After hitting the 80’s on Sunday, with morning rain adding to the humidity and clear afternoon skies letting the sun beat down on this part of the world, I made the walk to the road with my offering to the gods of the waste wagon while watching my breath fog out of my mouth. What a crazy spring this has already turned out to be. It seems as if we have had as much cold weather since the start of spring as we did in the entirity of the winter season…Not true I know, but it sure seems so. And winds…Lord the wind has blown in the past year. Day after day, it drives my wife crazy. Me I perfer a good swift breeze on  a warm day, more insulation on this body than my wife has.

The sun is up today. No clouds. Temperature right know is 48°. Yesterday at this time it was foggy…very foggy. The wind was blowing the fog around. The trees were dripping all over everything. The tarp I strung up to protect the bar-b-q pit on Sunday had a steady stream of water running off the low corner. That tarp saved me though on Sunday as the front moved through. It took me most of an hour early Sunday to get everything lined out and the tarp up, get the fire started, start laying the meat in the pit. Then the rain blew through in about thirty minutes total. There was a lot more rain just north of here , but that seems to be our patern for the last few years…Lots of rain just north of I10 not so much (if any) down here where we are.

Sunday we had all of the kids and their significants and their kids over for the afternoon. Ended up with eleven adults and two youngsters. Lots of smoked meats, a ham, potato salad, cole slaw and baked beans. Everyone seemed to have a pretty good time and if I say so myself, the meats came out better than normal. The fact that I couldn’t get the temperature on the pit over 175° for most of the cooking time probably had a lot to do with the flavor. The last hour or so the temperature did finally climb over 200 which gave everything a nice little crust that wasn’t burned…I sure had the smoke chamber full though. I was using sausage links as spacers between lavers of meats at some points during the cooking time. I even used some of my “Ike” wood for the fire to supply some smoke. It’s not quite all the way dry oak I stacked off to one side while I was cutting up some of the smaller limbs that were down…I’ll have to cut most of it up into chunks because even though it was the smaller limbs it’s sytill a bit large for the firebox on the pit. But everthing said there should be enough stacked to make the season anyhow…