I got my money’s worth out of that weekend for once.  We were busy pretty much all the time, which makes the weekend seem a bit short perhaps but at least I didn’t feel like I wasted it again.  We even went out Friday night, a bit of a rarity.  I’m usually too beat down on Fridays, but this time around we had volunteered to work at a poker fund raiser so that got us out of the house despite the driving rain.  I ended up being a dealer, which was fun.  I had no idea how to deal poker, but as it turned out it was easy enough and none of the participants seemed overly concerned with the details of the game anyway.  We were there well into the night;  Quite the late Friday for us.

Saturday we got up, slowly got around, and headed up to the Northlands for a day of cooking at the Martin’s house.  Donette’s family was stocking up on food for the holidays, so we had two briskets and two pork butts on for them, and Martin did another two pork butts, a turkey, and a slab of ribs.  Might as well load the smoker up if you’re burning fuel.  While all that was sitting happily in the smoker, we worked on a mojo-batch of gumbo too.  With all the roux-stirring and chopping and boiling, it took nearly as long as the briskets.  We came out of the day with a fridge full of food though, so all the effort was well-spent.  After all that work the night rather strangely morphed into an evening of impromptu parties.  I don’t know if that is typical Northland behavior or not, hard to tell without more data.  At any rate, we ended up at the neighbors house for quite a while, and then a small mob descended on Martin’s house late at night, and a party developed over there.

Sunday we got around even slower than Saturday.  First we dealt on all the food from the day before.  Got all the pork and brisket divided up into more manageable portions and food-saved it all, and froze the gumbo for some future event.  After that Donette promptly retired to the couch, and I went over to Ronnie’s house to watch the Chiefs spectacle.  Despite the less-than-entertaining game we had a good time of it.  These events are getting to be quite the “thing” lately.  Everybody brings a dish and we make a decent party of it.  Beats sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the Brooksider all afternoon, where you can’t even hear the TV.  Heck, yesterday Ronnie even turned on the heat in the house, I imagine for the first time this year.  It works very well too…  It got so hot in the house I spent the better part of the game on the front porch watching the TV through the window.