Monday, July 5, 2021

Independence Day*

 Hope all y'all had a great Independence Day celebration.  I took Sarah Hoyt up on her challenge this morning over my pre-church coffee.  I read the Declaration of Independence in its entirety.  I've read parts of it before and probably read the entire document in school at some point, but this time, in this day, it seemed to ring home a bit more than before.  

I urge you to do the same.

But, that got the day started, then there was church.  The closing hymn was "God Bless America".  I do like that song.  I was blinking quite quickly at the end. Then, because Mrs J and I were riding with DIL to church, she got to decide on brunch.  Went to a nice little place and had a Brisket Breakfast Burrito that kept getting bigger the more of it I ate.  At that point, we went home changed clothes and drove back to town.

Why?  Beans, I thought you'd never ask.

The powers that be in the City and County, I think, recognized that the public was pretty much fed up with WuFlu and its effects on life in a free country.  Meetings of the two entities have been getting more commentary lately delivered in a more clearly understandable demeanor.  If you know what I mean. So, they went ahead and scheduled the first parade down Main St since the hoopla started in October 2019. Normally, there are 3 per year.  Independence Day, County Fair day and a night parade, which is generally the first Friday in December to start the Christmas celebration. They've cancelled 4 of them.  This will be the first in ~15 months.

Since it's after 6 on Sunday and I'm normally finished with my usual Monday post long before now, the post is going to be a bit more audio visual than verbal.

We arrived about noon for the 1 o'clock start (the powers that be took attendance at Sunday Church into account), parked a couple of blocks away as all the parking on Main Street had been taken.  Fortunately this isn't our first rodeo parade and we had positioned my truck in our usual parade watching area the night before. Arrived, dropped the tailgate, set up the umbrella and camp chairs and waited for the festivities to begin.  

DIL and Mrs J hamming it up a bit.  Mrs J and I picked matching Tees for the occasion.

I noticed one of my former colleagues nearby, so went and said hello and chatted a bit.  Came back and saw that the spot next to us had opened up.  About this time, I noticed a guy driving down the street slowly.  Pointed at the spot and waved him in.

He parked got out of the car and introduced himself.  Said he and his fiancé were on vacation and now driving home.  I asked where home was, he said "Right now, San Francisco." 

Beans, I was polite.

I asked him about "Right Now?"

He said he was the last remaining Conservative in the city and was traveling to look at places to move to.

I laughed and we got on great.  They'd been down Bean's way and up to Tennessee and now in Texas.  

About then, the parade started.

With a flyover of course.


Since the parade started at the other end of town, it took a while to get to our position.  Yes, Beans, it was hot and humid and Mr Polka Dot is consuming a cool adult recreational beverage.  This is a German Town, it's permitted. 

The first parade vehicle (behind the pilot car schussing people out of the way) was festooned as it should be on this day.

A docent from the National Museum of the Pacific War was driving

Then came Uncle Sam (of course)


Then another vehicle from the Museum loaded with Veterans.

Finally realized that if I turned my phone sideways...

The requisite would-be beauty queens were well represented.


As were some vehicles from when Sarge and OldNFO started driving.

Sarge

OldNFO's Stanley Steamer

All in all, the parade shut down US 87 and US290 for about an hour.  And this young lady waved the flag for the entire time. My kind of America.




 T-Storms this evening will probably not allow us to watch fireworks.  MBD recorded the following of her in-law's back porch on the third.





*No Beans, not the movie, although we did watch it on the 3rd.

34 comments:

  1. Those photos touched all the bases juvat, well done! DUKW DUKW go, eh?

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    1. Thanks, Nylon. Yes it was a DUKW, they used to drive a tank, but I haven't seen that one in a few years. They still have it and use it in their reenactments.

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  2. Jumping onto Nylon 12's bandwagon, be kind you your web footed friends!

    Thank you for sharing the parade.

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  3. Hope everyone had a great Independence Day - and may next year's celebration bring the spirit of liberty to even more people who by that time should have rejected all the anti liberty sentiments being thrown around these days.

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    1. Well. There were 3 floats for the R's and only 1 for the Asses. Lots of whooping for the former. Mrs J and I simply turned our backs when the latter drove by. My new friend commented that he thought that action highly communicative.

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  4. Júvat, small town parades maintain a simplicity and elegance that large town parades never approach. Thank you for sharing.

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    1. THBB,
      My pleasure. It was a lot of fun.

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    2. (Don McCollor)...Not much for the 4th, but all the little towns in our area have celebrations about every weekend from June - August. Fun quaintness and oddities. One time one had a pair of llamas trailed by a Scottish bagpipe. Another a camel followed by three girls jointly carrying a large python. Never realize how BIG a quad tracked farm tractor is until seen on main street. Same with a floater or highboy sprayer from the COOP. The driver can look in second floor windows. County Sheriff's Department is there with their equipment. A high point is an impressive collection (for a small town of about 800 people) of the local Volunteer Fire and EMT vehicles. They have the hardest job - almost every call, they know or are related to the people...

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  5. Well done, neighbor. I'm fighting off something, chair bound with a cough and fever yesterday. Cough and weak today. So I didn't do squat yesterday. We didn't have as much noise as usual. That was welcome as my DAV and I only had to monitor our sectors for a couple hours instead of all night. Something about being on the receiving end of various millimeters at all hours of the day and night don't go away very easily. When the fireworks start, I have to take my watch so he has less of the perimeter to observe. The rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air mean fun and family to me... incoming hostile fire to him. I had hoped to find a place way out where we could watch but not hear. Not this year.

    Happy Independence Day! May we have it from sea to shining sea by this time next year.

