3-D Fireworks

I spent yesterday puttering around the house. I cleaned, washed dishes, watched Shrek, and reinstalled our air conditioner before starting a series of blogs about my weekend trip, 1 post to go. When Steve and I installed the AC unit back in May I new something wasn't quite right, especially when I noticed that it wasn't draining. There are three main components involved. There's the unit itself, a wood shelf it sits on, and a piece of wood cut to fill in the rest of the window. We got these things in but something didn't seem right to me. Steve thought it was as he remembered it though. At some time in late June it started spitting water, so I picked it up and drained it and we turned it off for a while. The last few days of June it seemed to be doing fine so when I returned on Monday I let it run. Tuesday morning there was a puddle on the floor. So I drained it again and cleaned up the puddle. Then I took it out of the window and looked at our apparatus. We'd put the shelf in backwards so that the AC unit was tilted into the room instead of tilted back toward the outside and its drain. I also fit the other piece inside the window frame so the whole set up is more secure. Now we have water dripping outside, cool air inside, and I feel two steps closer to being handy; only 2998 to go.
Last night I went to a 4th of July party at my friend Greg's. There was a good sized crowd there, a mixture of people from my small group, friends of Greg's sister, and friends of his parents. We had fun hanging out. The Vernon Hills fireworks started at 9:30 and were being launched at Century Park, about 1/2 mile from Greg's. We hoped to see them reflect in Lake Harvey, but I think they were too close for the angle to work. It was a pretty good show. It was made spectacular by the use of 3-D Glasses. I don't know who originally came up with this idea but it was brilliant. The glasses refracted the light from the fireworks so you got a cool rainbow effect with every one. You would see the explosion in the center with 6-8 versions of it in full spectrum around it. If you bobbled your head side to side you got a Kalidoscope effect. There was also occasionally that genuine 3-D feeling where it looked like the explosions were coming right into you. On some it didn't seem to make a difference at all but some would go off and you'd have this little shimmering spectra all around your field of vision, the delayed ones where the firework would go off and then reexplode a few seconds later were also really cool, as Greg's sister noted every time that happened. Dave got some neat pictures using his digital camera shooting through the 3-D lenses. Like I said, 3-D glasses and fireworks were a brilliant combination. After the Vernon Hills show was over we saw some other fireworks being shot off a little farther to the west. On some of those the angle was right to see their reflection off the lake. That was also nice.
Oh well, back to work.