It was a beautifully warm weekend too - if not the first of the season, certainly the best. I spent Saturday afternoon refurbishing the barbeque I had bought back in 2014 at XS Cargo, replacing the carryover tubes and heat plates that rusted away to dilapidation, as well as the grill itself. With any luck, that will last us another three or four years and then we perhaps look at upgrading.
But Saturday also marked my eldest and her boyfriend going out for a year, and he had arranged to come over and spend some time in the backyard with her (from 2m away, bless him). We enjoyed some conversation in the sun while I assembled the various pieces and painstakingly removed the rusted screws holding the carryover tubes in place, and at suppertime I grilled some steaks and asparagus while Glory roasted potato wedges in the air fryer.
The fact that Bobby had to remove himself to the far end of the table did very little to impact the enjoyment of our first patio meal together, especially since the table never even got deployed last year following a cold, wet spring. Still warm even in the shade of the house, and with very few bugs to speak of we must have spent a couple of hours feasting, drinking and chatting.
The following day, Jeff invited the local lads over to his backyard for another socially distanced dinner, this time featuring the immense (12 lb.) brisket he had painstakingly prepared the previous day and began smoking for 6 hours on his Traeger at a little after 7 am (on a Sunday, on a long weekend no less).
I've never claimed to be a genius, bot only a fool would have turned down such a generous invitation, so I joined Jeff, his son Connor and two other friends shortly after our online D&D session was finished.
The Traeger is a fancy affair that not only uses wood pellets to smoke the food as it cooks, but employs two different thermometers to do this, one for the grill temperature and a probe that gives precise readings for the meat itself. This is all conveyed to an app on the user's phone via wifi, like a baby monitor for food. 'Primitive' cooking of meat with fire was never so high-tech!
Enjoying thin slices of tender, succulent beef brisket, plus roasted potatoes, some salads and a cold Red Rage ale from Jeff's cooler was heavenly. But it wasn't nearly as nice as simply sitting in a lawn chair in his backyard and shooting the shit with friends that I hadn't seen face-to-face in ten weeks. We took care to only handle our own utensils and keep two-meter spacing wherever possible, but it was the closest I had been to other people without masks in quite a while, and it felt great.
After couple of hours, the wind began to pick up and the clouds began to form, so the other guests and I reluctantly bade farewell to the backyard sanctuary and made our ways back home.
But it really did feel like perhaps a threshold had been reached, a kind of turning point in our respective isolations. The situation in Edmonton is far less grim than it is in Calgary and other parts of southern Alberta, but I am hoping that the easing of restrictions that began on Thursday can be kept up for a little while, at least.
Who knows what the "new normal" will look like, but hopefully it has room for friends as well as family.
Ohhh the meat was good.
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