Saturday, July 05, 2008

My yard and I survived another 4th!

I live 2 blocks away for the park that holds one of the biggest fireworks displays in Salt Lake. With the Sugarhouse Arts Festival ans other things going on, people are showing up all day for the event, but almost everybody leaves about the same time. Being on a main street, a lot of them pass my house, and too many of them have no respect for the plants I have in my parking strip (that little piece of ground between the sidewalk and the road.) But this year doesn't seem to have been too bad. The little plant I put in earlier this season was obviously stepped on, but looks like it will survive. A bunch of the rocks holding down the drip lines were kicked all over the place, but nothing was broken and it only took 5 minutes to put everything back. I found one straw and a light sabre as the only trash in my yard, much better than previous years.


I don't go down to the park for the fireworks anymore, too many people and all the gang assholes have to come out and flex their muscles. Annoying. So, I just watch them through the top of my pine trees, from the comfort of my own back yard. They don't look too bad, all the colors coming through the green tree. The best part of the evening, though, was sitting in the neighbor's front yard, with a few other neighbors, watching the people trying to get home.

Earlier in the afternoon, I did go down to the Arts Festival, which they had closed off 11th East for. It was ok. I did get a look at the development for that corner, what it's going to look like and have. Residential, commercial and retail spaces, with pedestrian open spaces. Not bad. It's kind of sad to have lost the old historic buildings in that area, but the good thing about where I live is that they try to discourage the strip-mall look, with huge parking lots in front of the buildings. Sugarhouse likes the buildings out front to hide the parking lots behind them. Much more inviting, if you ask me. There was a big group of religious fanatics in the park for the event (see picture of sign). They had a half dozen police officers hanging around to make sure it remained a peaceful demonstration. All I'm going to say about them is, looking at their sign, they sure hate a lot of people. Must take a shitload of energy. I also was surprised at how many people either stopped or ducked so they wouldn't get in the way of my pictures. Well, if you want to see the rest of the pictures I took, then just clock HERE. Hope you had a great 4th!

5 comments:

A Paperback Writer said...

Fortunately, God will probably know just HOW to judge the misogynist, homophobic sign-toting hypocrites as well as everyone else.

A couple of days ago, I was at the grocery store. One idiot in an SUV the size of Montana stopped right in the middle of the ramped exit -- because hey, her healthy passenger couldn't possibly walk across the parking lot to get to the store. As I swerved my cart to go in front of her (since she blocked the actual ramp when she roared up without even looking at pedestrians, I had to move the cart off the curb), another Barbiebleachblonde idiot in a slightly smaller SUV gunned her engine (wasting 5 dollars' worth of gas) to force her vehicle around the wrong side of the double-parked monster. She nearly ran me down because she wasn't looking at all. As she zipped past me, I yelled out, "Well, don't bother looking for pedestrians! Just move on past!"
She slammed on her brakes and shifted into reverse, but I had the cart right behind her SUV now, and I think it did occur to her pea brain that the cart would do some serious paint damage. I didn't even flinch; I just kept walking, knowing I had this one won, no matter what.
"Do you have to walk around just being a b____?!" she snarled out the window toward me.
Poor woman, she didn't know I was a junior high teacher and would be completely unfazed at her pathetic attempts to justify herself when she was dead wrong about everything.
I never stopped pushing the cart. I never even scowled. I nodded toward her politelyl, smiled, and said, "Just modellilng after you, ma'am."
I heard her teen daughter in the car say, "ooh, good come back."
I felt so justified.

I watched the fireworks from the Bonneville golfcourse. I actually toyed with the idea of calling you to see if I could hang out in your back yard to watch the fireworks, but I figured you were likely off with family and probably sick of me at this point anyway, so I refrained. I'm glad no one tossed anything flamable into your bark chips.

Max Sartin said...

What I find so amusing is that they are so conceited that they think they are the only ones that have God's intent right. Nobody else. I'm also glad to see that I'm not the only one who has decided being polite and not saying anything isn't working anymore. Bravo!

A Paperback Writer said...

"Polite"? You know I don't do that very well.

Jannx said...

Hello Max. Interesting photos. However, I was more interested by the similarities with the "small town" behavior that seem amazing like big city "I'm always right even when I'm in the middle of doing something wrong" attitude.

Max Sartin said...

Yeah, too much time teaching at a Jr. High kinda weeds out the polite.
Yeah, Salt Lake isn't the same small town I moved to in '74, in the last 5 to 10 years we've developed a lot of big city problems; gangs, traffic congestion, pollution. I haven't lived in a big city for a long time, so I can't say the problems are as bad as in NY or LA, but we have them.