All I'm Saying there's a joke in here somewhere

We had a very pleasant Fourth of July weekend. And by we, I mean the 2/3 of the household who didn't have to work. Matt spent most of his time chasing around the wily recreationists and making sure that people weren't killing themselves, animals, or each other out in the woods. It actually was a very low-key weekend in that regard.

In retrospect, it seems like every innocuous-seeming activity we did somehow involved strange risks. On Friday, Freya and I went and hung out at a friend's neighborhood pool, with the potential for damaging our skin with the sun's harmful rays. I prefer to think how much vitamin D my system stored against the long winter ahead, and how Freya's risk of rickets has been reduced.

On Saturday, we went down to the city farmer's market, which in and of itself wasn't innately dangerous, so just throw Saturday out of the mix as far as risky behavior goes. Although, we did again expose ourselves to toxic radiation from the sun. OH! But there was the neighborhood fireworks show, where we no doubt inhaled enough toxic gas to choke a goat. So check for the carcinogens there.

Tonight we went over to our neighbors' for a barbeque. We had BBQ'ed meat and veggies, and then we roasted s'mores in their fire pit. Hello, blackened food!

I just want to stress here that I'm not actually feeling guilty or that health conscious about any of this. I just all of a sudden tonight realized that it's sort of strange that many of the traditional things we do to commemorate our nation's independence are fairly self-destructive: blowing stuff up, getting drunk and operating motor vehicles, charring food and ingesting all the burned up bits, etc. Who'da thunk it?