Hau'oli Makahiki Hou in Hawaii-- ugh. It's the one night a year where I'd rather be anywhere else.
The state has a significant minority population of Chinese descendents. It's apparently a Chinese tradition to greet the new year with fireworks. Since it's a cultural third rail, fireworks are lightly restricted and enforcement is minimal. Just about everyone honors their ancestors, whether any of them are Chinese or not.
So Hawaii goes pyromaniac crazy. "Test firings" have been sighted all week, with illegal aerial displays that rival professional 4th of July shows. Thousands of people buy $25 permits and spend hundreds of dollars on "chinese firecrackers"-- the long strings that make a machine-gun popping noise and finish up with a snare-drum-roll sound explosion. Minimum loadout is considered rolls of up to 100,000 but of course testosterone poisoning takes that up into the millions.
Sunday will dawn to sporadic explosions as everyone verifies their inventory. Families will rove the streets checking their competition neighbor's plans and perhaps making an emergency ammo run. Tall poles are rigged to hang 20-foot strings of fireworks, and every year HECO has to remind people that their streetlights are not to be climbed to support pyrotechnics. Experienced homeowners hose down their roofs and give their yards a good sprinkler soaking.
The insanity starts at sunset and continues for over six hours. Over half the homes will have a crowd in their driveway lighting something. All of them have sparklers, pinwheels, and roman candles. Most of them have firecracker strings, although those are saved for midnight. At least one party on every block will be putting on an aerial display and dueling with others for air superiority. They must spend thousands on smuggling & hours on setup.
The smoke is unbelievable. Visibility drops to a couple hundred feet. Valleys fill with the haze and tendrils crawl up the hills. Movie theaters stay open to 2 AM and advertise their air-conditioning filtration systems for those with respiratory issues. Sleep, even with earplugs, is impossible before 1 AM. Of course you could barely nap during the day with earplugs, so by 10 PM the whole scene blurs into a fatigued haze of exhaustion. Veterinarians sell pet tranquilizers all week long-- over a years' volume in a few days. Every firefighter in the islands is on duty. They'll receive over 200 calls, about 50 of them for fires and the remainder for cardiac/respiratory problems or even burns/shrapnel injuries. There will be a half-dozen brushfires and perhaps even a burning roof. All police officers are on duty and patrols will cruise but the civil disorder (anarchy!) is so rampant that they'll only respond to the worst violations. Permits only matter if a citation is issued for endangerment. Even if it rains, the smoke won't clear until well into the next morning.
Entrepreneurialism runs rampant. A few years ago a woman in our neighborhood was dealing from a 38-ton stash distributed throughout her house. (The blast arc from a fire would have cleared most of the street.) It took the bomb squad a week to empty her home. She received fines & probation.
A few innovative candidates for the Darwin award will experiment with M-80s or piles of black powder. Last year two men filled balloons with welding acetylene, wedged them into sand-filled metal buckets, and lit the fuses. The shrapnel flew for dozens of yards, damaged several cars, and put one girl in the hospital. (They're facing jail time.)
On Monday the hospitals will total up the injuries and the police/firefighters will make their reports. Lawmakers & politicians will sadly shake their heads and solemnly swear that Something Must Be Done. Of course most of them are exhausted, having been up all night lighting fireworks. Some of them might even have bought permits.
I've spent over two decades learning how to safely blow things up and I just can't be a part of the mass hysteria, to say nothing of the danger. So I'll try to nap Sunday afternoon, seal the house, & stay up "on watch" while our kid spends the evening with neighboring pyromaniacs. She used to be terrified of the whole thing but a couple years ago she decided that it's "cool". She wants to spend the money competing with her friends but I offer to just set fire to her allowance to save her the trouble of standing in line at the store. Sure, parents & other grownups will be "supervising", but... Our kid pretends to understand why I won't come out to play but I don't think she really appreciates the risks. I'm just hoping that she gets tired of it now and doesn't go crazy with teen rebellion later. I guess eventually she'll scare herself and decide that it's not as much fun as it's cracked up to be.
So I'll probably be on the board Sunday night... maybe for a cheap thrill I'll even get a head start on our tax returns.
? Step daughter in spare room - let's go to a casino or something since no waves of friends/relatives are scheduled.
![:-\](https://www.early-retirement.org/sk/forums/images/smilies/undecided.gif "Undecided :-\")
) They live outside of town so we will shoot some fireworks off the back deck and have a few brew. Don't want to step beyond that as cow turds come into play. Were all pretty laid back at this point in our lives. 
