Sunday, 08 June 2008
Jon is NOT MacGyver
I've not blogged for a while, because I've been busy. As a result, there's lots to tell, so I thought I'd best start telling!
Jon has been full of surprises. Two Thursdays ago, I asked him if we could go to Broomhill Sculpture Park, but instead he took me to... a garden centre. He did buy a purple rose shrub, though, which is mightily cool. :)
The Friday after our garden centre trip, Jon suddenly announced that evening that we were going camping! His friend lives by the beach and has a field, so we were going to go, enjoy the sunset on the beach, have a barbecue and finally use my new tent. But things did not turn out quite as I expected...
Problem #1 was that the field in which we were meant to camp was full of prickly weeds. Problem #2 was that the only method of cutting the weeds was using a broken strimmer. But Jon and Tomothy had a plan. I decided to leave the boys to it and go for a walk on the beach. It was lovely, and the sea was still quite nice to kick my legs in.
When I returned, there appeared to be progress - the beer had been opened, the barbecue was going, and a long line of extension cables enabled the strimmer to be taken out into the field where the first attempt to actually cut something with it was made. The short strimmer line broke.
Not to be deterred so easily, Jon quickly found his old hands-free kit (for his old phone), and they set about using wire from this to replace the strimmer line. The hands-free kit cut down one weed before it, too, broke.
I ate a burger while they prepared their next attempt. A plastic zip-tie was used to cut two weeds. And then it broke. At this point, I thought they were going to give up, but Jon seemed to have been infected by MacGyver fever, and was determined to have one more try.
Admittedly, their last attempt was also their finest. The guitar string cut five weeds down before succombing to the same fate as the rest. All in all, however, only eight weeds were cut down and there was still not enough space for a tent. The sun had also set by this time, and it had gotten very dark.
The greatest success of the night had been the barbecue, which by this time had cooked several sausages and burgers and was starting to die down. We finished our dinner, emptied our cans of beer, and went to sleep on an inflatable mattress and sleeping bags in the lounge. Not quite the camping experience I hoped for, but probably warmer.
The next day, Jon and I left to check out Appledore Visual Arts Festival, which was good, but not a whole lot different to last year. Later, Tomothy texted Jon to say that he'd found a mower in the shed.
So, perhaps next time we try camping we'll have more success?
