BBQ Anyone?

After we came home from the mission just a year ago, one of the first things Laurie did was to buy a new BBQ. Travis was here with his dad's truck so off they went to Costco and came home with a big, shiny, stainless steel, impressive looking BBQ that took up most of our small back deck. The main problem was, though, that it didn't work! He tried several times to cook various meats, etc, on it and it never did a good job. The trouble seemed to be that it just didn't get hot enough, so instead of cooking anything, it just kind of dried it out. So Laurie called the company listed on the literature that came with the BBQ and they sent him a new "regulator". So we thought we would be able to cook some decent food on the re-regulated BBQ. But it still didn't work. So when Laurie complained about the no-good BBQ while Nancy was here last month she asked where we got it and when we told her Costco, she said "Take it back, Costco will take anything back!" But we told her we had had it a whole year and it had never worked. So she called Costco and they said they would still take it back. Laurie spent over an hour looking through drawers for the receipt, but couldn' t find it. So she called again and they said we didn't even have to have the receipt. So again Travis helped Laurie and they loaded up the BBQ, this time in the back of Laurie's own truck, and took it off to Costco. They found the purchase in their computer and refunded the money. Then started the search for a new BBQ. It is a very important things to have, you know. So Travis was nice and went with Laurie looking at new BBQ's. They went everywhere in town that they could think of that sold BBQ's. But Laurie was kind of gun shy and couldn't find one he really liked. We kept telling him he could get the new model from Costco because at least we knew they would take it back if it didn't work well. But they came home empty handed and so after Travis went back to Arizona, I knew the task fell upon me to accompany Laurie all over town to try to make up his mind about which BBQ to buy. We looked up all the places in the phone book, but that didn't do much good. Angela even called to say she had seen a pink pig BBQ at a place on State Street and thought we ought to get that one. But we had already seen it and it was charcoal and we wanted gas. Otherwise we might have gotten the pink pig! Brian told us that his parents had recently bought a new BBQ and they had gotten it at R.C.Willey. So we went there. There were a couple that Laurie liked there. One was huge and thats the one he really wanted, but I told him it was too big to fit onto our small back deck and would only let him get the ordinary sized one. But we bought it. The next day he put it together and set it up on the deck, all the while complaining that it was way too small. But it appeared plenty big and shiny, and stainless steel, etc. That night he tried it out. He cooked a couple of steaks and grilled some vegetables and they all turned out great. The BBQ was made in, guess where! CANADA! The Canadians make a much better BBQ than the Chineese. So a couple of days later was July 4 and we planned a great BBQ'ed menu. But for some reason, the old problem seemed to be cropping up and when Laurie went to put the meat on, the BBQ wasn't getting hot like it had done the night before, so we thought we were jinxed. But he decided to change the tank as it appeared to be almost empty. After that, it did a great job. We had Austin and a bunch of his friends, Angela and Brian over to eat and had a real spread--ribs, chicken shish-ka-bobs, sausages, chili, potato salad, jello salad, broccoli salad, cookies and cake. And then afterwards we went to one of Austin's friend's home and watched the fireworks from the side of the mountain exactly east of the Stadium. So all in all we had a great July 4.