As I sit under my little Chinese umbrella in my Muskoka chair (they are NOT indigenous to the Airdoronaks, dammit!), sweltering in the 35 degree C heat, banging away at this laptop, I find myself quite relaxed and generally happy with the way the weekend has been going. Tomorrow morning, really early, I’m jumping on a jet and heading the rest of the way West… Victoria… to meet up with my darling and our eldest daughter. But for now, I’m just enjoying being somewhere that they aren’t bombing me, shooting at me, flinging hand grenades at me, or in any overtly militaristic way trying to disrupt my day. Thank what-every-powers-there-are that I was born Canadian! Sure, we’ve got our problems, and some of the worst weather on the planet, but compared to most places in the world, we are, or at least I am, in a charmed place… near enough to heaven that I really won’t complain.

The weekend did start off a bit rough… on Friday afternoon when I returned to the parking lot where I park my jeep when I have to drive to the downtown offices, I discovered that some stupid M/Fr bastard creep tweaker had smashed in the driver side window. What was missing? Just my change for parking… and that lovely hardened leather case that I picked up dockside at the Cutty Sark in Greenwich during the Nelson/Trafalgar celebrations. That is probably the part that pissed me off the most. The other part is that they spilled my coffee all over… and then I began to laugh. They missed the laptop I had secreted in the back… They smashed, reached in, snatched the money, knocked over my coffee mug… and didn’t even unlock the door(s) to give it a decent rummaging…

Of course this is being discovered at 4 PM on a Friday afternoon… I finally took a deep breath and phoned the Police… got a really nice desk sergeant type who warned me it would be close to two hours before dispatch would get a car to me… and at least an hour before I could dictate the details to one of the officers handling the phones… he suggested one or two community policing offices that I could run out to… of course there was always the headquarters, but with the parking issues, I was better off going to the community policing stations…

The Sergeant was right. I got to the Kensington Mall station, got in, got out in about 15 minutes. Armed with the file number I headed off to the insurance claims centre, and ran into a significant traffic jam caused by the Grand Prix. I know that they close at 5 PM, so I called… and was rewarded with an early closing message. I was very angry and quite short with the answering machine. How bloody useful is an insurance company that can’t or won’t make themselves available?

I went home.

After calling G. to whine and complain of my treatment at the hands of tweakers and insurance companies, I went off to the gym for an hour, and then settled in to feed myself… something which I can do quite well when properly motivated. This seemed like an opportune time to use the food prep as a form of relaxation… a zen kinda thing, I suppose. No rakes in little sandboxes, or the careful placement of rocks. No, instead I would chop something vigourously, fling meat onto hot coals, and figure out what other things I could abuse in the meantime. I did manage to unload the dishwasher without chipping or breaking anything. That was a good start.

I went to the freezer to get the frozen ‘gourmet’ burgers that I had prepped a week ago, and, even as I was pulling the patty-stacker-tube from the freezer I remembered/realized that I had made a tactical error. You aren’t supposed to freeze the burger still in the tube… why? ‘Cause the meat swells when frozen and makes it damn near impossible to get the burgers out of the tube!

After three five minute stints in the microwave, I finally freed up the burgers. I then started the barbeque, deciding to try to cook the burgers from their frozen state… a bit of an experiment. Warily I checked the propane in the tank on the bbq, decided that there really must be enough to get through the cooking of four burgers, right?

I went back inside to start laying out a plate. Once there, I stoppered one of the kitchen sinks and put the pieces of the patty stacker thingee into it, started the hot water as a trickle, with detergent, so that I wouldn’t get too many bubbles.

I took the plate of burgers out to the barbecue, only to discover just how wrong I was. The propane had run out. So I hauled out the other tank, and swapped them… dropped the burgers onto the somewhat preheated grill and then went back into the condo for the lighter…

The first clue that something was wrong was the sound of water falling gently off the counter onto the tiled floor. I had left the water running… hot water… argh!

Once the cleanup was done, and the burgers carefully cooked, dinner was a delightful affair. Thank God for chardonnay…