Rose's Cantina

Tired of hearing about my exercise and diet regime yet? Well, go find something else to read. What do you expect from an obsessive-compulsive ADD girl anyway? It's hard for people like me to commit, but when we do, we go all in. Today, I started the day with a mushroom egg omelette and a trip to the gymnasty. Right now, I'm drinking a 90 calorie vanilla almond latte which tastes EXACTLY like a Tim Horton's double double. I shit you not. Then I'll do housework after which Scott will return home to barbecue some lovely beef tournedos I picked up at Farm Boy today. We'll have that with a tomato salad littered with bocconcini pearls and red onions and maybe we'll have a nice slaw. That's right baby, I'm turning into Martha Fucking Stewart. Deal! Oops, I forgot about lunch. Can't forget about lunch! I'm trying to decide between a sweet potato and chicken stew or a bowl of chili. Maybe a stir fry? Why the choice? I've been cooking all ...

Every time I finish a piece of contract writing, I do something nice for myself, which usually involves buying lottery tickets. I used to go to the casino, but I don't make the same money as I used to, so now I have to settle for twenty bucks worth of government-sanctioned scratch off cards. I usually win something and today, I won fifteen bucks. Being a reformed gamblateer, I take my winnings and I buy something else nice for myself -- it's called behavior modification, people, learn about it! I didn't have enough to buy tequila, so I thought about buying some junk food. Okay, you got me. I'm on a diet, see, so my junk food consists of a hunk of cheese and an apple. Fortunately, the fast food companies have made this switch pretty easy. You see, I'm absolutely grossed out by the latest efforts of these merchants of death to get me hooked on the new trends in edible oil products. Here in Canada, we have many disgusting new food inventions to choose from. The...

Scott came out of the bathroom with a self-satisfied look this morning. I knew what that look meant. "I've lost five pounds," he said flashing that famous porn smile. "Go fuck yourself," I said as I sipped my 90 calorie vanilla almond latte. "What?" This is what bugs me about men. You promise a man that you will have sex with him one day a week for every 10 pounds of weight he loses and all of a sudden all that beer melts off his belly like ice cream on a sticky toddler. We just started this diet on Monday and today is Thursday. He's lost five pounds. I've gained one. By the weekend, we'll be doing the hibbidy-dibbidy at least once. God kill me know. It's not that I dislike sex. I just dislike sex wearing neon panties and looking like Rebel Wilson. You know the British foul-mouthed three-hundred pounder who's all over the place waving her flabby arms in the air and wearing a thong? You've rented Bridesmaids as man...

I asked Scott to take this photo because it says so much about our life. In the forefront is Dr. Gordon J. Blackstone, doctor of puppy philosophy, who is on the mend after being diagnosed with hypothyroidism. Before the diagnosis, Gordie didn't know where he was. He couldn't walk and would fall down the stairs. And he pooped on my bed. It's been less than six weeks, and he still poops on the bed in the evening, but less so. It know it's TMI, but he is a steady solid pooper so it's not hard to pick up. If it gets any worse, we'll put a diaper on him. No biggie. We've just come to accept this as part of his dotage. Could be worse. He could be peeing in the bed. On all other counts, Gordie has improved by leaps and bounds. We thought he was bound for the Green Mile, but he's astounded us once again. Every time he bounces back, I marvel at this little dog's capacity to beat the odds. He's come to be known as the Divine Pug in our house. ...

I have a phobia about business cards. Every time, I get business cards, something terrible happens. I get sacked. Or my business folds. So I started refusing to use them. I also don't go on vacation. Again, whenever I do, something terrible happens. I once worked for a political party and decided to take a much needed vacay to Jamaica (jus cool!). When I came back, I noticed I'd been turned down for a VISA card. The next day, I found out why. There was a new sheriff in town who handed me my walking stick. Another time, I went on vacation with my husband and over dinner, he told me he was cheating on me with an old girlfriend. A few months later, he took me to England and left me in the airport to fly to Bermuda into the waiting arms of the woman I now refer to as the White Witch of Bermuda. My step-son called it Rose's Goodbye Tour. Hah. So I don't travel anymore. Don't get me wrong, I trust this husband. But I'm afraid he might be eaten by sharks or k...

