Some assembly required, and other reasons the treadmill almost killed Sunday.

Sunday should have been a great day. On paper it was. I had a good morning. Went to shoot some sporting clays. Did a few things around the house. Ran the dog. You know the usual.

It really was not a bad day. It just seemed more or less pedestrian.

What really made it go south was throwing in a new treadmill that the Girl wanted.

I can’t begrudge her for wanting a new one, she deserves it. She also paid for it, so it’s her prerogative. Nor can I even begin to blame her for anything that happened post purchase. It is just that Sunday night is not the best time to start a 2 hour assembly of parts and instructions so heinously written that it must have been produced as a form of torture. I really should have known better.

How hard could it be, I thought.

If the instructions were not enough to make it a challenge, the rest must have been thrown in to crush a mans soul. It was pile of questionably fitting parts, less than accurate tolerances and sadistically placed pieces and an assembly of diagrams that looked like a map to downtown Beijing. A perfect mess of routing of wires and knuckle busting nuts and bolts and fasteners of all kinds.

By the time I knew what I was into, it was too late.

Dinner was delayed, and the hunger just proved an ally to the machine feeding off of and wicking away what little patience I had left. In the end it was only my sheer stubbornness the made me complete the task. It was done and working when I left but it may have been a pyrrhic victory as the toll on the evening was taken and the mood had shifted. I had truly won the battle but lost the war.

The rest of the evening never fully recovered.

Would I have done things differently? I would like to think so but I doubt it. The machine had won but I don’t really learn from my mistakes very well. At least these kind of lessons. In then end it is my realization that this is likely a lesson I will have to learn over and over again that is most perplexing and maybe speaks more about me than I would like to admit.