One of Those Days...

We all have days where we realize we probably should have stayed in bed. Occasionally one of those days is of such epic proportions that all you can do is laugh. This is one of such days. For me it all started when we got home. I can't speak for my wife. Things were ok until we got home. First my wife got a birthday card from her grandma. Not normally a bad thing but not to far back there was a major falling out with her and occasionally my wife will get all riled up over it again and it takes awhile for her to calm down. I was considering not saying anything for awhile, but she happened to be on the phone with her parents and already on the topic without a lot of drama so I figured that would be as good a time as any. That thankfully went over ok without any rage.

Next up we decided on firing up the BBQ and grilling some steaks. This is where our little adventure really begins. We had the steaks on the grill. My wife had turned them over and we were just waiting for the timer to go off. My wife had to run downstairs and burn a CD for someone that was coming over to pick it up. I heard the timer going off so my wife told me to grab the CD when it was done and she went up to check on the steak. Next thing I knew I heard shrieking. I figured she had found a spider or something so I meandered up the stairs. My wife runs inside screaming something about a fire. This gets my attention. I go outside to see black smoke spewing out of the BBQ and dark orange flames licking at the house. I turned off the gas and just waited a bit before opening the lid. I didn't want to give the fire any more oxygen than it needed to just burn out. It finally mellowed out enough that I figured it would be ok to open the lid. Given than it had just been in an inferno a few minutes before I grabbed an oven mitt and lifted the lid. There wasn't much left of the steak other than charcoal. We've had our burnt offering for the year now. My wife burned herself trying to put the lid down. I disconnect the gas tank and hook up the hose in our back yard. My wife and I get it off the deck and start cleaning the thing out a bit. Eventually we haul it down into the weed patch and I hose the sucker off. The stickers that were on it are now unreadable and a neat black color. I hose off the deck and patio. We now have a nice yellow tinted spot on the house. I hosed off the burnt cobwebs on the side of the house.

In the mean time we figured we'd have baked potatoes. We already had broccoli cooked and ready so we stuff the potatoes into the crock pot and get them going (My wife had found a way to get them cooked faster that way, and had previously worked on smaller potatoes). We decided that we'd go ahead and start on the broccoli and rip into the potatoes when they were done. We finished the broccoli and started opening the potatoes when we discovered that they were still solid in the middle. We hadn't taken the size into consideration. We decide to nuke them in the microwave which only makes the situation worse. The outside fries and the insides stayed solid. My wife burns her hand two more times on the plate that had been in the nuker and that's about the time we decide we'd had enough. It was pushing 9:30 and we'd still only had some broccoli.

We dashed across the street to Wendy's and grabbed some burgers and fries please, in a sack (A Berenstain Bears reference for the readers out there), and called it a night. All we could do was laugh about it. The only other option is to cry about it and that isn't ever as fun. I'm just thankful that the house is still standing and the worst thing that came of it was some extra crispy steak and over/under done potatoes.