There’s a house near ours that Ted and I refer to as the “party house” of the neighborhood. Those folks have a swimming pool and a lot of friends and relatives. It’s not unusual to see a dozen or more cars parked on the street in that area on weekends. It’s never a problem–no vandalism, no kids running in the street interfering with traffic, no loud music, no late hours–just a lot of people having fun.

In the last few years, our neighbors across the street from our house have yielded their position of “Best Neighborhood Fireworks” to the folks in the party house. The party house fireworks show typically lasts about 30-40 minutes, and the fireworks are non-stop. Frankly, it’s as good a show (and longer) than any public displays (usually about 20 minutes) in the area, and we have no traffic or parking problems to watch it.

This year, several families gathered in one neighbor’s driveway to watch the fireworks, and one member of the group counted 60 cars parked on the street and more that she couldn’t see around the curve. When I say “party house,” I mean it! We non-party house folks assumed that all guests contributed to the cost of the fireworks, but that’s really not our problem–we just enjoy the show.

I took some videos of the fireworks this year, starting when the first one of a group was launched. The long series lasted a full two minutes, and there were at least 6-8 long series. Just like at the public displays, there’s a brief pause between series, while the group lines up the next display and sets it off. To stay within the space limitations of this blog, I took some 30-second videos. Here’s one–and remember, this is only one-fourth of how many fireworks went off in a two-minute display. There’s sound of you want to hear the bangs.

Here’s a shot in which my camera must have auto-corrected for the darkness, but I think it’s an interesting picture. The time stamp of the photo is 9:42 p.m., and it was dark at the time.