There's a standard piece of fine print in the marriage vows that many people should consider carefully before pressing the verbal "send button". I'm talking, of course, about the "for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health" part. It's true, a few people hit the jackpot and get the "better, richer, health" part. But I also know many more who get the low hanging fruit that is marriage. Like the woman whose husband is the town drunk and falls down, hitting his head, causing it to blow up and sending him to hospital for surgery to remove half his brain. And the fucker is still walking around causing trouble and she had to move out of town. Or the woman who marries a doctor and got several mistresses in tow. Or the other who marries a guy with a great job who loses it and becomes a professional video gamer while she raises the kids and brings in the dough. Men also get the bad end of the carrot. They marry th...

Welcome to Rosalita's Friday confessional. So here it is. I smoked pot at 24 Sussex Drive back in the 80s. I smoked it all the time along with a bunch of my friends from the Hill after our weekly softball game -- right under the noses of the Prime Minister's crack security detail. They didn't seem to care. I know we weren't the first to smoke a doobie there. Justin Trudeau's mom always had a pretty good stash. Most Canadians knew that about Margaret. It made her cool. Probably took the edge off. Who could blame her? How could anybody live with Pierre Trudeau and stay sober? Why does nobody remember that? For most of my time on Parliament Hill, I knew people -- MPs, their staff members -- who smoked pot in their offices all the time. Especially the NDP. (Simon de Jong, God Bless 'em, was an avid toker.) Journalists smoked pot on Parliament Hill, too. Ask Hubie Bach. They also drank and fornicated on the Hill, in offices, behind the Centre Block and at ...

Well, that's an hour I'll never get back. The power went out this morning and there were rumors that we would be without electricity all day and into the early hours of Saturday. Of course, those were the rumors. The power actually was only out for 60 minutes. But it had Nick panicking in the basement. "What am I supposed to do with her?" he asked pointing to the baby Skylar. "How about taking her to the park?" A little scream of delight was heard from knee level. Nick rolled his eyes. Skylar stomped on his barefoot with her galoshes. Strange she was wearing rainboots given the fact there isn't a cloud in the sky today. That's what I love about her. She's always prepared. Meanwhile, our tenant Bill, had taken his lizard outside for some sunshine. He appeared unconcerned. I admit, even I was slightly unnerved. I was quoting on a video project this morning and had no email. Even my damned "smartphone" was on the blink. ...

  I always love watching this video of Gordie and the late Hannah and Ming. It doesn't make me sad. I think Scott captured their spirit on that day so long ago.

There is a leafy little enclave just down the street from us, which surrounds a National Defence Medical Facility. It's a wonderful pocket in the middle of the city where dogs owners can take their hounds to sniff the trees, and each other, a place where owners greet each dog by name even though they've never bothered to ask the names of the other minders. Places like this exist all over the Nation's Capital. It's what I love about this town. It's a people place with miles of bicycle trails and open spaces, which are paid for by the rest of the country. On behalf of Ottawans, I thank the good people of Canada. But there's a storm brewing down the street and it's pitting dog owners against the government. It's about the poop situation. For the past couple of years, the military has been paying soldiers to pick up random poop all over the field. Most dog owners are responsible and do their due diligence but for some reason some people in our littl...

I got a call yesterday from Doris, one of my oldest friends, the person who has stood by me through thick and thin, the woman who has always been there for us, to lend us a few bucks when times were rough, and offer herself up to the Masterchef as a guinea pig at our tasting table. Doris may be the only person I talk with on the telephone anymore; in this age of texting, she hasn't quite got the touch. So the phone rings at least twice a week with news about doctors' appointments, new medication and her strong-like-bull 85-year-old dad. But yesterday's call took on a different tone. It was ominous. Her husband Bob is what a gerontologist would call "young elderly," a man who spent most of his life grabbing life by the tits and squeezing them. David Sedaris would call him a man "with good time teeth," though he has few of them left in his head thanks to his daily consumption of rum and coke over a four decade drinking career. Is Bob an alcoholic? Doe...

