Skip to main content

Chatting by the Grill

 

 Tonight we had our monthly board game night. My dad grilled the burgers that me and my mom made this afternoon, and we ended up chatting around the grill about role-playing games and podcasts and skunks.

 Actually, I only learned how to grill a week or so ago. Now that it's stopped raining so much, we've been using it every chance we get. My dad taught me what temperature to cook at, that you should leave some spots warm but not hot, that sometimes all the grease dripping into the flame causes a big dramatic kick-up, plus all the special ways that our grill in particular is broken but still safe to use, promise. He said that the bonus to grilling at events is that nobody expects you to talk too much, because you're focusing. The other bonus is that you are the person in charge of all the good food and food smells, so people will kind of hang around and be near you. It's a solid middle-ground of socialization. 

 I was sous-chef with the burgers, dipping out of discussions with no notice to grab paper towels and extra plates and requests for what kind of cheese people wanted. The perfect amount of socialization for me, too. And the burgers tasted great. Wonderful for everybody!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Patio

  Where gray polyvinyl chloride meets  Drying strands of grass, like wheat  Which makes no grain, only waves  In sunlit breezes through the day.  Chairs older than my oldest tooth  Wear metal grating wound with roots  From ivys which do not know poison,  Only sweet tea, coffees, the noise one  Makes when they step into the morning  After a night full of dreams like warnings.  The wind chimes snake-rattle, the mint leaves  Attempt infinity, bound in a pot that won't keep.  And the sun loves me here. He sings  To the top of my head, and makes me king.
Post a Comment
Read more

Yard Sales

 Summer means yard sale season. I love everything about it. I love the neon-green signs with sharpies and an arrow (time and address optional), I love when there's obnoxious music playing directly from someone's phone speaker, I love listening to people talk. I suspect that the most interesting conversations in the universe happen during yard-sales, something about sitting in fabric camping chairs and watching strangers rummage through your life that shakes stories loose.  This picture is from a yard-sale that a family of musicians were holding before they moved to Bali to form a jazz band. I admit, I eavesdrop.  At yard sales, I've seen skateboards, bunnies, entire dining room sets, a marionette puppet, and cumulatively enough graphic tee-shirts to clothe my high school's graduating class twice-over. And I don't even make a hobby of going to yard-sales, I just follow the arrows when I come across them.   I think that my favorite part about yard sales is the ele...
1 comment
Read more

My Crappy Dorm Room

 I'm moving out of my crappy dorm room tomorrow, and then I'll be back in my home town for a few months. I'm going to wake up in the morning, file paperwork with Human Resources, take a final exam, ferry boxes and bags into a car which will drive to the storage locker place, ferry the boxes and bags into the storage locker, drive the car back to my crappy dorm room, ferry more boxes and bags into the car, drive the car back home to my parents' house, and then I'm going to fall asleep, surrounded by unpacked things which I can only imagine will be resentful of their cardboard trappings and will probably haunt me in my nightmares. I'm really looking forward to it.  The truth is that I've come to love my crappy dorm room. One time, me and my roommate saw a fawn walking by a meter from our window. My walls were covered in postcards from people important to me. We filled the room up with lamps so we never had to turn on the ugly florescent overhead light. Yes, we...
Post a Comment
Read more