I had this weird dream last night about… I’m not even sure what. there were whales trapped in a mall full of water or something and I had to open the doors to let them out into some other room, and then one turned into a giant half whale half alligator thing. their names were Itsy, Bitsy and I dont remember the third… but then they turned into humans or their conscious turned into humans or something and then there was a car chase in Smart Cars up a long, icy road. and then something about a castle or a mansion… and I was sort of the narrator?

I dunno.

I chopped some more wood yesterday. I’ll slowly but surely get through the many large piles of logs we have here. then I have to figure out where to stack it all. bonus, well be able to bring a shitload out in June to Fubar 4.0.

yesterday we got mail. mostly because we didn’t check it on Friday. here’s the thing about having a mailbox that’s not attached to your house; you sometimes forget about it. so sometimes we get mail on Saturday. or Sunday, depends when we check it.

We had a package from Danielle in there. to a lesser extent from chad. I’ll give him… I dunno… 20% of the credit.

we got christmas cards of awesomeness and some things to unwrap.

Aimée got nylons or leggings or stretchy pants. or are all of those sort of considered one and the same at some point based on thickness and material used?

I got a zester. which is awesome because zesting with a box grater is a pain in the ass sometimes. now I can zest the shit out of things. Citrus beware! I’m coming for your skin! dinners rejoice! for you shall soon have tasty morsels of zest sprinkled on you from above to enhance your already undeniably delicious flavour because I made you!

Correspondence from the front lines of the War on Squirrels!

Weather warming. Stop.

Squirrels becoming visibly more active. Stop.

Previous defensive maneuver utilizing expanding foam has sealed off several enemy access routes. Stop. Enemy tunneling has not been fully neutralized. Stop. Enemy reconnaissance heard under flooring this morning. Stop.

Enemy using tree cover at far end of yard for cover. Stop.

No enemy assault or close quarters contact expect in the near future. Stop.

Advise remaining at Squirrel Con 4. Stop.

Enemy activity not expected to increase dramatically until March. Stop.

Stop. Stop.

remember when I’d make a dinner and put up a post that night or the next day? yeah. I’m getting lazy in the keep up with the food post department.

and I can’t remember where half the pictures are that I took last weekend anyway.

all that really matters is that picture right up there of the two fucking spectacularly delicious looking chickens. which, of course they were.

Aimée wants me to smoke a turkey. I wanted to start smaller. plus her cousin and his wife were coming for dinner. so I made chickens.

I brined them overnight in a mixture of stuff. this stuff may have included lemon grass, kosher salt, cinnamon, ancho chilies, preserved oranges, paprika… and peppercorns.

I left the container outside overnight to keep it cool.

I bought apple a cheery wood chips the day before, because I only had mesquite at the moment and I didn’t want to smoke chickens with that. I was going to stick with just apple, but fuck it, I mixed apple and cherry wood.

I rubbed one chicken in stuff for beer can chicken that I bought a while ago that actually comes in a container shaped like a beer can. can’t go wrong with a container shaped like a beer can. ever. even if there was never beer in it. you may hold that against it, but it’s still a container that looks like a beer can and has ingredients for beer can chicken in it. give it a goddamn break, will ya?

the other one I rubbed with a mix of stuff in the pantry. garlic… pepper… cardamom… cinnamon… other stuff…

popped them in the smoker at 250 for a little over three hours. you could smell that shit EVERYWHERE. Aimée’s mom popped over for a bit and said she could smell it up the driveway.

that’s right neighbours that only really show up in the summer to live in your summer cabin at the lake, you will be subjected to delicious smells ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

so anyway, out come the birds. that’s what they looked like.

it was that kind of delicious where you have people sitting around commenting about how good it smells and suddenly you realize no one is talking because you’re stuffing your face in amazement at what your taste buds are telling you.

yeah. I do that. to your food.

we ate the breasts for dinner. I took the drumsticks for lunch the next day, and it was a whole new level of awesome. more smoke penetration, crispier. there’s just no practical way to describe how good it was.

you know those shows you see about crazy Southern Americans and their bbq and smoking techniques bragging about how it’s the best food ever and you sit there and think, yeah it looks good, but those silly Muricans think everything smoked is good.

well.

they’re right.

