The next 3 - 4 nights are going to be noisy. At my town's exit on I-94 there are 3 large fireworks stores, open year around, selling fireworks to locals and people traveling through between Chicago and Michigan. Some of this stuff is very big and very loud and I'm sure all my neighbors have stocked up.
When I was a kid darn near everything except sparklers was illegal in Indiana. Then when I was about 30 we started getting fireworks stands, but Indiana residents had to sign an affidavit that we would either be taking them out of state or using them to signal riverboats, trains and such. hhh. Sure. Now it's pretty much a, hold my beer, free for all of stuff blowing up in the air and on the ground.
> illegal
I've told about making a fortune at age 13 running serious fireworksmostly M80s across the SC border. My dad was my wheel man.
> M80s
These were the stuff of playground legend. Few of my cronies had ever even seen an M80 but the lore was passed down from older brothers. Cherry Bombs were a little more common and most of us had been in the vicinity of an exploding Cherry Bomb at least once.
Standard firecrackers were more common, but even the older kids with the most connections with smugglers only had a couple of packets. Bottle rockets were also highly prized.
> across the SC border
Here in SC, fireworks play as a kid is a sort of a given. In the summer if you didn't almost blow off a hand, finger or lose hearing for a day or two, you weren't having any fun.
I took it a bit farther and made my own "gunpowder" by sanding charcoal down to powder and buying sulfur and salt peter from the local drugstore to mix it.
I'm still not sure how I didn't burn something down.
We're just hoping nobody brings fireworks and burn us all down.
>We're just hoping
Lotsa luck!
NYE in Texas is an experience.
https://youtu.be/vHt47wfdE7E?t=30
That's pretty over the top, but not *that* far from what I saw in Fribourg/Freiburg, Switzerland back in the early 1990s.
People were setting off huge rockets from their backyards. I had seen them in the shops and some were like $1000 a pop and they seemed to be going up all over.
The thing that the video doesn't pick up is just how much smoke there is in the air after that amount of stuff going off.