Sticks of fruit and fire

Oh, my goodness. Yesterday was our annual street party. I am worn out and it's a wonder the kids got up to go to school.

We do lots of stuff at this party -- there are races and face painting and a rummage sale -- but the big fun and excitement for me comes in the evening, when we have a potluck supper and live music. I was making lists for a week, looking at recipes, counting my guests... The one super thing I did this year was make rainbow fruit skewers!

Raspberry, orange, pineapple, green grape, blueberry, purple grape. We could have done kiwi, but Arthur was with me when I was shopping and he doesn't like kiwi. We got some peaches for orange, but the flesh was not very orange after all. Next time I might use strawberries instead of raspberries because I think they would be better anchors on the ends -- the raspberries were a bit delicate for the job. But all in all, a success.

No food pictures were taken in between assembling the skewers inside and finding them almost gone on the table! (I also made corn on the cob and was kind of peeved when the person in front of me in line got the last piece! Luckily that person was Elaine and she gave me the last bit of hers!)

This is my front hall table this morning. Plastic wine glasses, discarded sunhats, candles and sparkler packages. I am the Sparkler Lady, you know. My neighbour gets a ton of sparklers from his pyrotechnic pal, and we keep the kids amused with them at the end of the evening when the music is over and the adults are taking down tables and gathering up their chairs and dirty dishes and empty wine bottles. I don't know what happened this year, but I think we had both more sparklers than usual, and fewer kids than usual! We had 580 sparklers, and maybe only 20 or 30 kids, so we have sparklers for Canada Day, and probably sparklers for next year's party as well! Arthur made a movie of his friend with sparklers blazing on the back of a skateboard, so I'll see if I can show you that another time.

Now, it is back to washing the dishes and sweeping out all the maple keys that blew in the door that stood open all day. Oh, and the last task of Sparkler Lady is to fit all those spent metal sticks into a garbage bag without injuring herself!