I will concede to that fact.

there was still some meat left, and Aimée put it in an alfredo sauce. i wish every alfredo sauce could taste like that particular alfredo sauce. all of them. even your grandmas.

I don’t know if i’ll do a turkey next. that’s a big bird. we need lots of people for that. plus, I’ve tried poultry and beef. time to go for a pork shoulder.

tonight we’re going to the keg. it’ll be good. but not as good.

not knowing that something can possibly leave you in paralytic fear and you don’t know it until you’re stuck in a fucking chair in the middle of it.

I will freely admit to being terrified of needles. and bees and wasps. fuck that shit. I don’t care if you think it’s stupid. everyone’s got something that creeps them right out down to their core. and if you don,t well la de fucking da, aren’t you special.

what sucks more is when you find that one of these fears extends into something else.

like dental work.

see? people laugh at the needles and bees thing, but mention dental work and you’re guaranteed to give someone the jibblies.

today I had to go sit in the part of the dentist office I’d never been in before because one tooth decided to get a goddamn cavity for the first time ever.

let’s begin with the fact that this requires the dentist sticking a needle in my face. literally. if you’ve never seen me react to one going in my arm or leg, well, up the ante some.

I told them this when I went for a cleaning at the start of the month. I took them up on the offer of nitrous.

lots and lots of nitrous.

as in they had to turn it up three times.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had to use a sedative, but it takes a lot for you to still feel that sense of panic through them if you’re really dosed up.

and yes, I know nitrous is not a sedative. but having been through that before after popping one, and then two tabs of ativan so I could get inoculations before going to Bangladesh… it sucks. there’s no way around it.

so they turned up the nitrous three times. they kept asking me if I felt anything. honestly, I never really felt it until the drill started up. and that was probably 20 or 30 minutes after starting to breathe it. the dentist’s assistance joked that she’d get me high if it was the last thing they did. if that’s the case, that was a shitty high. how would I know?

gee, lemme think.

 throughout the whole process I was thinking, “why is it called laughing gas? this isn’t funny and I’m not laughing.” the fucked up thing was that I felt like it was keeping me very awake.

that stuff might numb your body, but I didn’t think it did much for the fact that I KNEW he was sticking a fucking syringe in my mouth. should have brought a stress ball. pretty sure there are clawing marks in my legs. apparently I was hyperventilating. with nitrous on. not as fun as some people think it might be.

I talked to my parents about it last night, and they kept telling me it’d be over and I’d be fine. yes, I was, but all of that advice flies out the window when you’re in the middle of it.

I never really knew it would take that much conscious effort to open my mouth to let them get started. then the shit they put in the there to isolate the tooth made me feel like they’d jacked my jaw open. and you want to scream and yell but you’re scared shitless that if you move something in your mouth with crack or go wrong so all you can do is suffer through it and let your body twitch in fear and try not to feel like you’re choking and try to remember to breathe through your nose so that dry, orange smelling gas might do something to calm you down even just a bit.

it’s like being in one of those fucked up scenes from X-Files where someone’s strapped down and you get the character POV and all they see is masks, tubes and hear buzzing and high pitched whirring and you can feel pressure and vibrating and you start to lose track of all feeling of time and it just seems to drag on and fucking on.

some people have no problem with all of this.

apparently, I’m not one of them.

when the drill started I think the gas kicked in a bit and everything just went numb. but like I said, that doesn’t stop your brain from trying to force up just sheer instances of panic. the shitty thing is that you can’t do anything about it except try and force it to go away in your head. that is not easy.

I had to sit in the waiting room after it was done for about a half hour just shaking. whole body shaking. there was some old dude in there watching me sit there shaking. then some mom brought her daughter in because her filling had cracked or something and the kid was watching me sit there and shake. she didn’t look like she had a problem with any of it. good on her. she might have been 9. I envied her for not looking like she gave a shit that they were going to tick several sharp objects in her mouth.

you know what’s a good way to make sure someone uses proper oral hygiene? put them through this once. just once.because they will never want to go back and go through that again.

