LARGETONY Blog

The beginning of a pretty busy weekend. Got a little money in my pocket (payday yesterday. Whoo-hoo!) and a full schedule. Making a little extra money today working the big “Boomsday” event down in Knoxville. It’s a multi-million dollar fireworks display that the city has every year on the river downtown. It’s supposedly the biggest fireworks event in the southeastern US. They close the main bridge downtown and use it to launch every kind of fireworks you can imagine. And its all synched up with a series of music clips on one of the local radio station. For example, one of the big moments is the “waterfall of fire” where the big sprakling fireworks cascade off the sides of the bridge into the river while the play “Rhapsody In Blue” and they have orange colored fireworks while playing “Rocky Top“. For those of you who do not know, orange (and white) are the school colors at the University of Tennessee (which is in Knoxville about a 1/4 mile from the fireworks) and “Rocky Top” has become sort of the official “Pep Song” at athletic events. Footballl is HUGE in Knoxville. It’s practically a religion. There are two things that shut down the city of Knoxville: a home football game and Boomsday. When either of those events is going on, basically nothing else is happening in town. The football stadium, which also over-looks the river, is one of the three largest in the country with something like 108,000 seats. I think the other two are Univ of Michigan and Univ of Florida (Tennessee’s most hated rival.)

Now both Boomsday and a home game (season opener) are happening on the same weekend. Traffic in Knoxville is always a bit of a nightmare (some section of I-40, which runs through town, is always under construction and has been since before I was alive) and it increases on game day. In the last two hours before a game, or the two hours following, don;t bother to leave the house unless going to the game. Times like that I am glad I don’t live in Knoxville.

Normally Boomsday happens on Labor Day, but this year its on a Saturday. And normally football games are on Saturday, but this one is on a Sunday. So Saturday (today) I’m gonna go work the event, then tomorrow going to the football game.

The sun is about to come up, so I need to go take care of getting my granny up and get breakfast for her. It’s not too hot and humid yet, so I think I’m gonna have an apple and a bowl of oatmeal out on the back porch.

After that, it’s off to do the regualr Saturday shopping for groceries and household stuff and house cleaning. Gotta get it done pretty early and get down to Knoxville. Wish I could stay afterward and go out for while tonight, but with everything going on, I’ve been lucky to get some folks to look after my granny for me as it is. So, I’m gonna drive back home.

Ya’ll have a great day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 4th, 2004 at 7:08 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.