Up, Up And Awaaaayyyy!

We got to watch the Space Shuttle launch at 8:47 this evening. It was a spectacular event, to say the least...

When the rockets first lit off, we could see a huge ball of orange light reflected off of the clouds on the horizon. (Click on the pictures to make them bigger)

Then the bright orange light rose up from the ground.

Everybody was holding their breath as the shuttle kept heading up to the sky, and beyond.

It was amazing to watch as the flames broke in and out of the clouds. The light became pretty dim after that, with the exception of a brief blue-white flare-up of the exhaust, then it settled back down to the usual orange color, until we couldn't see it anymore.

For the most part, before we went out to the Courtney Campbell Causeway to watch the shuttle go up, we spent most of the day installing the Christmas lights in the yard.

Katrina and Jaime worked on the side yard, while Luann and I worked on the front systems. You can see Jaime is wearing her trademarked, blank stare...

And then she kicked back into gear and helped by swapping around some flasher lamps to find some good ones to put in the non-flashing strings.

After we were done, we treated ourselves to some snow cones, because it was a bit warm and we have been wanting to stop this cute little cart and see how good their snow cones are. Result: Not bad...