Smoke is good

Last night friends were over at my house and I was grilling hamburgers. Man it smelled good! We were all seated at the patio table and the grill was about 3 feet away from us. Don't ask me why I didn't move the grill a little farther away but I didn't so we were surrounded in burger smoke.

In Texas in July, it's about 700 degrees during the day but the nights are a little better. They usually range from 600 to 700 degrees. Because it was so hot outside I got out my trusty shop fan and aimed it right at us so our flesh didn't start bubbling and making sounds like frying bacon. As hamburgers are prone to do when they are cooking, they were smoking quite a bit. And since I was cooking 19 patties, it sort of looked like the house was on fire from all of the smoke boiling out of the back yard. We were having a grand old time visiting while being in the vortex of an extremely dense cloud of burger smoke thanks to the shop fan. I looked out across my back yard and tried to see the neighbors house, but the smoke was so dense, it was hard to make out. Excellent!

I must admit that I am a pyromaniac. I love fires. The bigger the better. In the grill, in the chimenea, in the fire pit. I collect sticks from the yard so I'll have something to burn. Mr. Wonderful and I have have a little place in the country and our house is surrounded on 3 sides by the woods. This makes me very happy because I have an inexhaustable supply of wood. I can make a fire burn 20 feet high and not run out of wood. It's a pyro's nirvana. See my friend's coat? All that white stuff is ashes. We burn lots of cedar which makes lots of floaty ashes. See how the ground looks like it snowed? It didn't.  It's just of ashes. And the fire in the picture? That's a little one. Do I need to mention that it gets pretty smoky? Sometimes the smoke floats down low, filling the creek bottom and the yard. It looks really cool in a horror movie sort of way. You sort of expect to see a zombie crawling around or something.

Anybody who has been around me more than once knows that I love fires. If you're going to come to my house, you're probably going to leave smelling like smoke. It's just a fact of life. When the temperatures outside are cool, there will be a fire in the chimenea. Since it's so stinkin' hot right now, I'm biding my time because I don't want to add heat to the inferno, but I can grill. And grills use fire. Guess that'll have to do for now.  Don't worry about showering before you come over because you'll probably want to when you get home so your house doesn't smell like smoke. And you might be ashy, too.

Peace, Love and Fire