Cue the swearing...

What a day.

I seem to have recovered from the vasectomy. Today, we ventured off to Burlington to do another mall-crawl. This time the destination was Mapleview Centre, which we had noticed on previous excursions to the Mandarin with our friends. Nice place, this Mapleview Centre. Impossible to get lost in: it consists of one long passage on two floors. The stores within are pretty much standard, but there were some neat-o exceptions. The neat-o-est was undoubtedly The General Store, which I've seen in only a few other shopping centres. You walk in and are confronted with any number of little nooks and crannies, each containing artsy-craftsy handmade stuff from a different retailer. Everything from teddy bears to candles to gift baskets to wooden/glass/ceramic knicknackery. Most of it's one-of-a-kind, you-won't-find-it-anywhere-else stuff. Cool beans.
Eva stumbled into a Lewiscraft that was closing and picked up some fantastic deals. I stumbled into Coles and, well, given unlimited amounts of money I would have absconded with most of the store. As our money tree hasn't sprouted yet, I restrained myself to "King of the Vagabonds" by Neal Stephenson, the second part (actually, the second part of the first part) of a series called The Baroque Cycle. (If that didn't make any sense to you, no worries--it doesn't make much to me, either.) I'm neck-deep in part one right now. Tough slogging, but rewarding...you'll sure come away from this thing smarter than when you started it.
Lunch at the aforementioned Mandarin: always great value for money, but even more so at noon on a weekday.
We hit a brand new greenhouse place called Terra on the way home. It appears that we are finally going to get serious this year about doing something with our mess of a backyard. This is not something I am looking forward to, to be perfectly honest, but it has to be done. At least two trees are coming down and any number of little plants will be gracing our yard in the summer to come.
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I've become something of a barbequer, to my surprise. I shouldn't be all that shocked, in hindsight--my father's great at it--but hey! I can cook something! I'm impressed. So one day last fall, I was merrily grilling up some burgers. I stepped away from the 'que for a moment and paced around the yard. Something caught my eye back at my grilling post.
For a moment my brain refused to process what I was seeing. Barbeque, check. Lid closed, as I had just left it, check. Fire crawling up the outside of the lid, check.
Wait a second.
Fire?
On the outside?
That's not right.
Exhibiting the kind of quick thinking I am really not known for, I ran over to the propane valve and spun it off. The fire, gratefully, died out. I sprinted into the house and grabbed some silicon oven gloves, then came out and took out some innards. I hosed and brushed and removed a chuckwagon's worth of grease, then re-assembled everything and started up the 'que. Within about five seconds, flames licked away at the controls on the outside.
Just great.
Hey, love, ummm, you see, the thing is, I broke the barbeque.
I didn't do it. It was our dog. Tux did it.
Yeah. Eva, I just about burned our back yard down. But I'M okay, and that's the important thing, right?
You know that tree next to the BBQ that we want to cut down? Would fire work?
I was at a loss. Eva would have barbequed coffee if she could. Short of putting an axe through our television screens, I couldn't think of a single item I could break that would discomfit my wife more.
She took it well, I have to say. We have one of those George Foreman knockoff grills, so we could at least approximate a barbeque, but it's not the same.
Yesterday, we picked up a new 'que at Canadian Tire. A cheap model--damn money tree's not taking, I think we have to do something or other with the yard first--but serviceable. This evening we set about putting it together.
The last model, by Thermos, took Eva about forty five minutes to assemble, all on her own. This one, despite being a little bit smaller....put it this way: after almost three man-hours, we got to Step 5 (out of 14) before we realized that we had completely buggered up steps one and three. (To be fair, we suspected we had buggered up step one almost immediately, but couldn't be certain...the instructions told us the square root of frig-all). Our living room is currently floored with barbeque parts, and we're waiting for the morning and clearer heads to prevail.