I had a rather unplanned Fourth of July, but all in all it went pretty well [map]. I woke up and saw that my friend Sparky’s away messages was a map to where he and some of the other xkcd Cambervile Meetup Thread forum users were going to spend the day. After having lunch I gave him a call and got invited to come down. I’d also been invited by Erik to watch the fireworks from his roof deck at the foot of Beacon Hill, so a plan to do both quickly emerged.
The xkcd fourm users had a nice spot staked out in the median of memorial drive. I arrive around 3pm and found them just wrapping up a game of some sort. They had plenty of games including Scrabble, Boggle, Flux and Carcassone. Being as bad a speller and I am I played a lot of the latter two, and none of the former two. I generally dislike flux, as there is essentially no strategy when it is not your turn. On the first game I lucked into the take another turn card on my second turn and managed to use scramble keepers to end up with two keeps for which I had a goal.
I felt kind of bad for ending it so quickly with newbies playing, but I guess you have to learn that can happen sometime. I won another game of flux, I think we played 5 games, but all of them were short. In one game one of my opponents got the The Rocket and Chocolate, which should totally be a goal. I’m thinking it’s like a chocolate easter bunny but sold in a NASA gift shop.
Around 7:30 I made my way over to Erik’s roof deck. He had some other friends of his, mostly from community boating, over. We took dinner up to the deck and were surprised to find that we were the first people up there. Usually the roof deck is packed with various friends of everyone who lives in the building, but at this point there was no one else up there. 
Later on there was a small group of kids my age as well, and during the show there were one or two other tenants up there, but it was by no means crowded at any time. To avoid walking up and down the stairs to let people in, Erik devised a plan by which he would throw the keys, attached to bright yellow string, down from the roof.
The Fireworks
The fireworks were perhaps the least impressive I have ever seen. This was because there was not any wind to be found in the area. The smoke just sat heavy right over the barge eventually obscuring the entire show. Now, as an auditory experience it was still exciting. Someone described the show as more of a “Oooooh” show and less of an “Awwwwe” show, emphasizing the lack of pretty things to awe over. I took the T home after the crowds dissipated, after learning my lesson last year. All in all it was a much better day that it could have been.
We watched your fireworks show on TV. It seemed as good as ever to us, but you could easily see the cloud that collected over the river. It certainly obscured everything that was behind it.