Ever taken a sledgehammer to a grill?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
This lovely opportunity was given me yesterday, as our family got a new grill and I was ordered to dissemble the old one. The words "by any means necessary" were actually spoken by the short-sighted parental unit, so I suppressed maniacal laughter, took up a sledgehammer, and began gleefully whacking the daylights out of the poor grill.
Thirty minutes later, I was marveling at the grill's structural integrity as I switched from hammer to angle grinder. For those who have not grown up with tools, it's basically a hand-held tool with a composite metal disk that can cut through steel and iron with ease, throwing out a satisfying shower of sparks as it does so. If you ever get the chance to use one, make a great effort to locate a suitable pair of glasses, because my efforts to secure a pair were not great enough, and after 15 minutes of happy sparking, I shot a metal shard into my eye.
After I removed the metal, I returned to the sparking and managed to cut through the rest of the grill without incident. I attempted to save the igniter in the hopes that a new battery would provide me with the trigger mechanism for my Fourth of July cannon, but after seven Band-Aids later, I decided regretfully that it was not to be and threw the pieces of the now-conquered grill into the back of the truck for dumpster disposal later and retired to the barn to get flattened by a horse and spat on by an alpaca.
Why do we even HAVE those things?
Leaving behind some amused animals and nursing some bruised ribs, I returned to the house to catalog injuries and ponder my next move. It came in the form of my old machete, which I managed to dig out of my closet and sharpen up. My dog and I then left for the woods to test it out.
We returned in an hour, leaving in our wake a trail of new forts, shattered forts, and blood trails (mostly from me. Okay, totally from me). I shall leave it to the imagination as to how our time was spent...but I'll give you a hint. IT WAS AWESOME!!! Just...don't ever forget you're holding a machete when you try to swat a mosquito. Yeah, you'll kill the mosquito, but you're going to lose a lot more blood then you would if you just let the mosquito and his entire extended family have dinner. On the other hand, there's the principle of the thing...I'd personally rather lose blood by my own hand than by a stupid bug.
But I digress.
So yeah, this is the first day of my summer...and ironically, the last day before I head over to another college for a one-week summer lab that's scaring the living daylights out of me just thinking about it. Oh well...it's only a week, and after that I can come home and begin planning the epic fireworks display for the Fourth that will make national headlines, either because it's amazingly cool and can be seen from three states, or because the farm vanished and left behind a smoking crater. Or both.
Just kidding.
Maybe.
Watch the skies.
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