America, Spread Your Golden Wings

I don't know about you, but my 4th of July ended with a bang. St. Cloud, a city south of Orlando, had quite an impressive fireworks display over East Lake Tohopekaliga (try saying that 10 times fast). I had a great view of it all from a camping chair on the beach.

It's interesting, though, because fireworks now seem a pretty normal part of life. Down here in Florida we love our fireworks - or maybe it would be more honest to say that our tourists love our fireworks. In the past month, I already saw fireworks three times over at Disney World. Both Magic Kingdom's Wishes and Epcot's IllumiNations shows have fireworks every night. That is a lot of fireworks!

Epcot IllumiNations June 2013

When I think of July 4th, I think of time with family, burgers and hot dogs on the grill, and lake boat rides. Despite having moved about thirteen states south of the 4th of July location of my youth, I was able to have all of these in Florida. Although I am usually quite quiet and reserved, I do know how to speak up. This year I used that ability to get invited to spend the 4th with a family I met when I moved down. The husband and wife work at Wycliffe, and I got in touch with them because the husband's sister and her family are long-time friends from MA. My new friends were so welcoming and encouraging as I transitioned to living in Florida. I had a great time getting to know them better last Thursday. It certainly helped that they had a pontoon boat to take out on the Florida lakes. Never mind that we got caught out in one of this season's daily afternoon rain storms. :-)

Saturday I learned an important lesson: the Florida summer sun is powerful. I went to the beach with the young adults group at my church and despite reapplying sunscreen multiple times and sitting under a towel whenever I wasn't in the water, I still managed to get a sunburn on my shoulders. Lesson learned.

Work is going well. Today I learned that I successfully completed a crucial step in the first big project given to me when I started. Wycliffe has several representatives attending a large conference in Texas this coming week, and several weeks ago I was given the task of pulling together materials for them to use at their booth, setting up the booth in the office and taking photographs, and then mailing all the supplies and emailing instructions to Texas. I heard today that the boxes of supplies arrived in Texas. Success.

P.S. The title of this post, for those of you who don't know, is from a song played during the show in the United States at Epcot's World Showcase. The music is quite majestic...and definitely emotionally manipulative.