Friday evening I found myself at a neighbor’s house watching a skilled man with dreadlocks mix fancy craft cocktails with a bunch of other guys I didn’t know. I was invited by the father of one of Finn’s friends and walked down the street to his house after dinner.
The first cocktail I tried was a barrel-aged Manhattan, which was served over a hand-carved chunk of ice and went down a little rougher than I’d anticipated. Next up was an old fashioned, and by this time I’d made acquaintances with some of the other guys as well as run into another Dad I knew from the playground. As the evening went by I met some other men from the neighborhood, played a few games of darts, sampled a Ho-Ho from the dessert table, smoked a decent cigar, and sampled three more drinks, which were enough to tilt Beechwood Avenue about five degrees on my walk home. And: a true whiskey sour is a new go-to drink for me, because nobody will know how to make a Blood and Sand.
Saturday I recovered quicker than I fairly should have and we made preparations for the annual Ice Cream Social put on by our friends the Wards. Finn got her face painted, chased bubbles, watched the cows walk up the path, and played with balloon swords under a perfect blue sky. We made a brief stop at IKEA for a roller shade part and then got Jen home into bed, after a late-day migraine came on. Finn and I stayed up to watch Monsters vs. Aliens in our Pjs and then went to sleep.
Sunday I hit the Lowe’s for shingle supplies and started peeling 20-year-old layers off the far side of the garage roof. It’s been leaking for a couple of years and this winter it just stayed wet and disintegrated. A closer inspection revealed a hasty patch job over the old shingle but no attempt to repair the sheathing underneath–which was completely gone in some places. I removed several layers and cut bad wood back to the joists, then laid in new sheathing and started tacking shingles back in. There’s about three layers on there in total, which didn’t surprise me, but the amount of water damage was actually less than I thought there would be. I didn’t lay any tarpaper down, which may be a tactical mistake, but we’ll see how it holds up when the next rain falls.
While that was under way, I stoked up the smoker with charcoal and mesquite chips and dropped a 5-lb. bird on the grill. Following the directions, I used about 150% more charcoal than was needed, and so the fire was too hot. As we all know, there’s no turning charcoal down, so I had to pull it off and let the fire die down for about 20 minutes. The final flavor was OK, but the bird was dry, so there will be lots of experimentation and testing before we perfect this method.