my barbecue on 3/27/10

Why this blog has been languishing in draft for the last 16 months is beyond me. It's just a blog about a barbecue, with pictures to show you exactly how I roll when it comes to throwing meat on the grill and getting it that nice smokey flavor. I didn't even notice that I had turned my grill around(I do admit to sometimes missing out on subtle details). I haven't even really decided on pic placement yet because I started putting pictures in this blog and then just forgot about it. I'm human it happens, I may come back later and go ahead and place the rest of the pictures from that day in this blog, it will just have to be one of those I sneak in hurriedly dumb a blog and then sneak out.

Since I have barbecued a few times since then of course I have a lot of pictures to go through, I actually think I have gotten a lot better in that time. I'll post this as a current post instead of sneaking it into last years count because that just wrong and while SOMETIMES I have been known to do that in this case I will bite the bullet and say yup I goofed. So enjoy these few pictures and if you're ever in the neighborhood and smell some good food come on by and get a plate.

Trailers: Transformers Dark of the moon

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

The IMF crew are being framed for a bombing at the Kremlin.  The entire department has been disavowed, they are on their own and must discover who has set them up as international terrorist, there are some new faces in the group (Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg stand out from the trailer) to help stalwart Ethan Hunt figure just how the world is on it's way to hell. And your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to hang on for the ride. Gadgets, explosions, and Tom Cruise hanging from some new climbing contraction, whats not to like?

Abduction

Nathan is your average high school teenager, nice house, great school, enjoying the life. Until his girlfriend shows him a photo from a "missing childrens" site that has a picture that when aged looks a lot like him. Of course this raises some eyebrows, and not long after seeing his picture on said site there is a knock on the door, his "parents" are shot and killed which puts Nathan and Karen on the run. Mysterious characters are searching for Nate some want to see him kept safe, others seem to want something that he has in his possession, all Nathan knows is that he wants a piece of whoever is killing his loved ones and acquaintances.

Energon Depletion Detected

So last night while attempting to watch Transformers: Dark of the Moon we got to the middle of the movie, the Rising Action as Kitsune was saying, it was starting to get Juicy, they had Sam Witwicky in a pinch and all the sudden *Poof* the lights go off. I don't mean a quick flicker I mean dark, game over, stayed at the arcade too long and they want to go home dark. Most of the lights were out though some of the things were still working(want some Willy Wonka candy, we got you). So we all decide to take a bathroom break, it was the 10 pm showing and we were all taking it pretty well. After finding the bathrooms sufficiently lit for us to relieve ourselves without having to worry about stream crossing or hitting the walls we walked out to speak to the Theater staff.

They were handing out free passes due to the fact that MOST of us had gotten cut off in the middle of our movies though I'm sure some were at the end. So as we walk out and joke with other customers what do you know MIRACULOUSLY the lights come back on, and we are all staring at each other. The darkened theater was suspicious in the first place because when you walk into the lobby and look out the front door everyone else has power. It wasn't much of a black out past the movie theater, and the fact that most of the patrons were outside the door now that the power comes back on made many of us think they just wanted to go home. It was the 4th of July and yeah it sucks to work on holidays but hey if you signed up for that money I say you work the whole night, just saying.

As they weren't going to restart the movie(hey I had my free pass in hand) it didn't matter to me or Kitsune it didn't become a free movie without them giving us our money back. Yeah yeah let me see you get a double dip opportunity and not take it, I thought so. So we know who the new bad guy is, we know who is going to day(at least up to the first half of the movie), and we have seen that Shockwave looks pretty much to the cartoon with a few minor changes. I would like to thank Michael Bay for always sticking to as much character design as is plausible. So Transformers Take 2 will either happen to day or tomorrow, seems like it pulled in a decent haul this weekend so thats nice. We might get a fourth one, dunno there are more than enough transformers you can bring to life if you so choose to keep going.

