On a chill and drizzly September afternoon, there’s nothing better than a steaming home-cooked meal enjoyed next to a warm wood stove. Barring that, you could try one of these recipes, concocted while I was a gangly university student, unconcerned with sodium, cholesterol, or pretty much anything resembling nutrition.

Glop on Rice

Empty the contents of a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup into a pot and heat. For the love of God, don’t add water. Instead, add frozen peas. More than you think you really should. Then scrape in a can of tuna, leftover cooked chicken, or the contents of a random can of Maple Leaf Flakes of Carcass.

Once hot, pile on top of a bed of rice. You’re not serving this to guests — are you? — so go ahead and use Minute Rice. Sprinkle with freshly cracked pepper.

Tortellini Casserole

Fry up equal amounts of spicy Italian pork sausage and hamburger. Don’t bother draining the grease. If there’s time, add chopped onion, garlic, bell pepper, and mushroom, in that order. Then throw in a large can of spaghetti sauce.

Boil up a package of tortellini. Drain. Mix in with sauce. Pour the lot into a casserole dish and grate mozzarella on top. Just enough so that you can’t see any sauce, or only half of that if you’re lactose-intolerant. Toss in the oven with the dial at the eight-o’clock position until the cheese melts and starts going a little brown, or until the next commercial break. Sprinkle with freshly cracked pepper.

French Toast

Add as many eggs as you can hold in one hand, three glugs of milk, and a dash of vanilla extract — as much as you can without someone noticing that you’ve stolen their good vanilla for your lousy toast — to a high-rimmed dish. If you’re cooking before 11am, add some sugar or maple syrup. Quickly throw in slices of slightly stale white bread or buns and then fry in butter. Serve with powdered sugar or more syrup. Do not — and I can’t stress this enough — sprinkle with freshly cracked pepper.

Egg Drop Glop

Ah, the King of Glops. After this feast, you won’t be hungry until the nineteenth of the month.

Prepare a normal can of condensed chicken noodle soup with water. Once boiling, crack in three or four raw eggs and pierce the yolks. Stir, and continue boiling until the liquid looks cloudy or threatens to puff up out of the pot. Add one entire clip of crushed unsalted-top saltine crackers. Thoroughly mix everything together. Remove from heat and allow to congeal. Sprinkle with freshly cracked pepper.

Consume directly from the pot and take a nap; you’re not going anywhere.

By my count, I’ve quit jobs at Yukon College twice before. So the fact that I start teaching a class this afternoon must mean that I’m a very bad quitter.

“Poor quitting skills,” it reads on my permanent file. “Shows a marked inability to resign, abdicate, decamp, vacate, withdraw, knock off, terminate, desist, or just plain give over already. Criminy.”

My yo-yo relationship with the College makes it a little unnerving to enter the building. Fortunately, I have a course to absorb all of my attention. It’s well within my competency to teach one or two courses. Beyond that, the Peter Principle takes effect.

So, while it is true that I am wholly and singularly to blame for any and all mistakes made before and because I quit, I take heart that I am not to blame for the many more mistakes that would’ve surely been made had I not quit. I mean, had I not quit that second time, after that first time I quit but before I unquit the time before this. Or something.

It was somewhere near Smiths Falls, Ontario. Sometime after the collection of the comatose nephew in Edmonton, the in-cab detonation of the fire extinguisher in Winnipeg, the first dual-port dog eruption in Toronto, and the expiration of the coolant thermostat in Kingston.

(Image fuzzy due to motion, or perhaps due to the roiling hot air from the heating vents, turned on full to draw away excess heat from the overheating engine on that 30C day. My gas-pedal toes were a-sizzlin’.)

And then we reached the megametre.

Not bad for a ten-year-old small truck, although that small tick on the rolling dial did knock off a good chunk of its residual value.

Next stop: the Moon.

Ignoring my pledge to buy an Apple Macintosh, I yellow-bellied my way to the Dell site last April and bought one of their unstylish yet bell-and-whistlesome models. Yes, I am weak. But at half the price of the comparable Mac, I saved enough for that spine and guts transplant I’d always wanted.

For three months, all was peaches and edible oil based dessert topping. Not two weeks before I was scheduled to leave the territory for the entire summer, the screen goes black. The kind of hazy green-tinged black that suggests nothing but frustration and expense.

The diagnosis, from my College colleagues who have fixed a broken computer or two, was that the screen backlight had blown. Prognosis: I would be sending it back to Dell.

Yet with days to go before my trip, I figured it best to lug it with me and deal with Customer Support once I arrived in one of the big cities on the itinerary. Decades of computing experience has led me to despise customer “support,” so postponing that hassle was okay-fine by me.

Following several further postponements, I sat down with my computer, the telephone, a pen, my purchase invoice and warranty documents, and steeled myself for a couple of hours of intense “support.”

After a few introductory explanations and the reading of many multi-digit numbers across the line, Sunjit, my support technician, said “Sounds like the backlight. We’ll ship a box for you to return it in this afternoon.”

Really? They do that? I had assumed that I’d be responsible for “all packaging, shipping, and unexplained ancillary costs.” I was also flabbergasted to find that my warranty was for a full year, rather than the typical ninety days.

I thanked Sunjit profusely, and, later that afternoon, packed up my laptop in the box that arrived just as promised. It was shipped back less than a week later, with a fully restored screen and everything else just as I had left it (including my non-supported Linux dual-boot setup).

I have recommended Dell to others for years, and will continue to do so after this episode. I have heard horror stories of Dell support and product quality, but only anecdotally or on the web — if it’s spellchecked, it must be true. My experience continues to be positive. Good on ya, Mike.

I was lucky enough to acquire a tenor saxophone — thanks Mom! — this summer. So far, I’ve been squawking away at home only while the neighbours are at work. The bathroom has wicked acoustics.

But now I need to get better at this thing. I was a reasonably good clarinet and sax player back in high school, playing the baritone in our senior swing band for various paid and unpaid gigs, including a ball in the West Block’s Confederation Room on Parliament Hill.

But that was a quarter-century ago (OMG!) and in the time since, my embouchure, breath control, fingering, and music reading skills have hit the skids. I’ll be looking into the All City Band shortly — although with trepidation, ’cause I really suck at the moment, but remember being so much better. I’m also heading down to the music store later to look at the bulletin board.

In the meantime, does anyone know of saxophone lessons offered about town, or have suggestions for this fledgling saxophonist?