I guess that wasn’t a BAD weekend, per se. Sort of iffy though. We had some fun for sure, but it was just a bit tempered by the abysmal football games. Just a bit though. Saturday we got up and turned on the Missouri game, (9:00 CA time,) which I genuinely thought they were going to win. Yeah, not so much. Losing is bad enough, but losing like that makes it even worse. The afternoon game was Oregon, which we are making some small effort to be fans of. It started off in a manner quite similar to the Missouri game. In fact, after halftime, we just turned it off and headed to an Oktoberfest nearby. This was a win-win for everybody; We had fun watching the German dancers and band, and without our bad luck hanging over them, the Ducks came back and won. Even got some texts while we were there: “Wow, are you watching this game? It’s crazy!” Well, no we are not, and you’re welcome.

Sunday we had some friends up for a barbecue, which I always look forward to. (We don’t get much company up here in the hills…) While the ribs were cooking, we watched the disaster that was the Chiefs. Holy smokes. I know they have a tendency to play poorly in Indianapolis, but that was ridiculous. Those are the games that fuel the “It’s all fixed” conspiracies. It honestly looked like they were trying to lose. Maybe we should have turned it off, like the Oregon game. We stuck out the whole miserable four quarters though, even when it became apparent what the inevitable conclusion would be. On the upside, I was quite happy with the ribs. I finally got to cook some spare ribs, which I prefer any day over baby backs. For whatever reason though, baby backs are usually on sale at the butcher shop, and spare ribs never are. Got lucky this time. Only problem was, I decided I needed four slabs, which ended up being way too much. I’ll be eating ribs through October, which isn’t a horrible situation. Oh, and there was a slight (self induced) problem with the smoker… After cooking on it for probably six years now, and it working perfectly every time, I decided I needed to try a few new tricks. (Insert eye roll here…) I put a few quarts of water in the bottom of it this time when I fired it up. Adds moisture, keeps the bottom clean, what could go wrong? This was despite the guy who built it telling me more than once that it didn’t need any water in it. (But then what would he know, I’m on the Triple Fat Back BBQ team!!!) Turns out, he might be more familiar with the design than me. It threw the temperature all out of whack, and I also had the lovely issue of cleaning up a bunch of greasy water later. Yeah, scratch that idea off the list. For evening entertainment, we watched our psuedo-local 49’s team, who also lost a poorly played game.