In my third act, I will live in a state of grace, unshackled by the shame, insecurity and demons that have plagued me in the first two acts. I will reach higher, move faster and embrace all that is good in my life. And there is plenty good already. I must remind myself of that. In the third act, no animals or people will be harmed. I will live only on ideas. And tea and oranges that come all the way from China. I will reduce the chatter. I will change the channel. In the third act, I will heal the wounds I can, put salve on them and soothe them. There will be no tsunamis. Just still water. There will be no room for naysayers and detractors, the people who have made me feel small. Sorry is not a word for the third act. No regrets, just possibilities. I will surround myself with people who have love in their hearts and I will encourage others to join me on this path. The mistakes of the past will finally be put in tiny boxes marked "history" and set on a dusty s...

Scott paused in the middle of a serious hand of Dominos. "Gordie, shut the hell up," he barked. "You've been at it for an hour." The little pug had indeed been standing by the fence barking at who knows what. He's nearly blind so he must have been commenting on the shadows or the sound of a distant lawnmower. Gord has an old man bark now, raspy like an elderly bluesman whose voice has been blown out by cigars and whiskey. His bark used to be annoying, but today it is music to my ears. Gordie was nearly put down a few weeks ago. He was so sick he rarely got up off his pillow and fell down when he went for a pee. Most of the time, he didn't know where he was and was often startled when I went to pet him. His fur had the consistency of the dust dragged out of an ancient vacuum cleaner, all spotted with dandruff. Gordie's eyes were constantly cemented shut with goo and his nose looked perfectly prehistoric. When my son Nick was born, he had a congen...

In today's Globe and Mail , the activist Naomi Wolf describes a business climate that is rife with discrimination based on how people look. She calls this lookism. In a nutshell, Wolf makes the argument that how a person looks affects his or her climb up the ladder -- or not. Why, she asks, must the media riff on Angela Merkel's wrinkly cleavage or Hillary Clinton's cankles? They don't take Newt Gingrich down for his pottiness or mock Ben Bernanke for his weird facial hair. I don't agree. I think lots of people laugh at Gingrich, if only for having such a stupid name. I do agree that there is a double standard. But it's not the double standard that Wolf is talking about. The double standard has to do with smart ugly men, or smugglies. An ugly teenaged boy with a pizza face and no pecular activity whatsoever might get teased. But if he's smart in a book learnin' sense, he will go to university, take advantage of that nerdiness and excel. While gu...

The fact is, I don't have any useful skills. I can cook, I suppose, but I cannot make Jello. Or fudge. Both turn out gloopy no matter how I try to change up the recipe or follow it to the letter. I can't assemble things. I once tried to put together a desk from Ikea and I thought I was successful at it. Then the cat jumped on it and it folded like a deck of cards. I can't sew. I can't paint. I can't sing. I can't play an instrument. I tried to crochet, but the thing look like gum when you take it out of your mouth and stretch it out. The holes were not at all consistent. My aunt said I didn't have the right tension. My mother said it was because I was left handed. I can't play sports. When I tried to play powder puff football in university, I got a black eye. I tried to run and I got plantar fasciitis. I tried to play golf and hit some old codger in the head. On a parallel green. Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be good at something but ...

Yesterday, I got a rejection letter from Indigo indicating that the company had found a much better candidate for the role of "customer experience consultant". It means someone out there has a super-duper background in selling over-priced books to customers who could get the same books for half the price at Costco. Still, the rejection hurt. I've been trying fairly hard, for me, to find a low-level job that will help me pay my utility bills which almost cost as much as my rent. The utility creep has been going on for some time now. When I owned a house 20 years ago, a house that was much bigger than this one, my Hydro bill was $150. Today it's $700. And the God damned water bill is now $250! Okay, okay. We have tenants who don't turn out the lights when they are supposed to. And we do a boatload of laundry every week, during the day. But when we moved here, we still had the same number of people and the Hydro bill, I swear, was only $450. Most of the new ...

