On Tuesday I was really tired when I got home. I didn’t even make it to the bedroom. I just laid down on the living room floor with a couple of cushions “watching TV”. An hour later I was awakened by an odd feeling. I rolled over to discover that Momiji was licking my scalp. Marsha thinks she was grooming me. I suspect she was trying to get at my brains, and so I’ve started calling her zombie-cat.

Strangely enough though, I woke up with a recipe in mind. Not anything I’d ever made before, just a dish that came to me out of the blue. I call it Spaghetti Beezy. We like it so much that I made it again the next night

Spaghetti Beezy (1)

1 Barbecue chicken breast
1 Wad of Spaghetti (2)
A shake of italian seasoning (3)
Some Olive Oil (4)
1/2 Bell Pepper
Black Pepper

Dice Chicken breast and bell pepper
Break spaghetti in half, cook to taste (5) and drain
Add enough olive oil to coat the pasta
Microwave the chicken breast and bell pepper for a minute or two to warm them up. Add to pasta
Add Italian Seasoning.
Toss until mixed
Grind some black pepper over the dish and serve

(1) Extra points for anyone that gets the reference.
(2) Make a circle with your index finger and thumb. Fill that with uncooked spaghetti. That’s a ‘Wad”.
(3) Add Italian seasoning to taste. That is, keep putting in more until it’s too much, then put in less.
(4) Enough to coat the spaghetti without too much pooling in the bottom of the dish, unless you like that sort of thing.
(5) To taste means squishy, al-dente, crunchy, whatever you prefer.

Then later in the week while I was dozing after work, I decided to do a stir-fry Asian thing. Limited to, mostly, what I had on hand I thought it came out better than expected. Far better in fact. I chalk the success up to the Three Magic Sauces, or as Google Chinese would say 好热哦 . Of course with Google Translate that might actually mean “I want a cabbage in my pants”. 

Magic Stir Fry

Two potatoes found sprouting on the counter
Half of a green and a red bell pepper left over from Spaghetti Beezy
A stalk of limp celery from the back of the crisper
The last of the onion we got on sale, diced and put in a ziplock bag in the freezer last year
Half a bag of frozen vegetables. I had a mix of peas (loose and pods), baby corn and carrots, but most anything will work, as long as it’s been in the freezer a while.
A can of sliced water chestnuts that have been sitting in the cupboard for who knows how long
Bean sprouts because something in this has to be less than a year old
Half of a can of drained mandarin oranges that’s been sitting in the back of the fridge
A week old barbecued chicken breast
A bunch of cooked brown rice
The last of the cooking oil (why did we keep a whole bottle with just a couple tablespoons in it?)
A bottle of crusty soy sauce
Half a bottle of sketchy stir fry sauce we bought who knows how long (is it supposed to be that colour?)

Dice potatoes, peppers, celery, chicken breast,
Saute potatoes in oil until brown, remove and drain
Add onion, peppers, and celery and saute' in the same oil, stirring often
Add frozen veggies
Add potatoes, keep stirring
Add a splash of soy sauce as the oil goes down. The steam will help cook the mix
Add other ingredients but the orange. Keep adding a splash of soy sauce every now and then. Be cautious because it is salty.
Pour in the stir fry sauce, keep mixing so everything gets well coated
Continue cooking until the bean sprouts are limp and unappetizing and the frozen veggies are warm
Plate the dish over a bed of the warm rice and arrange the orange slices on top as a garnish
Serve with beer, lots of beer. Best start the beer well before the dish arrives

The question remains as to why I was so tired this week? The reason was simple;  something amazing happened. I was talking sports with “the guys at work”. Yup that's it. Just talking about teams and players, and all that sort of jazz. The Vancouver Canucks traded their legendary goaltender Roberto Luongo to Florida. We chatted for some time about this. The consensus seems to be that they traded Luongo “for a coke and a bag of pucks”. The other thing we all agreed on is that It was time. The lineup was getting tired and the Canucks were overdo to clean house and have a couple of rebuilding years. The most amazing, exhilarating, and exhausting part of this, for me anyway, was the mere fact I was having this conversation. I don’t know anything about hockey. I don’t like hockey. I don’t watch hockey. Having this exchange was great, though. It was a wonderful practice in improv acting and I think I pulled it off fairly well. 

So what sport do I like? Well, I love rally. The trouble is that none of it is televised. I've watched several Dakar rallies over the years but since they moved it to South America, coverage has dropped to almost nothing. Mostly it isn’t on. This year I did see one stage out of sixteen, but none of the others. But while rally isn’t on, I did discover they've restarted the Red Bull Air Race Series. I love it. It's exciting and the camera work is fantastic. The series went on hold after the 2011 races “for retooling and review,". I suspect they were having trouble getting cities to host the races. Plus in the last series they had some safety issues that they wanted to address. I’d just about given up on it ever coming back. Then last weekend it returned with the race in Dubai and I am just thrilled about it. http://www.redbullairrace.com/m/en_US/article/2014-season-launched

The races are about once a month or so and they finish in November. I’m very happy about this, however I don’t think I can talk about it to the “Hockey Guys” at work. 
They wouldn't understand.

So remember last summer when Barb got evicted from her house near the beach? We found out on Tuesday that there was a fire in the house. When the fire department showed up they found a body in the garage in a burned out car. It turned out top be Dave, the guy that owned the house and Barbara's former landlord. He was a principal at local school. It’s so weird to think that this happened to somebody we knew. 
http://www.nanaimobulletin.com/news/248840301.html

And finally there was a really impressive fireball that exploded over Yellowknife.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/fireball-explodes-over-yellowknife-1.2563631