I know tomorrow I’ll go in to work and my coworkers will razz me about it. that’s fine. I can shoot back. I know other people will fire some zingers about it my way too. that’s fine. because someday, all of them will end up in a situation where they feel them same.

now… where’s my fucking floss…

on friday we went to check out the newest bar slash pub slash restaurant slash eatery slash all of the above in Sylvan. Voilå! Cities Gastro Pub! there’s already one in Red Deer, but the one in Sylvan opened about two weeks ago. I will give you the ONLY reason you need to know that you should go there.

instead of nachos…

you can order a bucket of bacon and syrup to dip it in.

done and fucking done.

I’d have pictures of our night, but apparently a rule was established before we got there that the first person to take out their phone had to pay for everything. so you dont get to see a picture of the table covered with beer bottles. or the incredibly delicious Tokyo Burger I had, or the Butter Chicken poutine, or the Angry Bison poutine, or the Fish Tacos that provided much entertainment with their obvious innuendos.

or the jalapeno pepper chili beer that someone ordered and was… well… it was fucking gross. I’m sorry, there’s no way to simplify that any further. it was terrible.

so would I recommend you go there? duh. BACON BUCKET.

Last night I popped the cheery of our Staub tagine we go for christmas. fitting since it’s red. like a cherry.

see what I did there?

chicken, acorn squash, onion, garlic, oilves, parsley, cilantro, plum, raisins, preserved lemons and oranges, served over quinoa.

and you know what?

it was delicious.

of course it was, I made it.

it’s almost back above 0 from the shit -36 we had to put up with all this past week. you know what that means of course. slush. slushballs. thawing dog poo…

Aimée brought me back fries from Blondie’s cause she went for brunch with her friend and apparently she blames my hiccups on the fact that as soon as she walked through the door I went all Epic Meal Time on them.

lies.

I ate them one at a time.

just really fast.

on tuesday we went up to edmonton so a doctor could shoot lasers at Aimée’s face. I asked if it made PEW PEW noises. then I asked if I could make PEW PEW noises. then I asked if I could run around the room all Han Solo style yelling PEWPEWPEWPEWPEW!!! geuss which one was not agreed to. if you guessed the first one, you are correct.

it made noises like a library bar code scanner instead. I was a little disappointed. I was a little disappointed I didn’t have to wear giant tinted goggles to protect from the LASER BEAMS either.

BUT.

I did subsequently get to make a shit ton of Dr. Evil and his Laser jokes.

afterwards, we went to a deli right by the clinic and bought some sammiches and I caved and bought four fresh Italian sausages. two chorizo and two chicken, tomato and basil. so I cooked the bitches up last night on our grill. I also sliced up a potato and yam in that Julienne style IE REAL FUCKING THIN, and fried them into delicious little crisps. and you know what? that whole meal was fucking fantastic. those sausages were the, you take one bite and stop and stare at it and look at the other person because they’re doing the same thing, good.

yes. THAT good.

it was also insanely cold here this week. so cold in fact that the driver door of my brand new truck decided that in the few seconds it took me to open the door, the latch would actually freeze open. you want to bitch about your door freezing shut, try driving to work having to hold it shut.

to be fair, I only had to hold it a few blocks before the heater warmed it up enough to make it work.

fucking winter.

although, I have to say I’m glad that’s all that happened. if I still had the van, I probably wouldn’t have been making it in to work. the cold has that van’s number written all over it. it’s frightening to hear it try to start in minus 30 or less. all those noises you really hope you never hear coming from your engine? yeah, it does that.

now I don’t have to worry about it. my truck is like, “-36? bitch, please. SYNTHETIC OIL FTW!”

you know what I think about SOPA and PIPA? everyone should just host everything in Canada. those are American laws affecting American hosted content. fuck ‘em. home hosted, no problems.

and that’s that. food time.

I don’t have a fog machine or stage lights and a sound system to make a fogged, strobe lit entrance here. cause I totally would. because the reflection off the paint of this truck would look fucking bad ass.

