The Chorus of Fasteners, including several nails you can pound into your head when it gets really bad:

The first step: assemble the top frame. Easily done, except that one screw refused to go in at the proper angle. 

This isn’t going to work, is it?

This isn’t going to work, is it?

I set the screw aside to try it later. Already had one part left over, and still on page one. Grand. Finished the framework, set it aside. It was big.

I wept out loud when I pulled one roof strut from the box and saw it was bent. No. NO. I will not wait for China to send another. I just won’t. What – the other strut was bent. And the other. All four. Then I considered that they were supposed to be bent, and sure enough: the instructions showed them slightly kinked. Ah. Well. Carry on.

More screw-screwing. The phrase “as finely machined as a Chinese nut” does not come to mind for most people, and there’s a reason. In order to tighten them up, you had to hold the nut with a cheap little “wrench” with one hand and use your hardy dependable co-worker, Allan Wrench, with the other. I did four before I realized the pointy-screw-end would be visible, as opposed to the nice smooth head-end. Undid them, did them again. 

Okay! Making time! Also, a gazebo! I managed to get the roof completely assembled. GOTT IN HIMMEL, this thing is GROSSEN:

Went on to the next step. And I quote:

Nevermind the difficulty of moving that SETI radio-telescope dish across the lawn; how the devil would I secure it to the frame once it was on? Build a trench like they have in oil-change shops? 

And how would I get this thing on top of the posts? 

Called the Giant Swede. “I will pay you money,” I said. But I knew he’d work for a small cigar.

While waiting for aforementioned large ration of Swede – who got a job, by the way; he was sent to the knackers’ yard when Northwest Airlines was consumed by Delta, but he found gainful employment in his field within a fortnight – I decided to drain the Oak Island Water Feature’s main tank, so I can clean out the accumulated grot, replace the light bulbs, and get that wretched, miserable, soul-searing moneypit going again. I got out the pump, put it in the water, plugged it in. 

Nothing.

Tried the other outlets: nothing. So either the outlets were dead, or the pump was dead. This is where you shake your fist at heaven and ask WHY it seems so NECESSARY that we BLEED MONEY OUT OUR NETHER APERTURES EVERY DAY for EVERYTHING. 

He arrived a few minutes later, surmised the situation, pulled out his Engineer Mojo and threw the instructions aside. We’re going to do this differently, he said. You might think this was a sure route to making something that looked like Homer’s BBQ pit, but he’s a capable fellow. 

How capable? He summoned Velcro from a place where Velcro was thought not to be. One of the instructions said I should attach the roof to the struts using the velcro, but I couldn’t find any. Anywhere. Turns out it was pre-attached for my convenience , hanging from the roof. He also managed to get that balky part to fit, channeling John Henry. Pile: driven. Now it was time to attach the legs, bring it up, lean it over, and other maneuvers that made this look like the Hokey-Pokey for centipedes. (NOTE: in this post-Dowd era of attributing everything lest you be accused of plagiarism by people who think it means lifting an entire paragraph a friend read to you over the phone, then copying a few words for some strange reason, one of the many helpful folk who read the afternoon’s twitter play-by-play mentioned “the Hokey Pokey” as an example of concise instructions. So that’s obviously on my mind. I apologize.) 

There was great grunting when the roof was finally added, but it had that honest, plain, Amish-gazebo-raising spirit, and when it was done, it  was done, and -

Remember the screws I redid because I didn’t want the pointy part looking down? Turns out that meant the pointy part would be looking up, i.e., poking through the fabric roof. So. I redid all eight, with the roof on, which was like changing the sparkplugs on a car with the hood down. But it was done. One more thing – had to put on the skeeter nets, then take them off and put them on again because they were backwards – and it was done. 

Except for the chandelier. Yes, it came with a matching chandelier. But this meant getting bulbs, so we went to Home Depot. Nothing like Home Depot at five PM on a Sunday. It’s a quiet, contented  place. We went to the bulb aisle, where I realized I didn’t know what kind it needed. Phoned home. Child was no use whatsoever. GO GET MOM. My wife said I needed C base bulbs. I had no idea there was such a classification system; you learn something every damned day in this life. Found A base, B, G, F . . . no C. Found Ca, though. This would be the calcium base? Asked a clerk if there was any difference between C and Ca, but she said no, they’re all “Candelabra.” 

Should be Li for Liberace, maybe. Bought another *(#$*%$# pump, then hit Lunds for some groceries, as the Giant Swede had been instructed via wifely text to pick up some items. Only family I know that buys six gallons of milk at a time. The store, Lunds, is doing its best to assure cash-strapped customers that they’re not really the high-end place they’ve been acting like for all these years, and so they have a new strategy:

BOGO.

That’s right: lots of signs everywhere with the BOGO logo. Buy one, you get one free. 

Which would be BOGOF. 

BOGO is what always happens. You buy one, you get one. BOGOF is the real term, but it sounds like BOGUS crossed with Eff-Off. In any case I got BOGO cheese and BOGO lemonade. Back home to wire up the chandelier. Cleaned away all the construction detritus, and lit it up: