If You Are Going To Have a 4th of July Barbecue

At least have some food for your guests!

On Saturday Keith was busy all day working on the baseboards for the hallway, measuring, cutting, nailing, running back and forth to Home Depot for putty, nails, and other odds and ends, and going in and out from the house to the garage where his big saw is. That was about the extent of our plans for the day until our neighbors invited us to come over for a 4th of July barbecue complete with fireworks. Sounded good, right, and do we need to bring anything and what time? Oh, just whenever, and bring whatever you want.

So, the day goes by and we see tables and the barbecue set up in the driveway, but not much other activity, so we keep doing what we're doing and keeping an eye out for hamburgers being slapped on the grill. Along about 7 pm we're getting really hungry and there's no sign of food anywhere and no sign of the husband next door who's supposed to be grilling the food. Well, it turns out he spent the afternoon drinking at the bar with his buddies, and the Mrs. is getting a lot annoyed and I'm sure all the kids are getting pretty hungry too. We are absolutely starving, so we sneak off to go get a hamburger at Carl's Jr on the pretext of going to get beer and potato chips for the barbecue.

Finally the party gets started, with other neighbors coming over, beers being opened, chairs set up on the lawn, the kids clamoring for the fireworks to start, but still no food. Just the potato chips that we brought and coolers full of beer. Beer is filling, though, right? But I'm still wondering if anyone fed the kids.

So, fireworks get played with and beers get drunk, and along about 9 pm the Mr. finally starts the barbecue, but it's too hot for any food to get put on it. The food finally gets thrown on the grill about 10pm, and all I can say is I hope the rest of the guests went to Carl's Jr, too, before coming to the party.

The fireworks were fun, but drinking parties are just not that much fun when you really don't drink anymore, and you don't really know these people all that well, and everyone is at least a decade or two younger than you, and everyone is getting pretty drunk, and drunken conversations are not that interesting unless you're drunk, too. So, after the food finally went on the grill and it looked like the fireworks were over with, I was getting pretty bored and went home, leaving Keith to drink beer with the rest of them. He ended up staying until about 1 am, the host finished cooking whatever it was he was cooking and then had to go inside and pass out, the kids were high on firework fumes and sodas, and who knows if they ever got anything to eat, but I guess everyone had fun by the looks of the trashed yard and the huge piles of empty beer cans the next morning.

Keith didn't feel all that good on Sunday (hmm, could it have been the many many beers he drank?) so the baseboards are still not finished.

So, if you got invited to a 4th of July barbecue, I hope you actually got to eat something!