During this luscious August week, it's hard to believe we have to be bothered by the Pamela Wallin travel expense scandal, but bothered we are. If I were Pam Wallin, I would never travel again. Put yourself in her $800 pumps for a moment. Imagine standing in line waiting for a flight and having everyone stare at you, or jeer at you, for taking a flight headed to T.O. from Ottawa. Or waiting in the Timmy's line for your double double with eyes boring into the back of your Donna Karan smock. I can hear the wise cracks now. "She'll be having the chocolate donut," someone might say. "You know, the one that's double dipped." Harharhar. Some of my Facebook friends are actually saying that Pamela Pitstop is being unfairly treated because she's a woman in a bouffant hairstyle. I'm not so sure. Like Lucy being caught by Ricky, she's got a lot of 'splainin' to do. The University of Guelph loved her as a Chancellor because she d...

I spent the afternoon with two of my favorite people in a resort for people who are on the mend. My friend Donnabelle has been incarcerated for the crime of having a split hip that had to be pinned back together. She can't go home, as she lives alone, and doesn't want to be found smelling bad and prone on the floor like a distempered dead hamster should she miss the commode. So she's recuperating at the Rideau Perley, the place where all the war heroes go to smoke their final cigarettes. I lived near the Perley for years but never got a chance to visit. It's a beautiful facility with well-manicured gardens and picture windows, but it's still a nursing home. They do a good job keeping the place neat and tidy, but there are the familiar smells of rubbing alcohol, mixed with old farts. I know the smells well. I spent my youth working in a nursing home telling jokes to sad little old ladies while spinning the Bingo popper. I love seniors, so a visit to the Perle...

Over the ten years that Scott and I have been together, we've been apart maybe a half dozen times. For years, we have lived and worked together, two peas in a very small pod. I take this all for granted until he disappears on a caper. That's when I realize how much space he takes up in my life. This last weekend, Scott set off in the squeaky Subaru to pursue his culinary dream, with a VIP ticket for an audition for Masterchef Canada. I was left alone with the dogs. Secretly, I was looking forward to batching it and stretching out in the bed. Having three dogs and a large husband means that I slumber on a tiny sliver of mattress, and half a pillow. By morning, I'm usually bare-assed with no covers. The dogs serve as punctuation, with Sophie curled up behind my knees like an apostrophe, Gordie on my feet like a period and Finnigan between us like an exclamation mark. You get my drift. There is no spooning in our bed unless it involves a snoring black...

In the end, I should have listened to my mother. And I shouldn't have trusted him, that's for sure. But the person I married, the person my friend Katie now refers to as "the bad man" became my everything, and then I became my nothing. Choosing love over career was a bad decision on my part. Having his children was an even worse one. "But look," said the bad man. "At least you have these beautiful children!" "Yeah," I said. "But I could have had these children with someone who didn't leave me." I was thinking about this conversation reading the New York Times this morning, a feature about women like me who "opted out," then, when their marriages fell apart, wanted to opt back in. I am one of those women, albeit a little older than the ones featured in the article. When I met the bad man, I was having a relatively successful career in Ottawa. Back in the 80s, before mandatory enforced bilingualism, I could ...

Photo: Stuart Miles, FreeDigitalPhotos.net   I can't believe this story made all the papers. Apparently, Oprah Winfrey that defender of all things "soul" on Sundays, is crying foul over a tiff she had in Switzerland over a $35,000 handbag. According to Oprah, the shop girl thought it would hurt Oprah's feelings to bring out the bag because she looked like she couldn't afford it. Poooor, Opie. Smited by the Swiss. Everyone should know that the Swiss are snobs. That girl wouldn't show me the $35,000 handbag. The French Swiss hate everyone, especially Germans and English people and the German Swiss hate everybody and life in general. Oprah shouldn't have taken the slight so personally. It wasn't because Oprah was black. It was because she was poorly dressed as she always is. Usually, Opie can be seen running about in pajamas and neon colored sweats with her hair in a jerrycurl when she isn't all tarted up for her shows. Have you seen her ...

