Happy 2019!

Happy New Year guys!!!! 🎆

I hope you all had safe and fun festivities to participate in last night, whether you went out on the town or nestled in at home with a bottle of champagne, but no matter how you choose to ring in the new year, there's no denying that 2019 is officially upon us. I think it's fascinating how different cultures choose symbols to ring in the New Year in good fortune, whether it's long noodles for long life, carrots golden orange hue representing riches in the year to come, or shooting off countless explosives into the sky! 

Personally, I'm a complete and total homebody, happy to bury myself in a mound of blankets and celebrate the event with a homecooked meal, a snuggle buddy, and a drink. I've been fortunate enough to celebrate New Year's in my hometown of Vegas, abroad in Tokyo, and now in Seattle... while living in Tokyo (or, at least, in the next suburb over) I was able to watch the Tokyo Disney Sea fireworks display ringing in the New Year, so I'd stand on my little patio with a whiskey and coke in one hand and a smile on my face as the brilliant illuminations crackled across the sky. Vegas, as you might expect, goes absolutely bonkers- the Strip shuts down and becomes a pedestrian haven, where heavy drinking and outlandish behavior is the normative way to bring in the countdown. As much fun as I'm sure it is to get lost among the sweaty, drunken masses marauding through Las Vegas Boulevard's most populous corridors, that was never particularly appealing to me as a local... and, let's be real here, most jobs in Vegas are based around the tourist economy, so chances were I was stuck working well past midnight on one side of the Strip, and then faced with the conundrum of trying to navigate my route home around the road closures. All this given, perhaps it's no real surprise I'm happiest to sequester myself away at home and take in the annual tradition in a more low-key way, with only my most precious people around. To each their own, though! You do you, boo-boo. 

I've been gearing up for this change for weeks now, and am quite excited for all the things to come in the year ahead. I hope that you, too, are going forward into this new year with optimism, hope, and a heart full of love and joy. Thank you for joining me here, and I look forward to all the new content and adventures to be shared over the coming months! 💗

Vegas: Summertime Fireworks

 What could possibly be a more American way to celebrate our independence and the creation of our nation-state than to get irresponsibly intoxicated and set off explosives in the street? Often there's a ceremonial barbeque involved as well, where slabs of pork, beef or tubular meat-forms are seared and slathered for consumption, though this particular Fourth's festivities were devoid of such sustenance and socializing around carcasses. It was a rather impromptu thing, at least from my perspective, as I kind of crashed the housemate's party while Antho was at work. While there's no shortage of places from whence you can purchase boom-booms in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and configurations, we hadn't gone out and done so due to limited funds. These things, they happen. I wasn't particularly upset about this lack of combustive arsenal, partly due to the fact I'm not exactly 100% comfortable with the combination of booze and explosives in residential areas. I mean, Japan does fireworks, and they do them big and beautiful, so it's not exactly like celebrating with fire flowers is an entirely new phenomenon...  but those shows were generally situated around rivers or water, even in the case of Tokyo Disney's firework shows...

Anyway, when I was able to get over my trepidation at having things exploding several feet away from my vehicle (full of combustible gasoline and such), I was able to capture some pretty fun photos of the fire-flowers in blossom. I know, they're technically called fireworks in English, but I find the Japanese term of "hanabi", or fire-flowers, far more poetic and in-tune with the ephemeral beauty of the bursts. As brilliant and stunning as they are, they only light up the sky for these brief blasts of intense beauty. I'm not familiar with the chemistry involved behind achieving the different colors, or the different shapes, though I know the shape of the tubes themselves can provide some degree of variation in the bursts. That's one of the cool things about life, though, I suppose... you don't have to completely understand the mechanics behind something to appreciate it's beauty. Sometime's it's best to just stop and take it in for what it is before it's gone.

Fourth of July Fireworks

Happy (belated) Fourth of July to all of my friends in the United States! 

I hope you had fun and didn't lose any limbs in the process.

Remember to use caution when playing with explosives!

This is a photo heavy post, so beware ye of slower inter webs.