Where once there was Big Red the 2005 Dodge Caravan SE, there now sits The Big Grey Buffalo.

Why The Big Grey Buffalo?

well, it’s grey. and the first three letters on the license plate are BFL.

So world, say hello to the new 2012 Toyota Tacoma V6 SR5 in front of the house that shall now, and forever, be known as The Big Grey Buffalo.

I have plans for it. add ons if you will. a slow, practical build. starting with tires. awesome truck, got an awesome deal, but the OEM tires are total shit. except I dont have a grand to buy new ones. so, that’ll be the first mod down the road.

probably followed by some PIAA or IPF lights.

and eventually maybe swapping out the suspension.

no lift kits though. do not want. as long as I can get tires that don’t need a lift kit, there will be no lift kit.

maybe bull bars and a winch.

figures the week I buy it, it’s going down to like -36… but at least I know it’ll run in that. the van would probably have frozen solid and just collapsed into a heap.

in the spirit of the Big Grey Buffalo, this is sort of required listening now:

Dear Big Red,

I never named you that. My sister did. She probably liked you more than I did. I know my mom did. When I put a new license plate on you and tried to name you Zeke, that didn’t hold. Also, thre three digits were the model number of a lesser known and less successful Porsche. I can’t fault you for that, that was the registry agent’s fault.

So Big Red, tomorrow you head up the road to edmonton with my foot mashing your accelerator one last time. After that, I don’t know where you’ll go. If you get wholesaled, maybe Hobbema. I don’t wish that upon you, so maybe you’ll end up some kids first vehicle that they don’t really want because you’re a minivan.

Big Red, I never drove you easily, except when you were making strange noises, like the time last winter when I started you and it sounded like the fan had exploded. People would often tell me, “Pat, it’s a minivan, not an F1 car!” yeah, well, you have to start somewhere.

I never liked that you were front wheel drive and I couldn’t drift you. However, in retrospect, that’s probably a good thing.

You’ve hauled all my worldly possessions to and from Vancouver several times. You’ve driven through mountains, across dry lake beds, through farm fields, into snowbanks, into tree branches, through ditches, through giant puddles in parking lots, you’ve smacked into curbs on ice, rear ended 4runners, had the police chase you down for going too fast (yet never a photo radar ticket was ever seen).

You’ve hauled dinosaur bones, firewood, camping gear, plants, dogs, and derby people. you’ve driven through a blizzard at 3am from Medicine Hat back to Red Deer. You’ve tilted, swerved, braked and sped up like most soccer vans never did.

You’ve been muddy, wet, dry, hardly washed, covered in mud on the inside from a wet dog (some of that’s still there), cracked your windshield, burned out lights, and blown a hole in your radiator.

You cost me a dollar to buy. you cost me several thousand times that in repairs.

You’ve been the cause of people asking if I had kids, and when I said no, they got weirded out because usually people with kids have minivans. or creepers. no and no on both. well, I mean, I guess that depends on who you ask for the latter really… of course, the people saying that are just as weird as me anyway.

You’ve hauled nine people from a concert in edmonton while your suspension screamed at me.

You’ve been driven balls out with the windows down.

You’ve done all these things, and while I never really liked you, I did grow a fondness for you. You put up with my beatings and cursing and singing and the likes. You never really broke down on me, but, let’s face it, you’re still kind of junk that Chrysler makes. that’s ok, we can’t all be Audis, or VWs or the likes. sometimes you just have to live as the nitty gritty.

I don’t think I’ll feel bad about getting rid of you. you’ve served your purpose. that’s all you can ask of a vehicle.

I won’t offer you a lament, but I think that this song serves as a good wave goodbye:

so I had figured on starting small with the smoker. make jerky or something simple. of course, waking up on saturday and going to the grocery store and picking up a three pound roast was a little different than that.

