Isn’t anyone here from suburbia?

So obsessivewoman had been marinating some steaks this afternoon and asked me to fire up the grill for cooking them, so I poured a bunch of briquettes into a chimney, set it on a patch of decomposed granite where it wouldn’t char anything else, and started lounging. As usual, there was a fair bit of smoke from the chimney... but for the first time in my ten years here, the fire department showed up to investigate. Apparently, two different neighbors had called it in.

Fortunately, they were very friendly and polite about it all; Mara said “We have four steaks” and invited them to stick around, but they declined. I guess I really need to do more grilling so this doesn’t seem an unusual event...