Remember Remember...

Remember Remember the fifth of November
With gunpowder treason and plot...

Saturday was the fifth of November when we celebrate Guy Fawkes Night in the UK. This is the night when Brits light bonfires and set off fireworks to commemorate foiling the plans of Guy Fawkes who was going to blow up the Houses of Parliament. I must admit, I do think it's a strange thing to be celebrating 400 years after the fact, but everyone really seems to like it. I guess it sends a message to would be traitors. Part of the Bonfire Night celebration is to make a dummy of Guy Fawkes, then to toss the dummy on the bonfire. I still remember doing this in school as a kid. I loved it! Nothing gets a nine-year-old boy excited like burning stuff.

This year we didn’t go anywhere, but we sat out on our back patio and watched all of the fireworks going off around us. I pulled out the hookah that we bought in Turkey and smoked it a bit. Heather wasn't really into it, so she didn’t smoke much. When we eventually got cold enough to go back inside, Heather said, "You aren't going to blog about this are you?" Well, I guess I am. I don't really have anything anymore exciting to write about this week.

On a completely different note, I installed a new floodlight at the back of our house. It’s a super-bright 300-watt halogen. The sad thing is that I had to blow a fuse before I remembered the difference between a series lighting circuit and a parallel lighting circuit. If you draw the circuits out on paper, it’s the kind of stuff that I studied in my first week of Electrical Engineering classes. It reminded me of helping my friend disconnect the electric baseboard heaters in his house in college. My famous last words were, "right, the power should be disconnected now"...Oh well, the light works really well now, and we can blind the neighbours on the other side of the valley.

JE