For Labor Day weekend (hopefully the Sunday thereof) I've invited family and friends over to the apartment complex where I have taken up residence, Canterbury House Apartments.

Canterbury has over two hundred (!) units in it, organized into Buildings, each with a number, and one-, two-, and three-bedroom townhouse-style units in each, with letters running from A to S.

Got all that? Well, I'm in Building 339, Apartment Q, and this is near the end of the building, with a porch letting out into a resident parking lot.

A few steps away, off the back of the complex property, is a woods. There is a place I can dig for earthworms to go fishing with, and a clear area where, if the weather cooperates, I will set up a luau-style party outside for my guests. Planned: pork loins (catered by a local downtown bistro famous for them--Darryl's Downtown in Jackson), fresh sliced pineapple, rice and sweet potato casseroles (individual ones--classy and freezeable), and, of all goes well, a special French-bread spicy garlic bread of my own invention. Cool, huh? And not as expensive as all that sounds since Darryl's promised to help out with the thing a bit for the advertising, as it were. You know, where did THIS come from? And you tell everybody if they like it where to get more.

Anyhow, the regional office of the company which owns Canterbury was consulted and they said, "WHOA! absolutely NO open pit fires or bonfires!!" Consequently I had to come up with an alternative to the traditional luau format.

For $2.50 (closeout at CVS Pharmacy) I picked up a bamboo hawaian torch, and then I designed a barbecue setup (pictured above) to be made from found materials. My brother Bob supplied the empty oil drum (he's had two of them dating back to the eighties when we had an oil company) and I found an electric sheet metal cutter for $10 at a garage sale, and I plan on making my grill in time for the party.

Back in the '70's we threw a Labor Day yard party for the staff of Portage Lake State Park where I worked as a Park Ranger, and then we took an empty drum and sliced it in half length-wise to make two grills. This is different, but the new design should work as well and be transportable back to the complex garage area by dolly, so there you go!