Travels with FatCatAir

Thursday June 07, 2007

Pirates

This past Saturday was our big annual party. The theme this years was Pirates. As usual it was hectic getting everything ready for the party. At least this year I didn't have some big project, like building the gazillion, to complete (although I did stain the gazillion). Mostly it was a getting the hangar in shape after a year of increasing entropy. My wife thinks that I should just always keep the hangar neat then it would be so bad ... right!

The props this year were pretty simple, a few fake cannons and turning the 10 foot john boat we keep on our pond into a pirate ship. Oh and the usual palm tree grove. I'm going to glad when those fronds are finally retired.

	Here's a shot of the various pirates having a good time.
There was an impromptu costume contest with a category for the women and the men. My wife Gretchen (2nd from the right) doing her best a pirate wench. Our neigbor Diane (3rd from right) was the people's choice winner.
	Here was the guys auditioning for best costume. Much to Diane's chagrin her husband Pat (rightmost) did not win. He surely would have won but who would know that we'd get a professional pirate (not shown) who really wowed the crowd.
Here I am in the only correct Pirate costume. I'm wearing a Roberto Clemente jersey (the greatest Pirate). I don't understand how everyone got the wrong pirate idea from the invitation? I borrowed the grill I'm standing next to from one of my neighbors. This grill almost got my in trouble at the party. This grill (actually there are two on the trailer) is normally used for pig picking. Cooking a pig for 8-10 hours.

 Well the first thing to know is how large and heavy this grill is. It takes two people to open the lid! It is in serious need of a big counterweight. When I borrowed this I was told not to mess with the gas regulator so I didn't. Well after I had the first round of jerk chicken on the grill (30 lbs of boneless breasts) for 20 minutes I got someone to help me open the grill onyl to find that the chicken was pretty much in the same state as when it went on the grill. Yikes! So we had to mess with the regulator. I adjusted it to the point where it almost would blow the flame out to get the max heat. That helped a bunch but it was still pretty slow. It probably took almost 1.5 hours to do the first batch of chicken. I don't know how many times I had people asking "is the chicken done yet". The second batch went much quicker and in actuality the fact that it went slow made it much easier to deal with once I got past that first hiccup.

The weather turned out almost perfect after giving us a bit of a worry. We hadn't had rain in several weeks but on Friday afternoon tropical storm Barry popped up in the Gulf of Mexico and the remnants were expect to reach NC by late Sat. and to rain all Sunday. On Saturday morning the sky was looking like maybe Barry was going to arrive early. That would have been no fun. As it turned out it was mostly cloudy and relatively cool for June in NC and only a few small bits of rain. Whew!

As usual everything went much too fast and before we knew it the party was over. Now we have to think about what to do for next year's party (SciFi). We have a couple of interesting ideas we'll see how practical they turn out.

For another view of the party you can check out the blog of my friend "Big Lee" who has a good write up on it (and had a great costume too).