Maintaining a Blog is Hard Work

As I go through the ins and outs of my sometimes exciting, mostly mundane life, something will happen and I think “oh good — I’ll put this in the blog.” But when it comes down to writing, somehow grilling legs of lamb in the rain for my parents 50th wedding anniversary or monogramming cupcakes at 2 a.m. for my cousin Kim’s wedding doesn’t feel like something anyone would be interested in. Or I start to write and what was meant to be a quick paragraph and it turns into several paragraphs of turgid prose.

But blogging is a bit like flying without a net and being able to share without tremendous consideration of constraint. I have told a few friends about the lamb and cupcakes and they liked the stories so…

Here are the highlights of the grilled lamb story and cupcake stories (aside from the astonishing fact that my parents have been married for 50 years and that my lovely cousin Kim began her new life as a married).

The lovely lamb was marinating in a potent rub of olive oil, garlic, rosemary, and oregano. It was indeed raining, more like a light drizzle, but enough to produce a very slick surface on the wooden deck. Safety is indeed important, so I did my best to dry things off, but the deck appeared to be under a thick coating of Vaseline.

I laid down old newspapers, which helped a lot, but I didn’t cover the entire deck. I got the hardwood charcoal going in a chimney starter (a Godsend of a tool) and when the coals became gray, I dumped them atop the coals that I had piled into a neat hill on one side of the grill, so that I would have a hot and cooler side.

With the still super-hot chimney starter held tightly in one hand by its cool handle, I carefully walked towards the deck steps to place the hot chimney on the stone walkway to cool. Well, I hit a slippery patch and placed an arm out for balance, for certainly a wipeout with a hot metal cylinder (likely some residual coals remained inside) was not going to be pretty.

In the nanosecond of my potential fall I realized I was readying to brace myself on the lid of the now-hot grill. So I did my best to spin. Did I mention I was in flip-flops? I spun enough to momentarily steady myself on the propane grill (a good use for it I think), but the flip-flop was having no part of being still with so much slippery mischief about. So I kept moving.

I quickly lunged one leg out, not sure where it would land, as my head was not facing forward but still engaged in the don’t-land-on-the-hot-grill twist. I went forward and my foot landed on the bulkhead, which I sorta pinballed off of. One flip-flop did slip off at one point and landed on the grass where I did, too, on one knee — still holding the hot chimney in hand.

I sat still for a moment knowing nothing serious had happened to my body. It was then that I could smell the burning rubber of the errant flip-flop. A small ember had escaped the chimney and landed on the “shoe.” It melted a gooey hole.

I said “thanks” to all the Gods I could think of, several lessons learned.

Next week: cupcakes.