big booms!

Last night, if anyone had wanted to find my house, I simply would have told them to follow the fireworks.  It was our neighbor's annual 4th of July party last night and the fireworks were wow...just wow.  The sons in the family set them up on either side of the far end of the lake so they're coming from both directions and we sit further back and enjoy the show.  So do a lot of our neighbors who weren't invited to the party, they all had parties of their own.  There's also all the other random people in town who know the party is going on and park along our road and sit in their cars to watch the show.  I know last year Ken told us he spent $10 grand on the fireworks and I know he had to have spent at least that much on them this year as well.  It was pretty spectacular.  He also supplies a beer wagon, pop and juice and a huge pot of booyah and tons of chips and pretzels, so we were all well fed and hydrated as well.  Hubs and I parked our butts around the bonfire with some friends and ended up being about the last of the crowd to leave.  Of course, we all had the advantage of living nearby, so we didn't have much of a drive, a lot of the guests were family friends who lived in and around Green Bay, so they had a half hour or more drive ahead of them to get home.  This party is one of the few times when our house is actually near the center of things and within easy walking distance, usually, we're the ones with the long drive to get anywhere.

In other excitement, we're opening up the crawlspace under our house to make our basement bigger.  The original part of our house was built with a full sized (though really dirty and creepy) basement underneath, but the other half of our house was a later addition (meaning it's only about 100 years old instead of 150) and only has a crawlspace beneath it.  I really need more space to store my canned food, right now, it's scattered all over the house - beans and corn in the basement, canning supplies in one of the outbuildings, apple pie filling in the closet in the office, cans of beans in the laundry room, you get the picture.  It would really be nice to have most of my food, as well as my canning supplies, all in the same spot.  So we've got WE and two of his buddies making us a root cellar.  It's a big messy project.  First they had to jackhammer their way through a chunk of the 2 foot thick rock wall foundation, then start digging out the dirt.  They're filling 5 gallon buckets and hauling them up the outside cellar stairs -thank goodness we have those, there's no way they'd get them up the narrow, creaky inside set of stairs to the basement.  We're hoping to get maybe a 10 or 12 foot room out of the deal, then it's going to get floor to ceiling shelves and a couple of nice bins to store onions, potatoes and carrots.  It's going to be a pioneer woman's dream, people.