[RavenSong]

I wish they'd outlaw the sale of fireworks here in the Sierra foothills of Northern California. All the campgrounds in the area surrounding our tiny hamlet are crammed tonight -- tomorrow will be worse. You take campers, tourists, boaters, way too much booze, unattended campfires, and fireworks...put them altogether, and it's a recipe for disaster. Seriously, the possibility of wildfire scares the heck out of me every year around the 4th of July. We live on private land inside the Tahoe National Forest, and if we ever have to evacuate during a holiday weekend like the Fourth of July, we're doomed. Most of the campers have no idea how to drive our mountain roads as it is...it would be horrible in an evacuation.

When I lived in Albuquerque, the kids used to set off bottle rockets every year. My roof caught on fire one year when a neighbor kid shot off his cache of bottle rockets and one landed on the roof. I felt like strangling him...fortunately no one was hurt.

That same year, I took call for the OR during the Fourth of July weekend. Have any of you ever held what's remaining of an arm that has just been blown off? It's not a pretty sight...and the patient was a pyrotechnic professional who was in charge of the city's official fireworks' display -- he knew what he was doing. The operating room got really quiet as I was prepping the guy for surgery...I think everyone was trying to control their gag reflex. Hospital ERs and ORs hate the Fourth of July weekend -- it's one of the busiest times of the year.

If any of you are setting off your own fireworks this year, please be extra cautious. Don't drink alcohol, please. Use all the safety precautions, and remember, even if you know how to set off fireworks properly, accidents can and do happen every year, even to the professionals who do this for a living. A lot of the fireworks are made in China, with little oversight in quality control.