get to stuff yourself shamelessly with amazing food and be around family and watch football. (I haven't spent a Thanksgiving with my family since going away to Canada for vet school - it's just too expensive to travel down for one day, plus we still have class! - but my surrogate family (vet school friends and their families) have made my Thanksgivings a little less sad.) But the Fourth of July is something completely different. There's something so wonderful about everyone feeling all patriotic and wearing red white and blue and silly jewelry and those garishly bedazzled themed shirts from QVC. (Calm down - I adore QVC.)

Danny is a building engineer in DC, and therefore has all of the secret keys to everything. For a number of Fourths, we have gone down to DC, climbed up onto the roof and watched the national fireworks in peaceful solitude. Last night was no different. Imagine: the Capitol building on one side, the Washington monument on the other, the city skyline around you, humid night air that makes your hair frizz, helicopters circling, police zooming around with their sirens and lights going, the too-loud conversations of drunk 20-somethings twelve stories below...it's giving me goosebumps just thinking about it. You can see the fireworks from at least thirty other sites from that one rooftop - I counted. And when the fireworks are over and the smoke is clearing and the sirens kick back up, you can hear people from around you (on the street down below, on other darkened rooftops) clapping.

And its at those times that I just want to give a Jersey Shore fist pump and dump some tea into the Boston harbor and say "Fuck yeah, America." (I don't do that, I promise. But it's really tempting at that exact moment in time.) I also feel thankful for those things that I have here that I don't have in Canada: Chipotle. Cheap milk. Cheap(er) gas (which can be pumped with a locking mechanism so that you can sit your lazy ass in your car while your 26 gallon F-150 gas tank fills up). Words without the letter "u" thrown in for funsies. Miles, Farenheit, gallons, inches. My family. My husband. I've developed a tolerance for Canada (and I love my friends up there, Canadian or otherwise) but as Dorothy said, "There's no place like home."