i'm home, dear
oh, were you gone
i suffered cyberinterruptus a month ago
oh that's what it was

this particular holiday celebration has never excited me. both terms in 'liberty and justice for all' always strike me as somewhere between inexact and irrelevant to the real world. but i always enjoyed the quality time the 4th gives me with my puter. and this time i can celebrate my return to the net with unabashed joy.

three noteworthy additions
1 - i'm now living on the second floor so i get to actually watch the free fireworks show for the first time while listening to my neighbors celebrating their liberty with real guns.
2 - i'm working hard at getting down adding my liberty slideshow to today's blog and with a little luck it will appear in the final version of this blog somewhere along here.

worth 1000 runs 'contests' to encourage photoshoppers to play with photos on particular thems. they recently ran one i've called their most recent one liberty redux using the statute of liberty as a base. somewhere within or elsewhere, there was a suggestion that the white house press office should have simply photoshopped airforce one on a pic of the ol girl instead of sending the real thing by for a flyover. at least obama wouldn't have had to apologize.
3 - and that provides me a not bad seque to some good ol gw irony. even in the new era, living in oklahoma still invites comparison to living in utah with baptists substituted for mormons. and northwest oklahoma had a firm lock on redness way before it became symbolic of your politics rather than the color of your neck*.
so it shouldn't surprise me that gw should take the lead from richard nixon and pick the area for public return from an ignominious end to a presidency. nixon went to enid; gw is going to the 4th of july rodeo in woodward, oklahoma, as part of his going to small venues with 'real' folks plans. here's some notes from the washington post story:

WOODWARD, Okla. (AP) — When the middle-of-nowhere town of Woodward invited George W. Bush to its Fourth of July celebration, no one really expected the former president to accept. But he did. Now this community of 12,000 is scurrying to get ready for what some locals are calling the biggest thing ever to happen to Woodward, a place where cattle outnumber people.
...
About 9,200 tickets have been sold, which would be the biggest crowd for Bush since he left office in January. Over the past five months, Bush has made about a half-dozen public appearances. He seems to especially enjoy rubbing elbows with regular folk. He paid a visit to a Dallas hardware store in February. Three days later, he dropped in on a political science class at Southern Methodist University.
Asked why Bush accepted Woodward's invitation, his spokesman in Dallas, Rob Saliterman, said only: "President Bush believes there is no place better than Woodward, Oklahoma, to celebrate the Fourth of July and looks forward to being part of this event."
Though Bush left office with a dismal 34 percent approval rating, he remains popular in Oklahoma. The state hasn't voted for a Democrat for president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and was the only state in 2008 where every county voted for Republican John McCain. Bush carried 81 percent of the vote in Woodward in the 2004 elections.
"Maybe some young kids and old Democrats didn't vote for him, but I think the rest of us did," said Kris Day, who owns The Cowboy's Tack Shop with her husband. ...
Seats for the speech range from $25 to $500 for the "Oval Office Ticket," situated in the first rows, close to Bush, VIP parking and
complimentary beverages. ...

*note to self - remember when conservatives used to affiliate red with badness and communism.