����No dinner party is complete, I say, say I, unless you end it either with the adrenaline rush of a major catastrophe or watching the pumped-up food gladiator goodness that is Iron Chef.

����One of the couples at last night's dinner party has now been involved in both.

����Maestro, can I have The Twilight Zone theme music?

����Picture this. It's 1982 and you've been invited up for supper at Marn and Paul's place. It's been raining, raining hard all day with no sign of let up, but who's going to let a little precipitation dampen a dinner party? Not the couple known as Ron and Sue.

����Okay, that's enough eerie music.

����So, anyhow, they mosey over to our place with Pat and Oliver, mutual friends, a couple from England who have since returned to The Motherland.

����(For the record I would like to state here that Pat and Oliver's decision to move back to England had nothing to do with my cooking. Hmmm, maybe I should qualify that preceding statement and admit that the prospect of having to eat at our place from time to time MAY have been a factor, but it wasn't the DECIDING factor that pushed them out of Canada.)

����But back to my tale ...

����Anyhow, much hilarity ensued and before any of us knew it, it was either stupidly late at night or stupidly early in the morning, depending on how you see these things. And the rain had not stopped. We all bid our good-byes and they drove off down into the valley ... and the biggest flood we've had here since the disaster in the 1920's.

����Ron and Sue arrived at the bridge they needed to cross to get to the other side of our valley (where they live) to find that sleepy old Courser Brook was now running about a foot of raging, boulder tossing water OVER the top of the bridge.

����A lesser couple would have turned back. However, we are talking here about people who have travelled all over the world, and been through A LOT.

����(As Ron once said, once you've lived in pre-Kholmeini Iran--where people completely ignored trivial things like one-way road signs in narrow tunnels because it's all in Allah's hands, right?--well, once you've survived THAT, hey, what's a flood, eh?)

����So Sue hops out of the car into the blackness, pounding rain, and did I mention boulder tossing current? and walks ahead, guiding Ron across the bridge with her flashlight. They were the last people across that bridge for weeks, because the current was so fierce that at some point that night it lifted up big hunks of the asphalt road leading up to the bridge itself.

����I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that an experience like that would most definitely give a person an adrenaline rush.

����And Battle Duck, last night's Iron Chef episode, how did it compare on the adrenaline scale?

����Ron thought it was a hoot, really got into it.

����Sue slept through part of the show, though.

���� Thus (and don't you find that you just DON'T see the word thus nearly enough in people's journals?) for the statistically inclined among you, I can now confidently state that at least 50 per cent of the people I know who have experienced both Iron Chef AND fording a flooded bridge find Iron Chef to be less of a rush.

����So there you go, eh.