Day 212: What DOES Heaven Smell Like?

A couple Joyful Moments to share again.

We had some new friends over for dinner tonight. The kids played together really well, which is always nice. And we had a lot of fun chatting and getting to know each other better. It was just a fun evening. It was sort of like a first date (you know how that is when you hang out with another couple for the first time) and we got the "We'd like to do this again sometime" message as the evening was winding down. So, it looks like they enjoyed themselves, too.

Score! Joyful Moment.

Earlier in the day, I finally found a moment to roast my chile peppers on the grill. Hatch green chiles, to be exact. I grew up in the Southwest. Out there during the harvest time, you'd find big huge black roasters out in front of the grocery store and you could buy the chiles like that. Here at the North Pole I was just ecstatic to find them sold in any form outside of a can at the grocery store.

So, I took on the challenge of roasting them myself. I read the instructions provided by the store and then googled and researched a bit more. I did not want to mess this up. All of the directions were pretty much the same and it seemed pretty simple, so I went to work and threw those babies on the barbie.

The one thing that all of my sources failed to inform was the smell of divinity that would emanate from my grill. Oh. My. It took me back to some distant memory, of what I'm not entirely sure, but it just smelled S.O. G.O.O.D.!

So, I called to HH to come on out and smell heaven. He walked out and took a sniff and looked fairly unimpressed. "It smells good, but not really like heaven."

And then I remembered that his upbringing did not involve a lot of spice, or anything like Hatch green chiles. I had a moment of silence and shed a tear, or two for his loss. And then I went back to the grill and sniffed away.

And then and there I knew, smelling those roasting chiles would definitely be today's Joyful Moment.

Wishing you all odoriferous Joyful Moments!