Month: October 2026

There is the peace and quiet and frequent feelings of complete solitude. Those things I pursue. Sometimes in that pursuit I’m lucky to witness Mother Nature’s majesty.

A neighbor posted this free smoker in our neighborhood Facebook group. I asked him if it was sturdy, heavy gauge steel. He replied affirmative. So the girls and I drove over to his house and loaded it up.

It’s a little smaller than what I thought it would be, but decided that that would be okay. I’m not going to be cooking multiple briskets at the same time. And even if I needed to, I still have my trusty Kamado Joe. This smoker is more of a project smoker. My initial thought that “project” would be project cooking. But when I got it into the backyard, I thought it could use a little TLC. Both dampers are rusted in a partially-open position, so I’ve doused them both with some penetrating liquid catalyst. As I type this, neither damper will budge. I haven’t taken wrenches to them yet, so that’ll be another day. If I need to, I might just cut off/out the dampers and fabricate new ones. This is when I’m glad I’ve been teaching myself how to work with metal and have bought the tools to do the job.

My first project was to fabricate new handles for the smoke chamber and the fire box. We had some scrap heavy gauge steel tubing at work that I cut and welded to make for rotating lift handles.

I’ll probably get anxious and want to try cooking with it next weekend. After that I’ll talk myself into cleaning it up really well, taking a knotted wire wheel to it, treating the exterior parts with some phosphoric acid, and oiling everything else after I get the rust off it. I could probably leave it as-is and it’ll outlast me, but I figured this could be a good project to keep me busy.

The photos don’t really do it justice. When I’m working on something, or by the time I’m calling it a day, I’m not much in the photographer mood. Elise needed a little side table for her office, so I made one for her. These are oak cookies from our yard with iridescent blue, Persian green, olive gold, and turmeric gold mica mixed into epoxy resin. The top was planed, rounded, and honed into a perfect circle by some geometry that I didn’t know I had in me. The oak cookies were being saved for another project, or maybe for smoking meat, but I think they worked well for this little side table. I wish I would’ve overlapped them and created live edges to make for a really cool natural design. Maybe that’ll be another project.

I learned an important lesson a few weeks ago from a Pueblo Indian in Taos. He never keeps track of the time it takes to complete any creation because the process is a blessing.

Elise had her Every Other Monday Church Girls Night last night. My plan was to settle onto the couch and watch a program (pronounced “pro-gruhm”). This is what actually happened, which isn’t at all unlike any other night.

I’m tired of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and Google TV. I’m tired of paying for them. I’m tired of having to subscribe to everything. Recently I asked ChatGPT (who, by the way, I’m convinced, at some point in the not-too-distant future, is going to leave me in a bathtub full of ice and I’ll find myself shivering and with my spleen removed) to give me a recommendation for a progruhm about outdoor adventures, hunting, fishing, animal and land converservation. It recommended Waypoint TV. That, of course, is an app that you have to download onto your TV. I need another app like I need another colonoscopy. I had my first colonoscopy just a few months ago. I don’t need another colonoscopy until the year 2036.

My colon’s health aside (it is a healthy colon, in case you were wondering. I have photo evidence.) I downloaded Waypoint TV and I fired it up last night. I was excited to watch Winchester Life only to find that it would only play audio 50% of the time. There would be dialog for a minute, then silence for a minute. I experienced this revolutionary technology advancement in television viewing while I ate my entire cup full of peanut butter cup ice cream. It was the ice cream that I was planning on enjoying while I watched a progruhm with uninterupted dialog.

I tossed the remote onto the coffee table and exclaimed to the empty room how I was done with this @#$#%ing technology. But it was only 8:00 p.m. and I didn’t get the reward of watching something on TV. So I settled on watching the recorded episode of yesterday’s Wheel of Fortune. At least that still worked.

I really miss the days when we only had 5 channels and no remote control. The channels were usually:

• Something I don’t want to watch
• Something else I don’t want to watch
• Something else I don’t want to watch
• Something else I don’t want to watch
• Wheel of Fortune

And I’m longing for the day, that I’m sure will be very soon, when I’m going to take my iPhone and the Alexa with a screen out to the backyard and sink and arrow into them both. I’ll probably ask Alexa and Siri if they have any last words. I don’t really care what those words will be, but I’ll probably document them for posterity.

And then I’ll probably need a new spleen.

Mara has been wanting a pair of cowboy boots for a long time, so she held us to it and we took her boot shopping on Saturday. Took a while, but she found the pair. And we ducked into Rosa’s Cafe after boot shopping. We’ve driven by that place a million times and finally stopped in to try it. Glad we did.

And now everyone in the family owns a pair of boots. Except me.

Whatever was carried into this hat that isn’t mine, I release it.

Whatever belonged to the people who wore it before me, I leave it with them.

Saul’s sweat, Saul’s troubles, Saul’s demons, none of them belong to me.

May this hat carry only what I choose to carry: good roads, my own sweat, honest work, clear skies, good people, and a little dust and grime.

What is mine may stay. Want isn’t mine may go.

This hat is mine again now.