Two nights ago The Woman and I were sitting here watching some tube. Evening time sometime...7:30 sometime.

Boom!! from off in the distance. Sounded like it might have been a nasty car crash on the main thoroughfare a half mile away. A 50 mile an hour or more head on, or something. No sirens after given enough time...not a crash...oh well...something happened.

Turned out some kid had been out metal detecting...found a WWII era mortar. The PoPo came, of course. They, in turn, called the Higher ups...who, in turn called higher ups until peeps from the 101st Screaming Eagles..."nuts" airborne arrived. They decided it was too unstable to move...this after some kid dug it out of the ground. So they blew it up in situ...8-10 miles from here. Turns out it was in fact live...so boom...big boom.

I guess they detonated it with explosives??? More than likely the explosion of the PoPo's stuff surpassed the the explosion the mortar would have made but regardless it was a nice size explosion especially given the distance from here to where they set it off.

When I was 10 years old or so, we were living in Corpus Christi...we had gone to South Padre for the day. The sisters and I decided to have a race over the sand dunes. Off we go up and over this good sized dune...as I cleared the top I noticed something in the sand. On the way back, I searched it out and pulled a mortar shell out of the sand.

Took it to the car...old man examines it and tells me to get rid of it. I just sat it up on the beach...disappointed that the old man wouldn't let me keep it as a souvenir. Could have been live, could have been a dummy?? Too, young to know was I, at the time...may be you can't even tell by visual examination. Over time, I came to see the old man's wisdom in not dragging that thing around but boy, I sure did want it.