Lovely Fall Weekend
We had a lovely fall weekend. It was cool, cloudy and a little rainly, and we even had to shut the windows at night. But we smoked chicken on the grill and did a little bonfire for the branches and twigs that piled up in the fire pit all summer. It was quite nice.
Friday night was once again anime night. We had a quick dinner on the deck and I decided to branch out and give a mead a try - Sociable Ciderwerks Mead for Spead. I thought it was absolutely amazing - very light, with a lovely scent of honey.
After dinner it was on to the anime. We are almost finished with Gen-Lock - two more episodes to go. Martin isn’t really sold on it. I don’t think mecha is his thing. Sigh… Ace of Diamond is also wearing thin I think. Will have to get a little more creative with the next one.
Saturday was smoked chicken night. To thank Martin for the desk making, Dave brought over chicken racks for the Green Egg. One was ceramic and could be filled with beer or water to keep stuff moist, the other is just a wire rack to stand it on end. For this chicken we used the ceramic one with some of Martin’s favorite All Day IPA in it, along with some Applewood chips for the smoke. It turned out well, not smoked brisket well, but it was good. I’m just not a chicken fan, so it’s hard to get too excited over it.
After dinner, Martin went down to light up the fire pit bramble. It took a good while to get it going, and I believe all of our 3 boxes of kitchen matches. Once it was going though it made for a pleasant night by the fire. Much like at the old place near the State Fair, we could hear the Burnsville Fire Muster celebration going on across town. It gave us some interesting background noise, while we just watched the fire burn.
I can’t put into words how relaxing it was to just sit there by the fire at the end of the night. As the fire burned down, it brought out the moose design in the fire ring. About this point it started drizzling down rain on us too, but somehow that just added to the peacefulness of the evening.
The end of summer here has been super stressful, and to some extent the whole year has been busy, busy, busy. It felt like one night by the fire just pulled all that away. Perhaps some credit should also go to the remaining two cans of the Mead for Speed too.
On Sunday the little fire-pit garden looked much neater. Not only did we burn the bramble pile, but I was pulling weeds out to toss in the mix as the evening went on too. It had gotten quite out of hand back there, and I had no time and energy for garden maintenance this year.
I managed to twist Martin’s arm into playing a bit of GW2 with Dave and I for a bit Sunday afternoon. It was fun to run around with other people out there again. Martin pulled out a few different characters and ran with us for a few hours until signing off to feed the cats. It was a good time to call it for the afternoon as I was getting hungry too. Had more of that smoked chicken warmed up with some BBQ sauce on a roll - yum!
Anyhow, we were able to get my Revenant enough hero points to fully unlock the elite Herald class. Dave and I popped back on after the server reset for dailies and I got to run around and try it out a bit. It totally transformed playing that character for me. I went from barely surviving fights to kicking some serious ass. This was the first time in quite a while now that I had a lot of fun out there, instead of feeling like I was just working at achievement points, grinding through key-farming, or pushing alts through stories.
Now it’s Monday morning and it’s back to work. There are 10 more days of class with Playfair and then it’s graduation! Woot!
We’ve also got a second chicken waiting in the wings. It looks like rain for today, so current plan is to smoke up the other one tomorrow. Planning to try the dry rack this time.