Primaldata Grill Enthusiast

This year I was honored to be asked if I would cook the meat for my family reunion, my eyes being bigger than my grill of course I said yes. After a few words in reminder from my mother and a one of my aunts it was decided I would just do the chicken. Now I must confess me and cooking chicken for my relatives and extended family always comes with a running inside the family joke, as my cousin Mack put it so perfectly "I don't know why you cook something and expect it to be here when you get back". Now I will confess my "famous" chicken is actually a family undertaking, yes I decide how hot the fire is, how many wood chips will be thrown in to each batch, and when I will pull it off but the spices as well as the spice combination is usually decided by my mother. The sauce that is usually added most times is added by Ero Kitsune, yes he has other skills besides just forcing me to sit through bad movies or coming up with catchy derogatory titles for movies, sometimes I will do it(but I will usually be dead tired by the time sauce making commences so usually his sauce is better than mine), this year it was handled by dad since Kitsune was the only brother who decided to work today(I have an excuse I was on the grill, Lank not so much unless you count Infamous 2 as some holy undertaking).

After buying my first batch of supplies my mother started marinating the chicken for me while I cleaned my grill, as not to fight over space I grabbed a large Tupperware bowl, put some soap in it, grabbed my grill brush, and decided to do the cleaning outside. a few passes of the brush to remove any leftover grease and or schmutz off each grate and a quick blast with the hose and 25 minutes later I was done. Now while I don't use all of my father's "Country Boy Grilling techniques"(my father was born and raised in AR), I do subscribe to the cover your grates in foil and pop holes through it technique. It still lets the smoke through, controls some of the flame ups,(some not all not claiming this is some holy grail of flame maintenance), and it cuts down on the amount of cleaning I have to do later. The only caveat is that I don't get the grill marks most people who just touch the food straight to the grate get, there is still minor stickage as well but no where near as bad as straight metal on flesh. This year was also a new medium for me: leg quarters. Usually I make chicken breasts and we pound them out flat so that they cook faster, but since I was cooking all of the chicken and not just trying to win the barbecue contest we decided the leg quarters would allow for more for everyone while maximizing cooking space.

Primal Files-Tech Tales:You fool no one but yourself

We've all done it, attempted to pinch a penny, cut a corner, recycle parts from something old into something new. Now while when it comes to electronics you USUALLY can do that, if the problem is a hard drive that is about to die, 9 times out of 10 you're better buying a brand new hard drive. This lovely screen belongs to a customer's computer I was trying to reload Thursday night going into Friday morning. I had two computers to work on a Gateway desktop that had mystically decided that it didn't want to recognize Windows XP anymore and a Toshiba Laptop that the owner promised he had put a new, non dieing hard drive in. To be fair the real dagger in my heart was the Gateway, as I would find later it would require at least 7 hours to load windows 7 on that computer. 7 hours, a despicable task because usually I can get a computer reloaded within 2 hours, regardless of the operating system so the fact that I started at 8 o'clock and finished around 2:30 am did not sit well. To make matters worse, I still had to load drivers for it's Surveillance system card, which added ANOTHER 2 hours to my total, to say I was exhausted is an understatement.

The Toshiba I treated like a rotisserie chicken I set it and forget it, came back in about an hour and 30 minutes and I got a nasty gram "Windows 7 could not be loaded on to this computer, all changes that have been made have not been saved". Excuse me, I just wasted a good hour waiting on you while I was running back and forth with Captain Molasses who might as well be visiting Nanoock in his home(Nanoock of the North, joke my mother used to use when we left the door open in the winter back in Jersey). So of course I restart windows on the Toshiba and begin the load again only to get a little orange message that leads to that pop up box. Why me? The customer and I had just had a DETAILED conversation as to why he needed a different hard drive, about the importantance of using a good drive(didn't have to be new new, it just had to be WORKING). I almost wanted to call him and ask if he had taken the surname Flecher and had his cousin 'Dung been in for a visit, it didn't matter where he got the drive it just needed to work.

New "series" on the ponderings:Sequels vs Remakes or Reboots

Near the tail end of May beginning of June I was trying to write a blog on my phone about Sequels, Remakes and Reboots as I was looking forwarding into the "Summer Movies Season". As we had a new "The Fast and the Furious" movie out (Fast Five), a new Xmen movie coming (X-men:First Class), another Transformers sequel(Dark of the Moon), and another Captain America reboot(Captain America:First Avenger) lightning struck in my mind. Why not talk about said differences between the types of movies as well as give my opinions on each, as well as whether I like said previous installment, attempt or incarnation. This of course was an immense undertaking filled with phone crashes(and thus lots of key strokes being lost), work stoppages due to my actual 9 to whenever, and the same basic malaise that has cause my reviews of X-men and Green Lantern to STILL be delayed(yes I know I should be Fonged).

