...don't go to pig pickin's very often.

WAYNE / STEVE / TWIG / MADELINE / BRIEN / TERESA / JAMIE / MERRITT / BLAKE / EBY / CHRISTIAN / MARK / TYLER / J.BOGGS / ELAINE / MO-GAN / CREEEECH! / WADE / JOHANNA / KILLER / ALEXIS / came out tonight and were great.



Plus HAYDEN SYKES, his mom JANE, ANDREW, WILL, PARKER, JACK, TOM and about 5 other Scouts and leaders from HAYDEN's scout troop came out tonight. More about that later.


CHEESE GRITS
TOAST/ BISCUITS
DESSERT
TAB(?)/ WATER

TaB? When was the last time you saw someone drinking a TaB? I always think of it as a 60's and 70's diet soda, but they still pump it out. 3 million cases a year. Someone gave us nine 12-packs. When we told them we had that to drink, we got a lot of funny looks. Several of them remembered it from way back. It was a fairly amusing sight to see our crowd sitting around eating Cheese Grits and drinking TaB.

Coca-Cola got the name"TaB" from a computer generated list of 250,000 four-letter, one syllable words. After narrowing it down to 20 words, they picked "Tabb" and dropped the last letter. The ads promoted it as a drink that helped you "keep TaBs" on your figure. It's popularity faded when, in 1982, Diet Coke became the flagship diet drink for Coca-Cola. (If you're ever on Jeopardy and the Final Jeopardy category is "Diet Sodas Nobody Drinks Any More", now you can bet with more confidence. You're welcome.)

The cheese grits recipe was same as last time- 10 lbs. of grits, big can of cheese, 15 dozen eggs, 20 lb. of deer sausage. That winds up being about 12 gallons of final product. It turned out to be a good night for it too, because it was chillier than I thought it was going to be.

Hayden Sykes collected bookbags and donations for an Eagle Scout project. He had 50 backpacks, all of them with a blanket, a set of thermals, a tobbogan, socks, toiletries, and a Bible inside. He brought some help from his troop to unload and pass them out at the first stop.

It was such a great thing to do. Nobody coming last night had any idea they would receive such a great gift and they were blown away. Hayden and his guys did a great job, not just passing out bags, but pitching in and helping us serve. Between the regulars, the Scouts, and the folks that came to eat, we had around 70 - 80 people out front for a while. That's a good kind of crowded.

The neat thing about it was God's timing. Because of the weather and whatever else, we had been seeing smaller crowds (20-25) at the first stop. Hayden called me Monday and asked if he could do it the next day. I said sure. He comes with 50 bags..... and 48 people show up last night with no idea of getting anything other than something to eat.

When football season starts in September, I mention to the guys at Mercy House every once in a while that we'll be doing a SUPER BOWL PARTY. The past few weeks they've been reminding me that we're doing one.

I always look forward to it. The first year we had 20 guys, the second we had 30 and last year 40. We have good people who come down and help us with it. Trying to decide what to do for food that night, I've been running through different formats. We could do burgers on the grill. I could put out a call and get people to make pots of chili and drop off at the church, then warm them up for the game. We could go heavy hors d'oeurves and appetizers.

Or maybe we could do........

....... a pig pickin'?

We got a pig cooker. A hog runs somewhere around $1.10 -$1.25 a pound. $100 dollars ought to buy us enough pig for at least 50 people. Get cole slaw. Beans. Some sweet tea to wash it down, maybe a TaB or two. Throw a chicken on there for guys that don't eat pork. BAM! SUPER BOWL PIG PICKIN' PARTY !

It's a thought. I imagine we could do the other things a little cheaper, and that's cool. They like burgers and they like chili. Shoot, I love burgers and chili.

Still, ....a pig pickin'? That'd be sweet. You gotta figure the guys at the Mercy House......