Thanks all. To be honest I am pretty upbeat about the whole situation. The surgery he has to have is apparently somewhat rare but has been around for a long time. The doctor said there is no sign of anything outside of his bladder he is very optimistic that this surgery will be the end of it.

On another topic, you passed through my head this weekend Ed. We have a neighborhood pub crawl a couple times a year. We hosted last time so were not on the list of houses until one of our neighbors had a death in the family and couldn't make it so we stepped in last minute as a host house. Our local meat market is the old style meat market where they butcher everything there and most cuts of meat are cut right in front of you. They all know me there pretty well because I will often take some random cuts and lesser known pieces with glee. A couple of the butchers there will sometimes tell me right when I walk in they have something for me.

At any rate...they cure their own bacon and took some of that and ground it into their ground chuck making bacon burger. Which made an unbelievably good burger. I took that and mixed it with their pork sausage and rolled it into little meatballs. Then stuffed them with mozzarella, gave them a good rubbing and tossed them on the smoker with nothing but grapevine. Wowza!!!

Since I know you and I have the same smoker, have you done anything to protect it from the weather? I never found a decent cover for it and it has some issues. The ring at the bottom rusted through so bad that most of it fell out through the bottom. I think I can get a cast iron skillet and cut out the bottom to make a ring to hold the chip tray but it is only a matter of time until it collapses.