Who knew Father’s Day came with tests?

Test 1: Appliance repair.

On Friday night I came home to discover that the garburator in our sink had stopped working. When you flicked the switch it simply hummed as if the motor was getting power, but couldn’t move. Great… I knew I shouldn’t have been putting coffee grounds down there and it had finally caught up with me. I delayed the task of disassembling our sink until the next night when the girls were sleeping, and did a little research on the internet. Apparently our garburator doesn’t have the handy Allan key method of unsticking it, so the next best recommendation was a broom handle. I tried all kinds of tools, performed numerous cleaning cycles, but the thing wouldn’t budge. Finally I decided to take the garburator off the the sink and get a closer look. It was then that I finally saw the problem. It looked like there was some sort of metal thing jammed between the flywheel and the housing, but I couldn’t recognise it and enlisted Christina’s help. The conversation went something like this…

“Hey Christina, I think I see the problem, but I have no idea what it is.”
“Let me see… OH!” Long pause. “I thought I cleaned them all up.”

Apparently, Christina had accidentally spilled some finishing nails near the sink and one had found its way into the garburator. Well, you can hardly blame the garburator for not handling that tough task. The good news is that I was able to remove the nail and the garburator bounced right back. Test one… PASSED.

Test 2: Food preparation.

Christina went grocery shopping on Friday, and announced to me when I arrived home that she had bought salmon for my Father’s Day dinner. Or rather, she had bought a salmon. A whole one — head, fins, and all. Apparently they are cheaper if you buy them that way, and it was my duty as the man to “clean” it. Although I had seen it done, I’d never cleaned a fish myself before (at least not that I could recall).

So what to do?

Off to the internet I go…With the salmon waiting in the kitchen, I’m hunched over my laptop scouring the internet for tips. A few YouTube videos later, and I’m ready tackle my first salmon cleaning. I’ll spare you the details, but it actually went quite smoothly and we enjoyed a delicious dinner for Father’s day. Test two… PASSED.