Bigger, brighter, louder, and I still have all my fingers!

So the nextdoor neighbor decided to have Fourth of July fireworks a day early. Her dad appointed me to be the head Firework Pyro honcho guy. No problem, right? This is Michigan after all; any firework which goes "poot!" is basically illegal here.

Wrong. This being my neighbor, she sent some friends down to Ohio to get an arsenal large enough to take over France. Some of her friends brought Ohio fireworks too. Has anybody here ever seen one of those 'airplane' type fireworks which take off from the ground, fly up 50 feet or so, then explode? I hadn't, and I didn't know what it would do exactly when we lit it. We had some, but something went wrong and they went flying within a yard or so of some teens sitting on a blanket. Then it blew up. Whee.

Later on, we found one of those motar-type fireworks, the ones where you put the actual firework in a cardboard tube, light it, then run away as it shoots up into sky then explodes in a ball of colorful sparks (Last year I put one of the shells in upside-down). This time around, we didn't have a carboard tube, but we did have PVC tubes which we had been usuing to shott bottle rockets. We stuck the motar shell in there, lit it, and ran. Unfortunately, the tube was too small. The shell didn't shoot up at all, but exploded a foot off the ground and shot sparks and crap directly at all the observers.

We were almost out of fireworks when we realized one of the guys has put a whole packet of small bottlerockets into one of the PVC tubes, after trying to light them all. We couldn't grab them; they were too far in. Two other guys realized we still had a fountain firework, and came up with a very, very, very foolish idea that we all thought was swell and dandy at the time.

That's exactly what we did, too. After we jammed the fountain into the tube, we ran away as far as possible. The fountain did set off a few of the rockets, but not all of them. Sparks were flying out of that tube at an astonishing rate. Then it all caught on fire. Yep, flames went shooting out of the tube and the remaining stuff just all burned. We panicked, and used up half the water in our water bucket (one of the few safety precautions we had) to put it out. We tried to kick out the PVC tube and poke out whatever was still in there, but the tube simply flopped onto its side when we kicked it. We were thoroughly scared at this point, and after one final firework we covered everything in water and ran away as fast as possible.

Surprisingly, no one got hurt at all last night.