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    1. hope you shake off that cough and fever quickly, amigo - feel better soon!
      Expected loud noises don't bother me too much, after all I work in a shooting range - UNexpected ones, however, are a different story - hope you find a suitable place for y'all to watch but not hear next year...

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    2. STxAR,
      Please extend my deepest thanks and best wishes to your friend. Folks like him made/make yesterday possible. Hope you feel better soon.

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    3. Tom,
      Yep, I'm not real good with unexpected noises either, and I've had none of the experiences some folks have.

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  6. A traditional Independence Day celebration, love it.

    'Murica!

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    1. Yep, pretty nice day all in all. Although the burgers and brats had to be finished on the stove. Lightning where the flash and bang are nearly instantaneous "discouraged" me from finishing them on the grill. It did clear up in time to watch the fireworks from our front porch.

      'Murica indeed!

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  7. Well, glad your town finally got it's DUKW in a row...

    Just... didn't feel it this year. Saw more BLM flags too close to us, which is a scary thing. I worry about Mrs. Andrew when I leave the house, so making her a target for odiferous pustulic pests is a no-go. City, a leftist burg that even Sen. Sanders would find too leftist didn't put on fireworks, nor did the University of Beijing in Gainesville, FL.

    That's okay, because the drunken, drug-addled idiots in my AOA fired off enough fireworks and ammo, yes, ammo, to set fire to the whole of North Central Florida (yes, a thing, as it's how the spine of Florida from south of Ocala to north of I-10 is called) and thank God that we've had just days and days and days of long hard rain else we'd have had a repeat of the Firestorms of 1998. Of course, it's not near the amount of explosives we heard for Juneteenth, so...

    Must be nice living in a place that is still patriotic. I miss the country I was born and grew up in.

    As for flyovers, we had those yesterday also. If you can call the 2 police choppas searching for armed idiots flyovers. And, of course, par for the course, no mention of it in any news article. Gainesgrad once again suppresses negative news like, well, the ChiComs or the old USSR.

    Bleh.

    Sorry for being morose. Me's craving freedom and liberty and tired of having to consider everyone else's 'feelings' when I go outside and breath. Want to breath freedom again.

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    1. Beans,

      It was interesting when the D float came by, there was a rolling decrease in crowd noise as it passed. Some shouts of support, but most of those were single voices or a very small number. The three other party floats were greeted by a much more enthusiastic response. And, there were a lot more people watching the parade than live in our town. So, I felt a lot better about things after the parade than I have in a while. It was apparent that there are a lot more people on our side than I thought there were and I think they're just about fed up. We'll see.
      I'd hate to think what would have happened if BLM had had a float or even just showed up.

      But...as I am frequently wont to say "Never Give Up! Never Surrender"

      Might need to watch that movie again.

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    2. We are rapidly approaching peak "WOLVERINES."

      And, yes, the urge to watch "Galaxy Quest" has become more than a faint tickle.

      As to 'party floats'... in this town the Republican Party had to move their headquarters out of the center of town because, no matter how good their surveillance systems were, the police just couldn't find the obvious idiots who kept breaking their front windows.

      I wish we had the money to bail out of this place.

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    3. Hang tough, Beans. I know how you feel. I was kinda in the same mood, and then I saw all the neighborhood kids on their bikes yesterday, doing the "INDEPENDENCE Day" bike ride, with all of them carrying flags, and with their bikes all dolled up with red, white, and blue streamers and posters.

      Made me feel like a kid again.....

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    4. Oh....and I wore my Wolverines tee-shirt yesterday. The neighbors (well...most of them) thought it was appropriate....

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    5. Beans, couldn't find or didn't look? Subtle, yet distinct difference.

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    6. drjim,
      Yeah, I also was in a pretty crummy mood heading into town. "It's gonna be hot, crowded, strangers, democrats. I'd rather be home, cool and sulking" thoughts in my head. That quickly changed talking to the folks around us, and other than my former colleague, I knew none of them. But after a short time, we all seemed to be on mostly common ground. The little girl waving the Flag, really made my day.

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    7. Oh, and I'll talk to Sarge about raising the uniform allowance to get T-shirts for us all. He's LOOOOOOOOOOOAAADDDEEEDDDDD!

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    8. Couldn't find. We have a lot of grumpy old people, but the socialists outnumber us far too much.

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  8. Nice report from a nice Independence Day celebration. Looks like a very nice town and parade. We had some decent fireworks around here and a nice time had by all.

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    1. Thanks, Aaron. Good to hear that your Independence Day went well.

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  9. The Independence Day celebration here left much to be desired.
    Our neighborhood celebration was pretty much as it should be.
    But it was totally overwhelmed by all of the sounds of illegal, and unsafe in the hands of amateurs, fireworks that started well before dark and were still being fired off well after midnight.
    In my lifetime I cannot rember anything like it, except in films of naval shore bombardment.
    I yearn a nice local patriotic parade.

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    1. Given the number of fireworks I launched as a kid and the method used therein, I suppose I should be very thankful that I am still intact. But, I do know what you mean Skip.

      Come on down, next 4th. It's pretty much guaranteed to be a very similar experience.

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  10. During a Spring road trip, my wife, and I, enjoyed a short time in that wonderful city for a bite at Dairy Queen, and some fantastic chocolates at the local confectionary. It was a great short time in an all American town, and demands another visit.

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    1. Come on down. The DQ is still here and if the confectionary is slightly out of town, I know exactly what you're talking about. The owner is a friend of ours.

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  11. Well done, juvat! Good to see other places are still doing parades.

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  12. Glad y'all got to enjoy it, and I started a 'bit' later... sigh...

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  13. Great town, great post, great digs (on Old NFO and Sarge)! haha. God Bless America- please!

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Just be polite... that's all I ask. (For Buck)
Can't be nice, go somewhere else...

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