I started off my Fourth of July by sleeping in until 3pm. It seems that twelve hours is the amount of time I sleep naturally if I don’t set an alarm, which is okay with me – the only problem being that it’s hard to stay on a consistent schedule with a non-24-hour sleeping/not sleeping cycle. This is why I end up being nocturnal.

Pretty much everywhere was closed and I didn’t particularly feel like cooking, so I wandered across the street to the Thai place and got a sandwich and a bubble tea. Some Hacker Schoolers mentioned a meetup in Prospect Park, which is uphill from my apartment by just a few blocks, so I started walking. Not two blocks away from my apartment, I found a 2″ stack of comic books (spiderman, batman, x-men, etc.) on the ground on the sidewalk, obviously placed there for someone to take. There weren’t any rare or old episodes, but it seemed like a neat find so I took them back to my apartment, buzzing upstairs and getting Levi to let me in because my hands were full.

I tried my walk to Prospect Park again, and it was actually a 20-or-so minute walk. Still, the weather was very nice (in the shade) and I drank my bubble tea along the walk. What I didn’t realize is that Prospect Park is huge. I wandered for 10 minutes before realizing that I was going in the wrong direction, and then turned around and walked a half hour before finding Richard and his (Girlfriend?) sitting on the grass between baseball fields 1 and 2. We sat and chatted for a long while, and Ian, Martin, and Alex eventually joined us. All in all, we spent probably four hours sitting and chatting about various topics. It was incredibly nice out, and despite a few small, non-biting ants and beetles, there were no bugs or other annoyances.

At sundown, we walked through the throngs of people grilling near the edge of the park, where grilling is permitted, and I hopped on the F to 4th Av/9th st, which is close to my apartment. I bought some beer and ginger ale on the way home at a small market, and went up on the roof to see if I could see any fireworks. The neighbors from two apartments over were also on their roof, and they invited me over, so I hopped over (the roofs are connected), and hung out with them for a while. I met one guy, Dan, who worked in Finance, and we chatted for a bit – there were probably a dozen of the neighbors, in their mid to late twenties.

The beer I got (Shock Top Apple Something) was really awful and I’m probably just going to dump most of it, which is a shame. It was pretty much halfway between a apple cider and a beer, except that the apple flavor was that terrible fake apple flavor like in laffy taffy. Ick.

There were some good fireworks around the apartment – no professional shows except way off in the distance, but plenty of small, probably illegal shows. I hung out with the neighbors for probably an hour and a half before heading back inside, where I surfed the internet for a while before heading to bed.