Post 3592 - The Barbecue From Hell

I should keep this short as it is quite late.

I know you have been wondering. People have been stopping me on the street. This morning, as I was standing at a urinal, a woman saddled up next to me and asked me about it. And I was in the men's room!

They all wanted to know how good Sissiboo coffee is.

It is good. Pretty darned good, actually. The medium roast has a nice and robust flavour without being obnoxious about it. I think we will revert to North Mountain Coffee when this stuff is gone, but Sissiboo is nothing to sneeze at.

After work, we wanted to go to Crappy tire and get a replacement battery for the cottage lawn tractor. We ended up buying a portable barbecue. Good quality parts and worksmanship. Marked down to $150. $50 off the regular price.

Anybody who prices barbecues knows that even the used ones are expensive. You can look on Kijiji and find plenty of barbecues. But even the rusted-out ones that look like they'll fall apart if you look at them sideways can cost a couple hundred bucks, which is outrageous. The more I think about it, the more I think the great maxim of life applies to barbecues: It is better to buy a new barbecue and buy your own problems, than it is to buy a used barbecue and buy somebody else's.

We bought our own problems tonight.

We went to Costco to get a propane tank, and filled it up for $9.45. Got everything home. By then it was nearly 8pm. We spent the next hour plus trying to assemble the thing. My heart sank as I opened the big box to see several little boxes inside, each with tiny parts looking up at me, mocking me, daring me to put them together in the correct order.

The lady in the store said this one was really easy to assemble.

Ha ha ha. Hee hee hee. Ho ho ho.

Patricia took control. By 9:15, as it was getting a little too dark to continue working, she had attached the handles to the side, the hinges had been installed, part of the cooking element was in place. Tuesday night, we hope to finish. But I don't find this easy at all. At. All. I am developing heart palpitations at the very thought of continuing this process. A few times now I nearly ran over to the young man who mows our lawn to ask him if he'd be willing to do this job for us. Each time, Patricia glowered at me with a "don't you dare tone", so I didn't dare.

I have a profound inability to take a diagram and relate it spatially to a series of objects within reach. I find this process so bewildering, so confusing, so frustrating, so maddening, that it causes serious damage to my mental health and self-esteem. The easier I am told something like this is to do, the more frustrated I become, and the dumber I feel when I don't get it. You would have an easier time explaining calculus to me. If I worked in a store where part of my job would be to assemble barbecues, or most anything else for that matter, I would have to resign from that job, to forestall being fired from it.  I am not kidding. This is a serious shortcoming in my skill set.

So, anyway, let's hope that the barbecue is put together by Tuesday night. It may not be, but we can try. Or, rather, Patricia can try, while I hold the washers and screws and nails for her. I might not muck that up.

But you never know. I cannot overstate my capacity for misunderstanding directions.

See you tomorrow.

Bevboy