She got her Not Valentine’s Day gift a few days early – a black Disney 100^th anniversary hoodie to celebrate a century of the Walt Disney Studios. Yes, we’re still Disney people, and it’s a very cool looking, yet annoyingly hard to find item.

Her response? Monday night, she came home and said, “Let’s go for a walk. But this time, we’re going to South Coast Plaza. We can walk for a while and go inside a store I want to show you.” She had me at ‘going on a walk’. I didn’t even mind it being in a mall. I love going on walks with my wife. We have great conversations while on either walks or bike rides. And I’m walking about next to the best-looking person in the mall? I’m already ahead in the deal. We get almost two miles in (multiple levels, you know), and end up at the store she had in mind – Sur La Table. I looked up and thought to myself, Ocean table, huh? Didn’t know there was a big call for poolside and Jacuzzi-attachable bar furniture, but in for a penny, in for a pound. I later found out the store is actually a thing, cookery-wise.

Once in the store, she took me back to the dutch ovens/pots section. I knew instantly what she had in mind. Let me digress for a moment. I’m not the best cook in our extended family. Not by a long shot. We have a cousin who is an actual high-profile chef. Heck, I’m not even the best chef in our own house. But I am around the kitchen like I am on the air parrying with Hugh Hewitt. I pick and choose when to take my shots, and on selected items that tickle my fancy, I can produce some pretty tasty dishes.

Chili is one of our more recent creations. My wife and I have worked together on a meat chili that would be right at home in Texas. We have tweaked it a smidge over the last few years, but every time we come out of the kitchen with a couple bowls and sit down at the table and dig in, we give each other that knowing look and nod. It’s the real deal. Pick your chili contest. This just would win. Period. End of story. Plus, she’s the best sous-chef there is.

The problem? We usually make a double batch, and the pot we use is basically a camping pot, and it just isn’t satisfying during the cooking process. It’s shaped funny, doesn’t conduct heat very well, takes forever to really get up to temperature, and is hard to clean afterwards. Other than that, it’s great. We’ve told each other every time we make it that we need to get a real pot. Today was that day. Her present to me, or actually for both of us, was to get an honest to God pot. We chose a 9-quart Le Creuset. Apparently, the French know a thing or two about cooking implements, I’m learning. It’s fiery red, just like our chili, and will be put to the test in about a week. Why all this build up?

Because we cook on a gas stove, and I pity the person who thinks they’re seriously going to take it away from me. Consider what the left is attempting to do as a distraction these days. Joe Biden wants to go out and take guns away from people who are armed with both guns and ammunition, and at the same time, wants his government to begin the process of removing gas stoves from people’s kitchens where all the knives are stored. You think I’m kidding. Joe Manchin doesn’t think so.

Now before you come at me thinking the Biden administration isn’t really serious about this, let me tell you something. They’re more serious about taking your stove away than Republicans are serious about cutting Social Security and Medicare, the tired scaremongering trope Biden and the Democrats have resurrected over the last couple of weeks. Remember Richard Trumka, the now-deceased former head of the AFL-CIO? His son, Richard, Jr., serves in Biden’s administration as the Commissioner for the Consumer Products Safety Board. His mission? Yanking out your gas stove. It’s a powerful tool in their toolbox, and it’s a real possibility.

I’d pay cash money to see Trumka tell Gordon Ramsay he can’t run any of his Hell’s Kitchen restaurants without gas stoves. Pay -per-view.

But you see, while Joe Biden gaslights everyone about what the Republicans are not going to do, even if you believe they should reform entitlements in order to keep them solvent for a while longer, they’re actually gaslighting you about what their intentions are regarding the consumption of oil and gas. We are a century away from a reliable alternative source of cheap, available, sustainable energy. That is, unless there’s a major breakthrough in hydrogen technology, Mr. Spock comes back from the future in a Klingon bird of prey with dilithium crystals, or Christopher Lloyd pops out of a DeLorean with Mr. Fusion. Barring any of those three, oil and gas are what’s going to keep this country going, not solar, wind, and/or ChiCom batteries. You know it, I know it, everyone around you knows it, and even Joe Biden knows it. At least I think he knows it. One can’t tell what Biden knows from day to day these days.

Let’s go all the way back to a speech Tuesday given by the President.

We’re going to need oil and gas for a long time, Biden told the National Association of Counties. Yet on Wednesday, 24 hours later, Biden spoke to an IBEW union crowd in Lanham, Maryland. After referring to Wes Moore, the state’s first elected black governor as “Boy,” Biden promised that he was going to take millions of barrels of oil off the road.

I’m sure I will never fathom why Big Oil just doesn’t seem too motivated these days to get more refineries built, apply for new drilling permits, build pipelines, or undertake the onset of any other infrastructure improvements. No idea at all. Biden seems to believe that if they just acted like team players, Big Oil could stand up all the infrastructure we need for the next decade literally overnight, make a modest profit, and then piss right off when he shuts them all down in a few years. It’s almost as if Biden doesn’t have the first foggiest idea how business works, other than how to conduct shakedowns with foreign entities.

Back to my gas stove that the feds can try to pry out of my cold, dead kitchen after I’ve mounted a defensive stance worthy of the folks at the Alamo (who may actually have successfully defended against the attack had they filled up in advance on my chili. I’m telling you, it’s that good). Every day, I end up behind a bus, or a trash truck, or a delivery truck, and it’ll proudly boast on the side or the back of it that this vehicle runs on clean-burning natural gas. That was the improvement from diesel just a few years ago, remember? Natural gas burns clean. That’s the entire selling point for using it. Now, I’m being told bringing my chili up to a boil and then simmering for 90 minutes, just getting happy and savory in a bath of guajillo and chipotle sauce, is part of the problem of climate change, and that it has to be done away with? So which is it? Is gas clean-burning, or is it not? If it’s not, whom do I sue for all the false advertising and tax dollars I had to spend in order to outfit all the public buses and trash trucks to burn CNG?

Why can’t we just remove the ChiComs? They’re the single largest contributor to carbon in the atmosphere, if you believe that is the problem in the first place. By far. We’re actually not even close by comparison. And that would be a larger tool in the toolbox. Oh wait, I know why. Our plate is kinda full dealing with Chinese helium spy balloons. Dismantling new coal-fired power plants coming on line once a month seems a little unwieldy once you put into perspective our indecision on dealing with containers of another gas, this one being inert, floating around the country.

If this government has their way, both federal and in my case, the state of California, here’s what my cooking future comes down to. No meat for my chili, no water to put into the pot, nothing but induction stoves to cook it on even if I had the time to boil the reclaimed water my insect meat cooked in, which you can’t control to the heat level you want no matter what the sales reps for electric stoves try to tell you, and after inflation goes up for another couple years, not being able to afford the pot to piss in, in the first place.

I’m voting for freedom. For water rights. For my ability to eat whatever dead animal carcass I choose. For the right to burn energy in whatever form for I opt to pay. For the Alamo. And for our chili.