FIRST.

by the way, feel free to read this out in the voice of Harley from EMT.

cranberries, chipolte and CHALAPEEN HOES! cookin up the marinade sauce, spicin’ up the marinade sawwwse.

ain’t no turkeys for this sawse! hot pepper cranberry hot sawse marinade, fuckin’ smart!

blend that shit! ain’t no chunks in this, cause it’s going to wrap up our MEAT.

see that meat? wrapped up so it can’t fucking escape!? prisoner roast!

soaked that motherfuckin meat cube in the sawse over night then took it out and wrapped it in bacon strips! and bacon strips! and bacon strips! and bacon strips!

soakin the mesquite chips! and mesquite chips! and mesquite chips!

now smoke that shit, slow. and low. like a limbo bar.

what’s a meat smoke without a meat drink! bacon vodka ceaser? liquid bacon strips!

drink that shit! it’s goooood. like alcoholic clam bacon sawse!

time to eat! take out that meat. pitch a tent over it to let it rest. it’s got juices, and they gotta settle.

slice it UP.

we took a roast! we covered it in hot thanksgiving like sauce! we put it in a smoker and made it smell and taste like the old west!

*insert eating segment*

next time, we smoke a platypus.

also, this coming saturday I’m picking up that truck. that one right there. 2012 Tacoma SR5 4×4 full cab. fuckin’ a.

one more for good measure?

fuckin’ right.

Ja, de Sveedes vun de Hookey tuurnament! Ja, ve vill eat de meatballs! Ja ve vill Svedish Chef!

So our humidor is pretty well as full as we can get it without taking out the humidifying packs. which would be bad. so, basically it’s full.

We managed to get a whole bunch for super cheap because of one of those fluke circumstances you scratch your head at and think “…that really happens?”

yeah. they do.

especially when a cigar shop owner dies and his wife decides she’s just going to burn everything and a neighbour finds out and goes NOOOOOOOOO like that fucker did in episode 3.

she came home with them and I just sort of put them all in without really going through them with much attention.

I decided to go through them tonight and figure out exactly what’s in there.

Some of them are still from our trip to the Dominican and are sort of no name local falvoured ones. some of them are bigger flavoured ones made in I don’t know where but not Cuba.

The ones I could easily identify are (p.s., Cuban unless otherwise indicated. take THAT Americans and your stupid ‘Cuba is Evil’ rule!):

Bolivar No. 3

Por Larranaga Montecarlo

Romeo y Julieta No. 3 and what I think are Belvederes

Raphael Gonzalez Panatela Extra

Arturo Fuente Gran Reserva Corona (Dominican)

Don Patico No. 4 (Dominican)

Partagas Serie D No. 4

Montecristo No. 4 Robusto & No. 2 Torpedo

Cohiba Piramides

San Cristobal de le Habana Hermosos No. 1 Grand Corona

Thomas Hind (Nicaraguan?)

Vista Real (Dominican)

Te-Amo Pausser (Mexico)

Havana Honeys Vanilla & Rum (Dominican)

CAO MX2 (Nicaraguan) these fuckers are huuuuuge. larger than the Montecristo No.2 and the Cohiba Piramides.

now, I am in no way an expert on cigars. at all. all I really know is that opening a humidor to see it full of Cubans is kind of awesome. and that even if you only have one or two a month, that’s all you really need.

as of right now my top three include Romeo y Julieta, Cohiba and Partagas.

right now I’m eating shredded cheese out of the bag.

back to work today. oh what fun it is to drive on a dark winter highway, hey! if you didn’t just say that phrase to the tune of jingle bells, well, congratulations.

yes, yes, back to work after a brief reprise. back to the grind. back to the ins and outs of oxygen. bonus points for naming the song there.

as I was sitting at my desk today, my phone rang. I answered. on the other end was my boss who proceeded to inform me that her four year old had told her she had no interest in going to the semi final games of the World Juniors today and wanted to know if I would like to go to the 3pm Sweden/Finland game.

