Smokin.

As apartment-dwellers, Brad and I never really get to do the home improvement thing. We have no house to renovate, no yard to maintain, no garden to plant. We do have this wall -- one wall, which could ostensibly be knocked down and rebuilt -- but the ultimate usefulness of messing with the wall (nonexistent), the possible repercussions (full-scale collapse), and the probable reaction of our landlord (attacking us with knives) make doing so less-than-appealing.

So all told, unless you count a single afternoon we spent spackling over holes in the wall after Hurley the Golden Retriever decided he really loved the taste of plaster, we never get to do anything of the Weekend Warrior variety.

In general, I don't think either of us really misses it. We're both usually happy enough to be free of responsibility and spend our Saturdays drinking beer in front of the television. But occasionally, and particularly on long weekends, and particularly if one or both of us has been watching too much HGTV... well, the lack of any sort of "project" can make us both a little desperate -- leading to the formation of plans which are highly questionable at best.

Brad, to me, last week: Hey, you know what I want to do on the fourth of July?

Me: What?

Brad: Build a meat smoker out of a flowerpot!

Me: Yes!

Brad: And cook a pork shoulder!

Me: AWESOME!


Normally, of course, this plan would never have achieved fruition. After a couple of days, somebody would have come to his or her senses and said, "You know, darling, I've been thinking about building a meat smoker out of a flowerpot, and on further reflection, to do so would be insane." And that would be it.

But this time was different. The first-floor apartment in our building was empty, leaving us access to the backyard, and more importantly, it was the fourth of July -- the birthday of American independence. And we were both wholly convinced that there was no better way to assert said independence than to build our very own possibly-illegal contraption for the cooking and consumption of meat.

This conviction took us all the way to Home Depot, where Brad strode purposefully around in a self-assured, man-in-his-element sort of way while I randomly pulled things off shelves with intermittent, celebratory shouts of "GONNA COOK A PORK SHOULDER!" Thirty minutes and about $75 later, we left the store armed with all the components of a flowerpot meat smoker and a renewed sense of purpose. We may have even high-fived in the parking lot.

The haze of DIY joy continued throughout the drive home, during which we turned to each other repeatedly, gleefully squealing, "This is going to be SO COOL!", and then again while Brad outlined his plan to get up at 5:00am on Saturday to start the smoking process. I, meanwhile, was daydreaming about wearing a pink apron and serving picture-perfect pork sandwiches alongside german potato salad (which I do not know how to make), with strawberry-rhubarb pie (which I am too lazy to make) on a rustic picnic table (which we do not own). All in all, we were both convinced that nothing could possibly go wrong.

And nothing did, at first. On Saturday morning, true to plan, Brad leapt out of bed at 5:00am and disappeared. I woke up for long enough to acknowledge a) his departure, and b) that I had a raging hangover, then went back to sleep.

I was awakened at 6:00, when Brad came lurching into the room, bumping into things and speaking in ellipses-heavy bursts like a dying cowboy in a spaghetti western.

"Can't… do it… too much… smoke… gonna vomit," he groaned.
"What?"
"You… unplug… smoker… please," he said, then shuffled over to the bed and collapsed face-first into the mattress.

I was barely with-it enough to remember to put pants on before walking downstairs, but as soon as I opened our apartment door I was shocked awake by the overwhelming, choking odor of hickory smoke. Fearing the worst, I ran down the stairs and through the empty apartment on the first floor, then burst through the back door of the building fully expecting to find a five-alarm fire raging in the yard.

Instead, I found our DIY smoker sitting demurely just beyond the door, with only the tiniest, most delicate tendrils of smoke wafting from its terra cotta body, as though to say, "Who, me?"

With the crisis averted, and Brad finally able to stand up without turning green, we pulled up a couple of chairs and sat down for the well-earned luxury of watching the progress of the smoker.

A well-earned luxury which, as it turns out, is only marginally more interesting than watching paint dry.

And after seven hours, three fire scares, and approximately 12,000 conversations about whether the smoker thermometer had stopped working or was just moving really, reeeeally slowly, we finally did what any other sane couple would have done in the first place: We took our (admittedly beautiful, deep-brown, smoky) pork shoulder upstairs, put it in the oven, and spent the next three hours watching the Harry Potter movie marathon on ABC family.

On one hand, the endeavor was by no means a total failure – I mean, we DID build our own smoker, and we DID smoke the pork, and some friends DID come over to eat it .

On the other, the fact that I fell asleep at 6:00pm after eating only one fucking sandwich and right in the middle of the Polyjuice Potion scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is still pissing me off.