The Barbecue is Back!

The post-work party chicken barbecue has been a KSC staple for at least 15 years, and is a highlight of our club's culture.  Kare built the barbecue/fire pit out of cement blocks and devised an ingenious way to grill and turn 40 pounds of chicken at once; he and Aase have been in charge of preparing the chicken their own secret way and it's very possibly the best grilled chicken you have ever had.  Throw in a bunch of delicious potluck sides, some beers cooling in the little creek, tables and chairs set up outside on the deck, and you have one fun afternoon of eating and laughing and talking and more eating.  The fact that the pandemic has kept us from gathering together for the last two years might be one reason why work-party attendance has been down lately.

But never mind that -- the barbecue is back!  At the snow-park cleanup last month, I noticed that the fire pit had fallen into disrepair and it made me sad; I have so many great memories of back-porch lunches and I miss our get-togethers.  

So I called up Kare and Aase and said, let's go fix this thing, and we did, last weekend!

Silly me, I thought we'd just replace the broken cement blocks, clean out the garbage and old ash that had accumulated, have some lunch, and be on our way.  Oh no no no, I had not reckoned with our very own perfectionist Norwegian master craftsman.  Instead of my slipshod plan, he took that bad boy completely apart, then we sledge-hammered the old blocks into rubble, then wheelbarrowed the rubble away, all under Aase's eagle-eye supervision.  

Then I unloaded fresh new cement blocks from the back of Kare's truck -- and may I just say, those things weigh approximately 500 pounds each -- 

-- while Kare got to work on the new bed for the fire pit.  He meticulously and carefully shoveled and scraped and measured and leveled, then rescraped and releveled until the new surface was perfectly flat and level to his and Aase's critical eye.

And then he rebuilt the fire pit, placing each block carefully and precisely, and when it was done, lo, it was a thing of great beauty.  

And then we had lunch.  

Thank you, Kare and Aase, for giving up your Saturday for this project.  I can't wait until we can all come together again and eat chicken and share stories!

(PS. I hid a note somewhere in the structure, so some day, another 15 years down the road, someone will rebuild the fire pit again and maybe they will find a little voice from the past.)