Yesterday I went in the morning to get a haircut at Matrix Hair on Beacon Street in the morning while we were waiting out a one hour waiting list at Zaftigs for brunch. My hair stylist was a nice Irish woman in the cast of many of the other Irish women that I have had cut my hair there. We got into a nice long conversation which is always preferable to the silent haircut. I’ve found that the young and attractive Irish girls who cut my hair tend to be more talkative than American’s. That’s one of the reasons why I go to Matrix.

She was wondering what I was going to do on Sunday and I told her that I was going to go to the Patriots game and make a day of tailgating with my friends. She let me know how funny it was that Americans are so organized about camping out and that the Irish are never organized about outdoors activities because they don’t know how to plan these things.

Over the summer one Friday afternoon she had gotten a call from her core group of friends, 3 other local Irish implants, informing her that they were all going to go on a trip to North Conway for the weekend. They brought one tent and one sleeping bag for four people. Once at the campsite when they had set the tent up they realized that all they had brought for sustenance were three cases of beer, a bag of potato chips, cigarettes, and a pack of cards. So they were tortured by the smell of steaks, burgers, sausages, spaghetti, and whatever else the Americans had managed to waft into their direction while they were sitting arguing about how stupid it was to only bring beer on a camping trip. So they stayed up all night long (until 5 AM) drinking, smoking, and playing cards only to find the next day that they had a terrible hangover. At 11:00 they managed to make their way into town and went to a diner where they had some of the “Oogliest hungover feces you’ve ever seen and ayt like pigs stuffin’ food into us fer half en eyr.”

After finally feeding themselves they rented kayaks on the Saco river. The man who rented them the kayaks left them at the launch point and told them he would see them tomorrow when they were picked up at the other end of the river. They were surprised to find out that the kayaking trip was an overnight journey and once again all they had were two cases of beer and a bag of potato chips. So they started to paddle and after about half an hour they all were complaining about how hard it was because they expected to be taken down stream by the current and ride it like a waterslide down to the other end. They thought about it and realized that they were going the wrong way on the river and turned around.

At this point they were getting tired, had terrible hangovers, and were getting hungry again only to find a small pack of Pringles for the whole group of them. Luckily as they rowed downstream they passed under a road and could see ahead on the road that there was a KFC open down the road. So they parked the kayaks, set camp, ordered lots of KFC food and drank the other two cases of beer before going to sleep. According to the man who met them the next evening late in the evening he was shocked at how long it took them to reach the end since most people paddle most of the river the night before and have only an hour to get to the end the next morning.
So lately my Irish hair stylist has been noticing her friends investing in camping gear like lanterns, stoves, and sleeping bags in preparation for the next season.

Now the premise that Americans are any better at planning for outdoors activities than the Irish would at first seem reasonable if you never tried to tailgate with my family. At the end of the evening on Friday night, after a long family struggle over my dad’s two month late birthday party, I left the stove we were planning to use at the Patriot’s game with my father to test with his propane tank in Newton. When I called him this morning as I was buying sausages, our key ingredient for our tailgating lunch, he hadn’t tested out the stove. As I was driving over to him he had decided to give it a shot at which point he called me to ask if the plastic should be removed from the connector.

Now the reason why we were testing the stove is because at the last Patriots football game we had been unable to cook our sausages because the propane tank had run out of gas since I had used it at a pre-season game and to cook food in Marshfield a few days before. The stove takes propane either from a small canister or through an adapter to a large propane tank. The idea of bringing it out to Newton was to try to use the adapter to attach the tank used on my father’s Weber Grill to the portable Coleman stove.

So as I am pulling into the driveway I learned from my father that the adapter and the propane tank are a mismatch. There is no way to fit the two of them together. At this point it was starting to get late so we had to figure out whether to abandon the idea of cooking altogether or to try to find a suitable source of propane. We also discovered that unlike the Irish, who always have a keg handy, we had not thought about bringing beer and were going to need to do something. Sarah looked like she had a hangover because she had thrown-up once more last night making two nights in a row. This could move her into a realm of sickness where food poisoning is not the culprit for her illness but it is hard to know.

So with Sarah sitting in the front seat because she was sick, Alan Buckler driving because Hattie had sold me her ticket because work was requiring her to work during the game and Alan took the call for the ticket, and my dad and I sitting in the back we headed out to Gillette stadium with a mission to stop at Home Depot to solve the propane challenge.

Once at Home Depot we first discovered that the adapter for the propane tank doesn’t do a good job of connecting to almost any modern large propane tank. Luckily we found two canister sized propane tanks similar to the one that had been used-up in three successful usages during the pre-season to prepare for the game. We drove the back route and my dad guided Matt and Kate through the back route as well and stopped at the lot to start cooking with our newly reconstituted grill.

So I was quite excited when I constructed the grill screwing the legs into it and placing the two eaves onto the side to act as table ends to hold utensils, drinks, and sausages. Then I connected a tank to the regulator, turned it to light, and started the clicking starter. Of course it did not light. Upon further investigation there was definitely no propane coming from the tank into the stove. It didn’t seem like it was possible to have it come out as though a part was missing.

A part WAS actually missing. Alan found a long stem-like screw that indents into the canister still screwed into the empty canister. Apparently in our haste to try to grill at the last football game we had screwed the canister in so tight that the regulator had left a screw still stuck in it. That screw allows the gas to come out by breaking through the sealed part of the canister. So we unscrewed it with much ceremony and then screwed it back into the regulator. This seemed like a perfect solution until I screwed the regulator now with the proper adapter to release the pressure into a full canister. The result was a leaking of the propane out the sides of the regulator. Now I figured we just had a wrong fit and we had purchased two different sizes of small propane canister so I switched canisters. I figured that by screwing it in tighter I could get enough of a seal on the top and the leaking would stop so I started screwing it on nice and tight to a long blue canister. Again it started leaking but much more and it was getting much cooler. So I took the regulator off the top and this time it didn’t stop leaking. Instead it shot propane out at a full blast like the back of a rocket ship.

Other people who were tailgating around us watched as I shot propane out at the ground and told everyone in no uncertain terms that propane was being released in large quantities all around their lit grills and fires to keep them warm. The jet was so strong from the tank that it blew the sand away from the lot and uncovered the concrete beneath it. After about a minute of spewing 4 hours worth of propane in the air around us I stopped to take a break and hoped that we didn’t immediately go up in flames.

We negotiated with a nice man at the tailgating party next to us to cook our sausages, ate some bread and cheese, and finally walked over to the game to watch the Patriots beat the Dolphins 24-10.

The broken Coleman grill was a gift for my dad for his birthday but I still haven’t been able to officially give it to him yet. It needs a gasket that keeps the propane from flowing out the sides of the regulator. I bought it on sale at K-Mart. Maybe tomorrow we’ll have better luck with getting his birthday all set. My haircut is quite good although it looks like I got a Flat Top irish hair do. My Irish hairdresser was likely to spend the day up north in Conway today looking at the foliage.