Happy birthday, you crazy old government
Before I get started with the entertaining stuff, a small tirade on the wonders of federal government bureaucracy. I’ve been waiting on the economic stimulus check in order to round out the down payment / sales tax for my new car purchase. I still maintain the entire idea of the stimulus was and is a terrible idea on the part of the g-men, but at least I’m actually putting it back into the economy like they intended. Anyway, today I got a letter from the IRS dated the 3rd of July. Evidently they couldn’t find the signature on my tax filing, and want me to send in a form with my signature on it, they’ll get to any sort of payment in another 6-8 weeks. This really fries me – not because they can’t find the signature, okay fair enough, but because they sure didn’t sit on their asses for three months before they cashed the check I sent them. It only took about two days for them to rip open the envelope and process the important parts. Nicely done.
Alright, rant over. Yesterday I went with Courtney’s family to watch some 4th of July fireworks. We got a pretty great spot, ~1200 feet from where they were firing them off. I brought my camera and tripod to try my hand at firework photography. I took about 130 before the batteries gave out, and of those I only ended up keeping 23, but that’s the upshot of digital photography. The keepers are all on my Flickr page.
Taken using a 25-second exposure time