I’m not sure how many other people’s bosses call them up in the middle of the day asking you to skip work to do that. probably not a lot. I considered it, but as much as it would have been, it would have been a bit of a hassle to get down to calgary, get to the arena, find parking, and get out of there later on. so I settled for updating year end reports.

pretty sure part of my brain will be stuck on “you dumbass” for a while.

anyway, it’s not like it was a completely wasted opportunity to hit up a Juniors game. On Saturday, being New Year’s Eve, we loaded up the pooch, hit the road up to Edmonton for some IKEA and the Canada/USA game, the tickets to which had been graciously been given to us by Aimée’s cousin. who ended up not being able to go. because he had to go to Winnipeg. not for a jets game.

so that was pretty much awesome. whole arena in red and white, chanting for the home town team? home town? home country? I saw three people in American jerseys. they were brave folk.

We had the defending end twice, 15 rows up, exactly in line with the goal line. that second goal the US had, fucker was almost in slow motion. I watched it bounce off the back of Wedgewood’s foot and it just seemed to take forever.

we’d eaten at IKEA because for 6 bucks I got us four hot dogs, two pops, a milk and a cinnamon bun. at the game, that bought part of a beer. 8 fucking dollars for probably a 14oz drink. rip. off.

after the game there was requisite McDonald’s eating. obviously.

the day before that, we had gone down to Bovine Town to have lunch with Aimée’s cousin and his new girlfriend. this burger place was like the epitome of hipster burger joints. and I can say this based on the look of 99% of the people who walked in and out of the door. regardless of that, the burgers were fantastic, so if you want a primo piece of meat in a burger bun, hit up the Dairy Lane Café.

On this trip south to the land of cowboy hats and misguided Flames fans, we also stopped in at the Kensington Wine Market. I’ve browsed through their stock many times online and mentally drooled at all the bottles I’d love to line up on several shelves. I always pictured the place as this looming, warehouse like expanse. I was wrong. it’s maybe the size of our house in total. but the scotch wall…

oh, the scotch wall.

I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to buy. A Bowmore 12 year and a Lagavulin 16 year. I said as much to the guy who came over to ask if I needed any help. I told him I just needed to look at it all for a bit. if you’ve paid attention to the pictures above, you’ll note that what I intended to buy was only 50% correct. this is because I can get a Lagavulin fairly easily in Red Deer. an Ardbeg Corryvreckan, not so much. so I adjusted my purchases accordingly. plus, I’m a sucker for Ardbeg. it will forever be known as the bottle that wrote my thesis.

they had stuff on that shelf I never even knew existed, even with the time I’ve spent perusing the products pages on my favourite distilleries. they had five bottles of Kilchoman Sherry Cask, which amazed the shit out of me because I tried many times to find what releases there were for that and never came across that one. ever. if I hadn’t already bought a bottle of the 2010 Winter Release, that Sherry Cask and it’s beautiful red box would have been in the car on the way home.

so anyway, Bowmore 12 and Ardbeg Corryvreckan. Delicious.

after that we went to lunch.

yeah, my narrative here is a little disjointed, whatever. I’m typing this and talking to Bimala at the same time who is now in tomorrow at 6am.

next stop was Chinook Center. it’s a “Premier” mall, dontchaknow.

this became quite evident when we walked out of the parkade into the mall right beside some designer shoe place that I had no idea what the fuck it was but instantly drew every woman in the vicinity in with wide eyes. yeah you. we wandered around the mall a bit, eventually being drawn towards the Williams-Sonoma store. maybe not so much drawn as, I saw it and just marched in kind of thing.

the result of that was a flurry of text messages between myself and Danielle about the necessity of owning Shun cutlery. mostly this was to convince Aimée about the necessity of my buying the 5.5 inch Santoku knife that was on sale and not $110, and not the $150 6 inch blade, or the $180 8 inch chef’s knife…

what transpired through the store was basically me clutching it to my chest in the “if you don’t buy it I WILL” manner. which, yeah, that’s the case. even her pointing out the retro Marvel cupcake tins and lunch boxes did little to relax my grip on it.

so that is how I came to own a Shun knife.

and then yesterday, (you’re still following this time frame right? good), I pre-seasoned my new smoker. and it smelled delicious even with nothing in it. so now I have to decide what to put in it to make into delicious smoked food.

ok, I think I’m done. I was going to go into a whole “this is why I don’t make new year’s resolutions” thing, but then I’d have resolved to write about that, which would have been counterproductive.

exactly.