How I Became An Egghead

One of the dangers of spending any time in the South is the taste you acquire for its food, namely pig, slowly cooked over several hours in a smoky black barrel somewhere in the vicinity of a trailer park. The barrel itself looks as if it belongs with a blacksmith. Tending to it is usually some fat guy in a dirty tank top who last used deodorant during the first Bush presidency and looks as if he just spent some quality time underneath an oil-gushing Ford.

Such places do exist in Minnesota, but they're not as common. And so, upon my return to the state of my birth five years ago, I took up smoking.

Food. Not tobacco. (I did smoke tobacco, briefly during and after college, which made all sorts of sense, given that before and after college I had no money, so naturally I threw what I had away on useless cancer sticks; apparently, if my college offered, "Common Sense 101," I missed it; or maybe I did have it, it was scheduled at 8 a.m. and I slept through it, just like mythology.)

I had already been the household grillmaster and had wrested from The Wife the title of Household Cook, when I saw a friend smoke all sorts of meat on his smoker. So I invested in a cheap, electric version purchased on Craigslist. It was small, black and barrel shaped and smelled like wood. It worked fine for a while. Better yet, it was easy. And there's nothing I like more than easy. Especially easy food. The less effort required to get grub gets into my digestive system, the better.

The only problem I had with the smoker, other than the fact that it looked like a poorly-made rocket done in by a shrinking ray and painted black, was that it was useless when it got cold. And the last time I checked, my address said I lived in Minnesota. And it tends to get cold here for several months out of the year. Unfortunately, my love for the cooked pig doesn't end when the temperature drops. So off I started looking for a new smoker.

The Wife is afraid of three things: clowns, more clowns, and me uttering the phrase, "I need a new grill." Because she knows the potential for financial and/or physical harm that such a purchase can bring upon a household. And there are three things I'm afraid of: fricking rabbits, my kids uttering the phrase, "Dad, can we get a (FILL IN THE BLANK)," and my wife's reaction when I say, "I need a new grill." That's why I didn't tell her that I needed a new smoker for about a year.

And it's also why I didn't tell here exactly what kind of smoker I wanted.

See, when you begin researching smokers, eventually you come across the Big Green Egg. For those of you who don't know, the Big Green Egg is big, green and egg-shaped. The Egg smokes, but according to its enthusiastic users it does everything else, too: cooks steaks, makes pizza, bakes bread, makes cookies, laughs at your jokes about your mother-in-law, finishes your beer, babysits your children, and rescues cats from trees. It also cooks year-round, meaning I'll be able to stand on my deck smoking a pork butt in the middle of a mid-January snowstorm wearing bunny slippers. Woohoo!

(No, I don't wear bunny slippers; I would wear them, however, if they were made from actual bunnies ... that came from my yard.)

Egg owners are called Eggheads. And their boasts about the grill are legendary. Go to any smoking forum, and bring up, "What smoker should I get," and Eggheads will pop out of the woodwork like seagulls to a piece of bread or old people to a garage sale. All of them will say, "Get an Egg! It cooks everything! It lights up fast and uses less charcoal! It's like God made a grill and bestowed it unto His people! You will never leave the house again because you'll be too busy cooking! The food it cooks is orgasmic! GET IT! GET IT NOW!!!"

I NEEDED this egg. The moment I found out about it, I realized that I would stop at nothing to get my hands on one. Only, there was one problem: It's not exactly cheap. The Egg is an expensive grill that you keep shoveling money into once you get it. So not only do you have to spend hundreds of dollars on the grill itself, you have to buy all of these "eggcessories" so you can cook with it properly. You have to get something to enable you to cook indirectly. Then you have to buy something to stir the ashes. And then another device to lift the grate. And of course you have to build a nice table for it, lest all other Egg users laugh and call you sissy boy. By the time you're done your children are selling apples downtown so you can make your next mortgage payment. And you're selling stuff you've made on the Egg.

But such was my desire that I got it, anyway (Just a few more bushels of apples sold and we'll have that mortgage, boys!). Which brought me to one other problem: the egg weighs about as much as a Honda Civic with a family of four still inside. It's heavy. And as it's made of ceramic, meaning that one mistake and your egg will go Humpty Dumpty all over the ground. So I employed my 16-year-old nephew, who has recently become huge. He lifted the egg like it was an actual egg, and we got it home in one piece.

