The Canadian Adventure

Part 12 - 15th September 1997

HOME >> WRITING >> CANADIAN ADVENTURE

Links:

I looked after it, I kept it away from strong flavours and bright light, then, well inside the best before date I cooked it up with some fresh chicken and served it with succulent and juicy rice. Oh the disappointment! Oh the unfulfilled expectations! Chicken Balti sauce, from a well known company available in the UK (not some fly by night "I'd rather float some logs down a river and skewer a raccoon than eat a curry" Canadian company), tasted exactly like beef stew with chillis. Bleughhhh... Hardly worth soiling my wok for. Luckily I have an emergency chocolate cake held in readiness for just this kind of occasion, and I made that myself.

No such disappointment with the Season Premiere of Due South. I haven't seen this since I was in the UK, and I think that the scriptwriting has got even funnier. The Mountie-Ghost of Ben's father seems to pop up much more frequently, and in more bizarre locations than before, and Diefenbaker (who I now know is named after a Canadian prime minister) seems to have been bleached somewhere along the line. Those of you who have not come across this show will just have to take my word for its excellence.

Ho hum, it's raining intermittently, just as forecast (for the next six months) and I'm busy coccooning and not doing anything that means I have to go too far outside. I ventured as far as the supermarket today to buy some cake tins, got there and discovered that they didn't have the right size, remembered I'd already bought some and came home again (with some cheese). Such is the life of the hi-tech reconstructed-deconstructed post-yuppy. Oh and my phone battery is flat and I left the charger at Eve's.

Yesterday was way further up the excitement scale. Eve and I trolled around Stanley Park for a couple of hours, saying hi to the Beluga Whales en route. The park was heaving with raccoons, far more than I've ever seen there before, and as usual they were their amusingly endearing selves. They have very long fingers, but their eyesight is really bad and they have to feel for their food before they eat grab hold of it. Sometimes when they get some they take it down to the lake and wash it off before eating it. Cute. Big teeth though.

Last night we went around to a friends for a Potluck grub-fest. The selection was pretty varied, although fortunately no-one brought rollmop herring this time. The evening was dominated by three under-two year olds, two human and one feline. The race to be cutest was a tie.

My car is one year old. I stuck the new insurance stickers on the number plate yesterday, happy that it was $400 cheaper than last year. Give it another three years and the charge should just be outrageous as opposed to criminal. In the first year only the cigarette lighter has malfunctioned. This is pretty good for a yank car, apparently. The Sunfire is still getting 'recommended' status from the car mags, so perhaps my lucky dip into the world of yank autos paid off after all. Funnily enough you never see them on TV - all the shows seem to use Ford Taurus or Crown Victorias, with the occasional Pontiac Tran-Am if the character is supposed to be cool but strapped for cash. From what I've seen a go-cart with the wheels removed is generally preferable to a Tran-Am, and even the relatively new ones seem to be crumbling to rusty dust.

Car geeks: the new Audi A6 looks nice, as does the VW Passat. The Cadillac Seville '98 version looks almost identical to the '97 in a "curves? don't talk to us about curves - we'll just keep on using these straight lines" kind of way. Much better dashbard though. Perhaps bits of this one won't fall off when I tug them in the car showroom. Oops.

Time for the X-Files...