Tag Archives: smoke

Cats and a crazy fear of prison

Bloody cats.
I wonder if anyone else finds cats as annoying as I clearly do.

They’re completely two-faced for one. They rub themselves up against your trousers without permission, then try and scratch at you when you attempt to stroke them.

I can get around this by simply never visiting anyone who owns a cat.
Sadly though, they (the cats, now the owners) leave their house and shit in my garden.
We’ve put down spikes in the dirt so they have nowhere to comfortably squat, and chicken wire around the fences to stop them climbing through, and still they get in somewhere.

All that pales into insignificance though, compared to the piss-taking wanker that seemingly wandered into my house this morning.
No doors were open – it literally scaled a wall and climbed through a window.
My girlfriend shooed it out, but it did make me wonder. At what point can you legally kill a cat that wanders into your house? Can I claim self-defence?

I’ve found that when visiting anyone with a dog, they inevitably ask “oh – are you alright with dogs?”
Never do they ask “do you hate cats, by any chance?”
They’ll offer to shut the poor dog in the kitchen, but will they nail the catflap shut while I’m there? No.
As it goes, I’m fine with dogs. They’re mostly friendly, loyal, fun.
When’s the last time you saw a cat on a TV show because it had saved it’s owner from otherwise-certain death? It’s never happened!
Go on! Throw a stick for a cat! I bet you any money it won’t bring it back.
When’s the last time a cat swam a long distance through shark-infested waters, and survived on a near-deserted island?

Dogs = better than cats. It’s pretty clear.

Cats are not deemed in law to be owned by anyone, as they’re not trainable in the same way as dogs. Many cat-lovers have badges proclaiming they are a slave to “Fluffy”, but they’re actually deadly serious.
Also, if you run over a pet, different rules apply for dogs and cats. If it’s a dog, you must report your kill. If it’s a cat, you don’t have to, as they’re semi-wild animals.
Given they’re not in any sense endangered, I wonder if I can legally kill this cat if it wanders into my kitchen again.
It would seem not, as proven recently by lawyers.

If I knew who it belonged to, I’d seriously think about collecting it’s feces and putting it back in the owner’s garden.
Other possible options to rid myself of this cat, include sleeping tablets and traps, and are very long winded.

A Crazy Fear of Prison

A while ago, an acquaintance of mine (I won’t describe him as a friend), asked to borrow a bag from me.
He just wanted a normal holdall type bag to put some clothes and a laptop in, to visit a friend.
He specifically didn’t want a laptop-style bag, as he didn’t want to advertise his electronics to muggers.

He borrowed a bag, and several days later I got it back.
Rather than putting it away though, I’ve left it out for months, wondering what to do with it.
You see, the acquaintance has been known to smoke weed on a fairly regular basis, and I’ve no idea if he transported any within my bag.
I can’t see any, but I don’t own a sniffer dog to make doubly sure.
A normal sane person would have dismissed it. What if he did? What’s it really matter?

Sadly, the irrational side of me started thinking about the occasional people who get stopped going through customs with “2 grams of marijuana” in foreign countries, and end up in jail for years on end.
At some point I might have some money and take a holiday. You never know. It could happen.
It’s bad enough, when asked if I’ve left my bag “unattended at any time”, that I let someone borrow it for 3 days in 2008, but there’s the possibility of milligrams of marijuana residue now.

I don’t want to take the risk, so yesterday I emptied this bag, and hung it out on the washing line in the rain.
How long does it take to wash off marijuana? Anyone know?
I’ll give it a week.

Sausages!

The bane of my life!
While shopping in Tescos a few days ago, my girlfriend suggested she might cook me something. I can’t remember what it was going to be now, but I asked “do you mind if I get some actual meat to go with it?”

For anyone not up to speed on my current relationship, I’m currently dating a vegetarian, and what with my hatred of most vegetables and her not eating meat, eating together is somewhat complicated.

Luckily, as she’s got a busy life with friends and hobbies, and I’m a miserable old git who is currently unemployed, I get up at noon and go to bed at 2am, and we don’t often end up eating together.

Back to my story, and I picked up some sausages. I’ve never been any good at sausages. They seem to go black and don’t cook properly in the middle.
However, my girlfriend is a pretty good cook, so I figured she could show me how to cook them.

I bought them and got home, mentioned this to her, and she told me that not only does she not eat meat, she doesn’t know how to cook it either!

Not to let this get me down, I decided I’d have a go anyway.
So I put some of the sausages on a baking tray and put them under the grill. In a little under 5minutes, my kitchen was completely full of smoke. I removed the sausages to discover there’s either a fault with my oven/grill, or some food stuck in there that’s burning when it gets hot.

Frustrated at the apparent lack of cooking equipment in my kitchen, I switched the grill off and found a frying pan to cook my sausages.
High heat? Low heat?
I’ve no idea so I put some olive oil into a frying pan (I guess I would have used vegetable oil in a frying pan ordinarily, but I couldn’t find any) and put it on a low heat.

Someone in my house has got one of those Tefal pans with the red spot thing in the middle. Its red with detail on it to start with, so I think that means I heat it til the detail disappears. I got bored of heating it on a low setting, so switched my gas hob to the highest setting, but still the detail didn’t disappear. Maybe it’s broken?
Bored of waiting, I chucked in the sausages which immediately started to go brown very quickly on the outside.

This is the bit that confuses me. I’ve attempted sausages before and they’ve been cooked externally, but with a chilly food-poisoning-inducing centre. Last time I mentioned this to someone, they told me I was cooking them too fast, and I should try a low heat setting for much longer. I turned them down, and to be honest the outside still seems to be browning very quickly.

As the brown outside started to go black on one, I grabbed a sharp knife and cut it open to find it not cooked inside.
I moved them around a bit, then cut them all into tiny chunks. It seems easier to cook smaller chunks of meat than big bits, from my little prior knowledge.

I asked my girlfriend to let me know if there was any smoke, and went off to find my ‘Delia’s Complete Cookery Course’ book I bought ages ago.
Under sausages it has various complicated meals, and the simplest one just tells you to ‘brown the sausages’ before adding them to the recipe.
I looked under the beginning of the meat section but am still slightly confused as to exactly what ‘browning’ them entails, and indeed whether that results in them cooked, or just makes them brown ready for the next process in preparing them for eating.

None the wiser, I returned to the kitchen. As I’d spent a long time screwing around with my sausages and smoking out the kitchen, my girlfriend had actually finished cooking hers some time ago and mostly eaten her dinner without me. I did some baked beans to go with my now-blackening sausages and put some toast on to go with them.

As a final thought I borrowed (I haven’t repayed her yet) two pieces of fresh bread from my girlfriend and thought I’d fry it in the leftover oil. This may be something that doesn’t work so well with olive oil, because it came out black. It was edible, kinda.