(Seriously, how did that happen? Here's a kid I used to spin around the parking lot over and over and over again and now he could probably do that to me; come to think of it, that kinda sounds like fun ...)

It's here that I'd like to say that I made a bunch of food and it was all awesome and that's the end. And so I will. But I'm glad to say that I haven't purchased all of the eggcessories they offer: I drew the line at the Big Green Egg corn holders.

Escaping Yard Work The Hard And Painful Way

Someone in the 1970s looked at homes around the country and declared, "You know what this yard needs? MORE ROCKS!" The result was a decorative landscaping rock trend that today is the bane of my existence. Someone somewhere leveled a mountain, broke it up into a million billion rocks, smoothed them out, and then spread them all around my house. I hate every single one of them, especially those that venture out into my lawn shortly before mowing time.

One particularly notable patch of rocks is in my back yard, where the drunk farmer who built my house decided to put an unsightly, raised area of decorative rocks. Did he plant anything in this patch? No. It's just rocks. Well, rocks and weeds now. And my central air unit, which is old. Probably older than the house, really. I think someone discarded it here back in 1977 and the house-building farmer decided to use it. A friend of mine once, upon walking in my yard and seeing the air conditioner, said, "What the heck is THAT thing?"

The job of that rock patch for the last few years, besides serving as a weed haven, is to be the object of my constant declarations of, "I'm going to do something about that." Of course, the job of transplanting decorative rocks from one part of my house to another, or to the driveway where some poor Craigslist shopper will take them, isn't exactly fun, and so I've usually found other things to do, such as anything. (Seriously, didn't Alabama chain gangs shovel rocks as punishment? Why would I want to do that?) Five years after we moved in, that patch is still there.

But this afternoon, in a fit of responsibility, I took my wheelbarrow and a shovel and got to work, shoveling rocks. I had asked The Boy if he wanted to help and earn some extra money, and apparently, after remembering the Alabama chain gang reference, decided that playing his skateboarding game would be more fun.

So I went back there and started shoveling. I periodically had a visitor in the form of my toddler, but asked The Wife to remove him, because toddlers and rocks really don't go well together -- or perhaps they go too well. Besides, some of those rocks would be flying from my shovel, and hitting my toddler with rocks is not how I want to end the weekend.

I started humming old blues songs, shoveling away, when I felt something on my ankle. Something painful. I looked down.

Wasp!

Apparently, wasps don't like it when you dig up their home. I shoved it out of the way, then felt something else painful. I took my shoe and sock off. I felt another sting of pain. More wasps! So I did what all the backyard survival books tell me to do, I began yelling and running while doing the Adult Wasp Dance. I yelled and danced my way into the front yard, hoping that someone would see me and come to my assistance. They didn't, meaning my neighbors (and family members) probably didn't think I was doing anything abnormal, at least for me.

I had about a million wasps coating my ankles and legs. OK, I had fewer than that. A dozen. OK, a half-dozen. I went into the house, having left a trail of shoes and socks and sunglasses and pride in my wake. I ran straight to the shower, figuring that the 5 million wasps I was certain were still on me looking to do some a-stingin' would run away and die at the first drop of lukewarm shower water.

I have been stung by a bee precisely once in my life. I was 3. And it hurt. But that didn't cause my fear of bees and wasps. That fear was already well ingrained, because I'm human, and it's a human instinct to act crazily the moment we see anything with a stinger on its butt. Now that I've been stung again, that fear has been magnified. I've been seeing and hearing bees everywhere since removing myself from the shower. I haven't gone outside since then, either, so my shoes and socks are still on the lawn.

And, indeed, the first dose of removed footwear is still near the yellow jacket nest, driving them crazy. We looked out the window and saw my shoe. It was under a relentless attack by a nest's worth of wasps. An hour later, the swarm was still there, though they were clearly tired, as a few were taking breaks. Nearby were my shovel, my wheelbarrow and a metal rake I was using for the job. And there they will stay until I can get myself a hazard suit. Or maybe a suit of armor.

The good news is that my eldest opted against earning money and my wife removed my youngest, or else they'd be the ones with stings, and it's one thing for a wasp to sting me, but them things had better not sting my kids. Or I'll go all gasoline-and-propane torch on them.

I guess this was just nature's way of telling me to sit around the house more often.