I should be ashamed

I who read either ""Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix(870 pages) or ""Harry Potter and the half blood Prince(672 pages) in one night, a perfectly happy passenger in J.K. Rowlings latest installment of what was to be her 7 part epic(obviously it is over now, the final movie coming out within the next 30 days) took the better part of a week to finish The Elements of Style (95 pages including all introductions, forwards, prologues and acknowledgements).  Now some might say I deserve a little forgiveness because of course Elements is more of a text book than it is some sort of fanciful tale geared to grab my imagination, I say that is cold comfort. I selected the book, I checked it out, I read a few pages realizing it was more grammatically intense than it was comical lecture or humorous chiding and I still picked it up.


It was a case of not being able to get the book I wanted so I took a book it had recommended,  29 Common Writing Mistakes, I went into the library with hopes of borrowing the title so that I might finish it and do some of the exercises. Within the first 34 pages two titles stuck out at me the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (which my brother still owned a copy of from high school and it was readily available) and the previously mentioned Elements of style. As I would like to become a better writer I decided hey the first step in ANY journey is always the most important, if you would like to write better read about writing(granted writing at all would also help but I will chastise myself about that later). Anyone who knows me personally (especially my tumultuous time from 4th to 12th grade, my my my how many times was I stuck at the front of the class) knows how much I LOATHE HOMEWORK, to say I think it evil is somewhat overstated, I think it's unnecessary. I tend to learn things quickly or not at all so if in my initial reading of the textbook I didn't get everything I needed, I wasn't going to get anything. And as my test scores would often show, I tend to retain a lot I just can't stand repetitively doing it over and over and over, practice may make perfect but if you continuously stir the bowl you will either beat out all texture or else create so much gluten as to make it a chewy inedible mess. So for me to be basically signing up for *groan* homework would probably make some check the temperature in hell, hold on there bessy I'm not sitting here doing exercises I'm reading something I actually like to do.

Upon first blush it seems me and Elements are going to be at odds, it is a book built upon the foundation of BREVITY and me be brief, do I not extole on how I will say what I want for as long as I want and to the extent that I want? I warn people at least a few times a year about the fact that I will ramble on, randomisity train isn't this what I call my fine friend here. So to ask me to be brief, why I should put it down immediately shouldn't I and yet I was intrigued by the challenge. And to make matters worse why this book suggest I don't add words to the English language, THE UNMITIGATED NERVE. How dare some dusty tome from a bygone age tell me NOT to amend the English language as I see fit, though to be fair I don't do it as often as I would claim so honestly that one isn't that hard to go along with, brevity though yeah thats gonna stick in my craw. It also suggested breaking long sentences up into shorter ones and abstaining from heavy handed prose, now see that last bit I do need to work on. It suggested making sentences stronger by removing unnecessary qualifiers for example:why say something is LIKE a thing, if you feel it's a thing take a stand and call it a thing(you may have noticed that if I did a cloud of this blog over the last week or so the word LIKE is showing up a lot less). See I may be stubborn, bullheaded, and set in my ways but I don't mind a good well intentioned debate or discussion on a topic or technique. And like I said I always want to get better, being less timid in my language is actually something that I want to do, the fact that I have banned "Colorful Metaphors" from this blog means at times I have rambled on to say something that a quick two word sentence might have been employed for on wordpress or multiply.

Now of course this would not be a book on grammar or writing if punctuation did not rear it's vile head, what can I say I BARELY put my commas in the right place, and if I really wanted to be better I would let a more grammatically gifted friend edit me before I posted. That is what I wanted though: ideas, suggestions and directions upon which to better improve the quality of my writing and thus the presentation of my blog. And the Elements of Style while stern in its call for less digital diarrhea isn't so cruel as to say it's his way or the highway, just that when you look at a few well chosen examples isn't less more? Isn't being direct and forthright with your imagery and thoughts a better usage of your time and page space. I say yes, so while I will still write long and lengthy blogs they will be long not because I wasted 10 words to figure out how to say 5 but because I found the right  5 words to get my point across and expounded upon that thought in a more connected nature.






































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