Weenie Roast

   Jan and I grabbed up Jen and Kaylahni  and made a mad dash out to Freshwater Bay last Sunday. We wanted to take advantage of the sunshine. There has been darn little of it this year, even though the winter has been exceptionally mild. It was almost fifty degrees in the sun, so it felt great. It's hard to imagine the East coast suffering through record snow and cold, while here in Alaska, we hardly have enough snow for the Iditarod dog sled race. Simply amazing, but I'm not going to complain. The road out is all gravel and narrow with lots of blind spots and hills, to say nothing of potholes, so you can't really drive all that fast on it. I think it's about twenty seven miles to get out there, but it still takes over an hour to get there- sometimes longer depending on the condition of the road. When we got there, Jen wanted to build the fire. She had been out to Long Island the day before and had built a towering inferno, so I guess she thought she was a regular Daniel Boone, or maybe it's Danielle Boone. In any event, I figured she may as well, otherwise I wouldn't stop hearing about her prowess as a fire bug. I was busy chopping a few blocks of wood to throw on top once she got it going. As it was, even though she used dry grass and spent a fair amount of time breaking up sticks and shoving them in a pile, the fire never did really take off. She seemed to think that you had to blow on it until you became light headed and eventually passed out in order for it to start. Well, after some time had gone by, I could see that her efforts were going to be fruitless, so I just grabbed a jug of motor oil out of the back of the truck and soon we had  a roaring blaze. It was either that or we would have all fainted from hunger. Once the fire was going, Kaylahni put her skills with a knife to work and whittled out a few sticks to pierce our hot dogs with. She was much more successful than Jen was with the fire. I hadn't noticed until I started to post these pictures, but apparently there is something in the DNA of female humans that requires them to ensure that their meat is sufficiently cooked. The first three pictures show grandma, mother, and granddaughter all checking the weenies dangling on the end of the sticks. What the .... ! God forbid that you should eat one only partially cooked. I guess there is some wisdom in that actually. If we really knew what went in to making a hot dog, we'd probably bathe them in a sterile solution for half a day before torching them in a flame that would be reminiscent of a a rocket leaving the launch pad at the space center. As the saying goes, ignorance is bliss! I really don't want to spend too much time thinking about my food. I just want to shove it into my mouth and get on with life. Fortunately Jen didn't drop her dog in the fire this time. On the one hand, I was kind of disappointed - I kind of wanted a little entertainment.  Since there weren't any fish in the creek right now, or at least none that I knew of, we decided to spend part of the day shooting at some pop cans on the beach. It's been a while since I've shot my guns, so I was kind of rusty. I still managed to hit the can five times, but given the fact that we fired over sixty rounds, that wasn't too impressive. I don't know if Jen ever did hit it. When we went down to the beach to check on the condition of the cans, there were a multitude of gouges in the mud where the bullets either went high or low. Still, it was fun. With this mild weather it probably won't be long before the bears make an appearance. If they do, we better hope that someone else is along who can shoot a gun. Lord knows that Danielle Boone and Thomas Davy Crockett  sure can't be counted on to keep the tribe safe.