Things I Should Have Learned as a Boy Scout

I read a news story about the elk in Idaho that like to eat tree branches and twigs because it's easier than digging through the snow to get to the grass. Entire herds go to sleep bloated and happy, and then they die.

I spent most of today sitting on my couch, waiting for the power to come back on, eating candy canes and breath mints, despite having a kitchen full of food.

My wife dusted off an old barbecue from under the porch and asked me to help her carry it to the deck so we could get some water boiling. “What’s the use?” I said, and crunched my Bubbalicious candy cane. I had given up the moment the power went out. It wasn’t worth leaving my 40-degree living room to cook mac-and-cheese and hot chocolate on my 10-degree porch. I don't like labor-intensive food. It's the same reason I won't eat lobster. I threw the candy-cane wrapper on the floor and started eating some Wheat Thins and Skittles I had found between the couch cushions.

Laura told me that our neighbor, Jeff, had made everyone a dutch-oven breakfast while I was sleeping off my graveyard shift. It sounded terribly Eagle-Scoutish, and I couldn’t imagine the effort involved in lighting briquettes, cracking eggs, mixing in “ingredients,” and putting it all into the Dutch oven. I get cranky when my microwave breakfast sandwich tells me to rotate the patty after two minutes. Do I look like a chef? Three minutes, full power, no rotating. I don’t mind if the inside is still a little frozen.

I told Laura, in a moment of malnourished delusion, that we should buy a Dutch oven for Christmas so we could actually cook the food in our food storage. I even had visions of myself moving the little coals around on the lid and babying the pot for twelve hours while our Pioneer-Trek Stew simmered to perfection.

Not going to happen. Unless, of course, Laura agrees to move Dutch-oven cooking out of the “Barbecuing, Auto Mechanics, and Other Things Men Should Do” category and into the “Things I’m Stuck Doing While Mike Sits on the Couch Wishing Jeopardy Was On” category.