It shouldn’t be this hard…

With our sixth anniversary coming up, Sunny and I decided to treat ourselves and buy ourselves a new grill.

I absolutely love grilled food. It tastes absolutely awesome, and on our current health kick, grilling is a really healthy way to cook. Throw some chicken breasts on there, stick some water-soaked mesquite wood chips wrapped in tinfoil on your coals and you're on the healthy-train to Tasty Town.

We got an amazing deal that we'd spotted two weeks ago. It was the last one they had and we bought the display model…getting a $150 grill/smoker for seventy bucks.

Oh yeah, that's the part I was really excited about. It's a smoker as well as a grill. It has the separate compartment off to one side jus for your coals so you can cook with indirect heat. We're planning to break it in this week by smoking a big turkey breast.

…but, as always, there's a snag.

I was the display model, and because it didn't come in a nice flat-packed box, it wouldn't fit in the car. It wasn't a problem, I just unscrewed it from its stand, put the actual grill on the back seat and put the stand in the trunk. It was really simple, four screws that go through the bottom of the grill into holes in the stand.

So, we get home, and because Sunny worked last night and I just didn't go to bed, I planned to slap the grill back on its stand, put the cover on it and go to bed.

Four holes, four screws. How long do you think it took us? Five minutes? Six?

Try an hour and a f**king half.

I got one screw in and noticed that the second wasn't aligned. I don't mean off by a fraction of an inch that meant you had to work it in. I mean off buy a good ¾ of an inch. I took the grill off the stand and turned it the other way…it was even worse. I called Sunny to see if she could see what I was doing wrong. She tried. Neither of us could work it out. If I hadn't seen it assembled at the store, I'd have assumed they'd given us the wrong stand and took it back.

Instead, like f**king morons we spent an hour and a half trying to fix the damn thing, until suddenly, without warning, without us doing anything differently, Sunny managed to get three of them in perfectly.

Then she asked me for the last screw. I said she had it. She said I had it. We both got on our hands and knees and spent the next 15 minutes searching for a black, non-reflective screw in the grass. All I can say is: Thank God I cut it a few days ago.

Anyway, we finally got it together. I put in the coal grates and cooking grates…and started to really look forward to breaking it in tomorrow afternoon on Sunny's day off.

Then I came in and checked the weather. Sunny is off work Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We have heavy thunderstorms forecast for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Bollocks.