A weekend in the life.

For the second consecutive year, my wife is participating in the Susan G Komen 3-day walk for breast cancer. As if walking 60 miles over three days isn’t enough of a challenge, she must also raise $2,200 in order to participate in the August event. But since it’s such a wonderful cause, she has no qualms about doing whatever is necessary to raise the funds. That includes having a yard sale over a 3 day period this past Thursday, Friday & Saturday. She decided that all proceeds would go towards her money raising goal.

My wife was successful in her attempts to raise money for charity and coax a new gas BBQ grill and patio furniture.

I came home on Thursday afternoon to find both our patio furniture and grill gone from our spacious patio.


Whoa, whoa. Spacious patio? If you had kids and told them to go out back and play, they would only be able to play a game of checkers. That’s because a checkers board is the only thing that could fit.


Uhhh, you’re missing the point here. What I’m trying to say is that my wife decided to donate our patio furniture and gas grill to her yard sale. She did that knowing full well I would not balk because:

a) The money raised from the sale of those items would be going to a good cause.
b) I would insist on buying a new grill and furniture.


Wow, aren’t you a softy. I guess it’s a good thing that she didn’t include one of your cars in the sale.


Why do you think I parked our better car two blocks away from our house all weekend?

Anyhow, the procurement of a new grill and patio furniture turned out to be a whole different harrowing experience.

We first went to purchase our new gas grill at….well….I won’t name the store but it’s the one with the big red & white bullseye on the front of the building.

We picked out the grill we liked and then read the instructions that we were to contact a customer associate to check and make sure it was in stock. The woman assisting us (we’ll call her “Tami”, since that was her name) was told the item was in stock. Tami instructed us to go to the front of the store where she would wheel up the grill on a cart and ring us up at the register. Upon completion of the transaction, she stated “I hope you have a truck or van where we can load this.” No, but I assured her the back seat in our Toyota Corolla would be sufficient. Tami was quite skeptical of that, a point she was looking to prove to us when we pulled up. Sure enough, when I pulled the car up I saw her shaking her head “no”. I proceeded to move the front seats forward in an effort to create more space in the back. Tami still insisted the grill would not squeeze in there.

By this time, one of Tami’s co-workers came to assist in the task of getting our grill into the backseat. Tami grabbed one end and backed into our backseat with her co-worker pushing on the other end. It took about one minute of maneuvering but they got the job done. As Tami emerged from our car I had this look of vindication on my face. All along, I politely insisted that the grill would get in there despite her protests to the contrary.

Ah, but Tami wasn’t through spreading her rays of sunshine. As we were about to leave, I thanked her for her assistance. She replied with “Well, good luck getting that thing out. It will be a lot harder getting it out than it was putting it in.” In an attempt to bring a little levity to her sour demeanor, I said we would just give her a call since she was so helpful in getting the grill to fit in our backseat in the first place. Not amused, she replied “I’m turning off my phone right now” and she walked off.

I guess good help (as well as a sense of humor) truly is hard to find.

Oh, and by the way. We got the grill out of our car in ten seconds.

Ever the gluttons for punishment, my wife & I returned to that same store a couple of days later to purchase our new patio furniture.

The whole routine was the same, right up to the sales associate insisting the box wouldn’t fit all the way in our trunk. This time, we brought our Dae Woo…..


… Gesundheit!


…since the trunk and back seat were larger. The sales associate, Adam, placed the big box in the trunk, but part of the box was still sticking out. I thanked him for his half-hearted effort and proceeded to finish the job myself.

Thankfully, Adam didn’t try to rain on our parade by telling us that we would have a tough time assembling the patio furniture.

All’s well that ends well!!