I hate to do it, but I am closing comments on this one post for the night (or maybe longer). This one post is getting slammed by comment spammers from Russia, and I don’t have the time or patience to deal with it right now. I’ll open comments on it again tomorrow to see if it’s stopped, but enough is enough for now.

Well before my alarm was set to go off I was awakened by the dual sounds of metal chairs being rapidly set up in rows and a vocal group practicing on the giant PA system. I could have done without all the chair noises, but there are worse ways to wake up than hearing some excellent singers singing patriotic tunes. I quickly got dressed and went outside to roam around and investigate.

The weather had turned most foul. Very cold, windy and wet. Yuck. Still, there was plenty of activity to keep me entertained while I wandered around and shivered … like oodles of young people in spit-shined shoes and well-pressed uniforms setting up all those chairs.

They were really quick about getting all the chairs lined up, but unfortunately for them, someone with a lot of brass on his chest wasn’t pleased with the final result and gave them a dressing-down about it.

“When I say I want the chairs set up thirty-four inches apart, I do not mean thirty-four and a half, thirty-four and a quarter, or thirty-three and three-quarters! I mean thirty-four inches!”

I tried not to laugh while they were getting yelled at in a stereotypically booming military way, but I couldn’t help myself. Yardsticks magically appeared from somewhere, and the young military personnel set about making certain each chair was exactly thirty-four inches apart while I hustled back inside to stand in front of the gas heater in the living room and rid myself of an awful chill.

It wasn’t too long before Mom wanted to get out to our seats. I certainly could have waited a little longer, considering how vile the weather was out there, but she wanted to be sure we got good seats, so off we went at 8:30 am for a 9:30 am event. I grabbed the tickets, and we asked the first person we saw handing out programs where we should sit, even though I already knew what section we were in (having scoped that out while watching the earlier chair escapades). A very young and well-uniformed Navy boy escorted us to our section, and we found our seats up in the front. I was already feeling far too cold, because I was, of course, dressed nicely and not dressed properly for the weather.

And then we sat … and sat … and 9:30 am came and went … and we sat some more. Not wanting to take the chance of losing our prime seeing, hearing, and photographing seats, we sat there and suffered. Mom did make a quick trip back to the house to use the restroom and to grab a nice warm wool blanket for us to snuggle under about an hour earlier, for which I am eternally grateful. It was really, really getting cold and nasty. I spent the time alternately shivering uncontrollbly and taking photos of the crowd, like this one of the press box.

Finally everyone who was supposed to be up at the podium arrived^† most importantly, Number 41 and his wife, Barbara.

The show finally started at about 11 am. I was pretty much a popsicle by then. After some local bigwigs spoke, the Big Brass scheduled to speak got up and had his say.

I could get out my program and look up his name, but I can’t be bothered. His speech annoyed me. A great part of it was his disgust with how World War II is presented in school history books. His main complaints? There are only a few pages about it, and horror of horrors, there are some people who believe dropping nuclear bombs on the civilian populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima shouldn’t be considered a good thing to do. I’m accustomed to high-level and older military people being really rah-rah about World War II and the dropping of large and deadly bombs on people, but this guy was over-the-top.

Considering there were a large number of elderly Japanese who were alive during the war (and the Japanese have been so wonderful to my hometown and the museum–not to mention being great friends of America now), it felt a little less than polite to stand up there and complain that some people think killing and maiming a bunch of civilians in Japan might not have been such a wonderful thing to do. In fact, I thought it was quite rude, as was the cheering, hooting, and general rah-rah attitude coming from some people in the crowd who weren’t old enough to be alive back then and likely have no clue what those bombs did to the people who had them dropped on them.^††

There was a little more speechifying, and then we finally got to the ribbon cutting. I was ever so grateful, because I was just about as cold and damp as I ever care to get, and I was beginning to feel sickish.

Mom and I took off for the house almost as soon as the ribbon dropped. While there was all manner of activity on the street afterward with the chairs being taken down and some bands playing and whatnot, we did not leave the house again. It was too warm indoors and too nasty outdoors, and we’d had just about enough of being out the cold and wet weather … so another evening of hot chocolate, good food, and sitting by heaters watching heartwarming TV programming for us!

Previous posts on this big weekend: Day of Arrival and Fun Day Sunday.

1. † Everyone except Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Her absence and the reasons for it deserves a post of its own and will get one soon. [↩]
2. †† And just so you know it was just little bleeding-heart me that thought his speech was way over the line, even my super right-wing, kill-them-all-let-god-sort-them-out mom was totally put off by this guy’s going on about how wrong it was for anyone to think dropping the bombs wasn’t something to be proud and happy about. [↩]