Scott and I were shooting a video a couple of years back and we came across this little guy. He was guarding a cow barn that didn't particularly look like it need guarding. It upset me to see a young dog like, attached to a short chain, made to live out his life like that. He was probably a runner. I get that. We had a dog named Susie, a bouncy little Springer Spaniel who had to be on a chain because, when she got loose, she used to chase the neighbor's chickens. And so she remained chained to a dog house where the flies ate at her ears so badly they were painful and raw. I used to take Vaseline and smooth it over her sores. I would spend hours sitting with Susie so she wasn't so lonesome. One night I spent the night with her after my brother kicked me out of the house for wanting to watch television. Brothers can be such assholes. Susie was never let in the house, never allowed to run free on our large property. Mom wouldn't let her curl up on my bed. ...

I pity the children who live in small spaces and have nowhere to hide from violence and abuse. Growing up on a six acre fruit farm, I found lots of spots to hide out during the day, but the dark, fragrant orchards were no place for a small child trying to escape madness. On the long nights when the fights raged, and I couldn't stand the yelling anymore, I would retreat to my mother's old car parked down the lane a far distance from the main house. Sometimes, I found peace sleeping in the doghouse with my beloved springer spaniel Susie who snuggled beside me. Nobody ever looked for me on those dark nights. They were too busy snapping beer caps and pointing fingers, too consumed with pacing and agitation. I don't know where my brothers were on these nights, I only know that I was alone with my fear and anxious thoughts. Sometimes I worried that when it finally went quiet, there would be no one left alive in the house. There were guns in the house, used fo...

Granny Crown broke her hip sneaking down to the basement trying to retrieve a beer, a fact she vehemently denied, but everyone knew to be true. Every night, it was her ritual to hobble down the rickety steps with her cane. None of us ever understood why a 74-year-old woman would take her life into her hands that way, especially considering any of us kids would have gladly helped her out. But she was kind of a mystery, an old dame who kept a lot of secrets, such as why my Uncle Vern was a 10-year-old living in a 52-year-old body. "He just never grew up," she shrugged, slurping the last bit of cold tea from the stove. Pointe finale. We were simply expected to accept anything she said at face value. I felt bad for Granny when she broke her hip and was carted away to the hospital for a lengthy stay, but I soon got over my sadness. That's because Granny always saved me her piece of hospital cake, my reward for visiting her every single night for eight months. ...

Squeaky was my best friend growing up on the farm. Unlike the other boys who spent their days playing softball and lacrosse on our huge back lawn, Squeaky was an indoor boy who preferred to play cards or Monopoly or watch the Rifleman. Today, he would have been a video game nerd. Occasionally, Squeaky and I would venture out of the canvas tent we constructed in the backyard to go hunting for tadpoles over at Cole's Farm which had a dangerous little pond with all kinds of warning signs, "Keep Out" and "Danger" but it wasn't very well secured. So it was a complete magnet for kids like us equipped with mason jars for the trapping of all kinds of vermin. Our quest was to catch the taddies then watch them grow to be regular frogs which would, no doubt, fall victim to the older boys who liked to blow their heads off with firecrackers. Squeaky and I weren't exactly Steve Irwin. We always trapped too many and by the time we got home, they were nothing b...

My grandfather Loyal loved creatures large and small. He also believed he could make a pet out of anything. Most city dwellers hate raccoons, the little bandits who upside the garbage and infiltrate attics. They spend thousands of dollars on exterminators and taxpayers foot large bills for animal control to keep raccoons at bay. Many farmers, too, would take shotguns to the little critters. Not Gramps. Gramps found some baby raccoons who had been abandoned near our farm by their mother, who might have met an untimely ending. Instead of ending their lives, Gramps took them home and bottle fed them and my mother kept them as pets. They are seen here in this undated photo. We had a pet crow, a pet wild turkey, pet rabbits, frogs and pigs. I even had a pet Banty Rooster. The crow had been found in the field with a broken wing. Gramps took him to his workshop and created a makeshift splint for the fellar. In return for this kindness, the crow became an unofficial guard crow who o...

My son Nicholas Gagnier was featured yesterday in the Ottawa Citizen , as the author of a new poetry anthology which deals with youth and their struggle with mental illness. Here is the link . Congratulations, son. Well done.