Saturday, being bummed

In spite of going to bed early Friday night, I did wake up again in the middle of the night. So, I slept in on Saturday (but, who cares?) and woke up feeling like 40 miles of bad road, as they say (or used to, anyway). I put a pot of coffee on and posted to the Blog.

I just found out that Paul Newman died from cancer. This, coupled with a phone call I had yesterday from a collection agency looking for my old neighbor in Columbus, has left me in a bad mood.

I took out some bacon for tonight's dinner and went out on the porch to drink my coffee and try and lighten up. But, it's not working...

No, I am crabby today. It ticks me off about my old neighbor. He was a hard working, self-employed contractor who did tile work for commercial buildings. He had the nice home next to me, and bought my place on the spot when I needed to sell it to buy the house in St. Clair. He was building a beautiful year-round house (I saw the blueprints) up north to retire to. I expect the collapse of Michigan's economy finally got to him, but still... it upsets me...`

As you might be able to tell from my multiple posts, I am not really doing anything yet. I am just p*ssed and just don't feel like it. And, I think that's okay, every once and a while. Screw that ToDo list! Power to the people! I want change! (Who said that? Obama or McCain? Oh yeah, both of them.)

But finally, at almost 2:00 PM, I got tired of feeling bad and went out to trim around the back. In the Captain's (my) world (anyway) you can only feel bad for so long, then you gotta shake it off and get busy! I got everything trimmed in a 100 foot radius (the length of my extension cord). I picked 14 tomatoes and brought them inside. BTW, since there are not enough tomatoes at any one time to make into sauce, I have been eating them as late night snacks, with just salt. Six of the tomatoes were not ripe enough, so they went on my new, extended, kitchen window sill to ripen.

I decided to take a nap. So, I did. I woke up at 6:45 PM, disoriented. I thought it was morning for a moment, until I realized it was not this light at 6:45 AM. So, I got up and went out to put the oscillating sprinkler in the front lawn. I turned it on and set the timer for 30 minutes.

I decided to make pasta alla Carbonara for my Saturday dinner. Now I have made this and reported this enough so that I felt I did not need a recipe. So, this would be a CaptainK original. I took half a pound of bacon and sliced it about 1/2 inches thick. That went into my largest saut� pan to render down. Meanwhile, I diced three cloves of garlic and two small yellow onions. They went into the bacon as well.

I boiled a pound of Fettuccine pasta in salted water. I whisked three eggs, about a half of a teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes, a teaspoon of Italian herbs, some fresh chopped parsley and a couple of handfuls of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. After that, I added about a cup of heavy cream and whisked it together. When the pasta was "al dente" I put it in with the bacon, garlic and onion. I added the egg/cream mix and stirred it all together. I let it get happy for a bit and then plated it.

I watched TV until 11:30 PM and then went to bed.