Upon the sand upon the bay: 3rd Annual Schwanroast 2005

Every year we do these gynormous Wagner things. Parsifal, Lohengrin, and now.......The Ring. Yes, it was as big as they say it was, but gosh darn it, what a thing to spend a summer doing. Dern thing was huge. So, we had the 3rd Annual B-Bque at Golden Gardens. It's really too bad that I'm always one of the first to get there. I can't light a fire to save my butt.

Madeleine and I were the first to arrive and we had to "save" a firepit by putting our wood on the bench in front of the pit we wanted. Much silliness ensued as the two of us gossiped for an hour looking off into this distance:

See, it's easy to get distracted. Plus, we were gobbling down sunchips and didn't even notice our little box of wood scavanged from her new house's yard had walked off right in front of our noses. We ran up to the pit, turned around and saw our sunchips getting torn apart by voracious seagulls. Holy crap. So, we left the chips to the birds and started marching around looking for our box of wood in an organic artichoke box. We found it, took it back from some frightening "toothless" men (as Maddy continually described them for the rest of the evening) and sat back down on our picnic tables. Where I promptly go shit upon by some seagulls that missed out on the sunchips feast. After screaming and laughing and wiping up of poop, we whipped out our cell phones declaring our shift over begging people to get their asses over here.
And come they did.

Slowly but surely our reinforcements arrived with goodies. Thank god for beer and the opener that lives in my little Mazda since Karen and I needed to open a bottle of wine somewhere off the interstate in Kansas.