Rose's Cantina

Quite a neighborhood, we live in . A couple weeks back, a grocery clerk at the local Loblaws heard a pop then saw flames coming out of the garage of a 95-year-old neighbor lady. Apparently, someone had thrown a fire bomb into her unattached garage, which held a snowblower and a vintage automobile. The fire dudes had to put out several fires in the 'hood that day. You've got to ask yourself: do we need better recreational programs for our young people? You might call our Elmvale Acres neighborhood eclectic. For the most part, it is populated by hard-working folks and retirees who like to troll the mall and drink coffee at Starbucks. But there is plenty of sinister stuff happening around here. Kitty corner to my house is an apartment building which is a frequent point of interest for Ottawa Police. In fact, its number was called out in court during a recent case involving teenaged prostitutes who were held prisoners there. Across from me is a crack house. Nice. The p

Conroy Pit, an off-lease dog park in the south end of Ottawa, is one of my favorite places on Earth. It is a mecca for dog lovers who come out to see the myriad breeds of dogs run, hustle and spin. It's also a great place to socialize new canines and keep the old ones tuned up. Unfortunately, things are changing in our beloved park and not for the better. The City of Ottawa has recently re-gigged its budget for the park and fired its private contractors, the ones who used to come and empty the dog poo bins which were placed at the entrance to the park and at a midway point. The one in the middle has disappeared completely and the entrance bin has been replaced by what I like to call The Giant Head, a spaceship-sized dome which could easily consume a ton of doggie doo. I suppose the change was made so that The Giant Head only had to be emptied once a millennium by some company owned by Rod Bryden. I cannot see how it could be emptied at all given the size of it. Perh

"Are you really going to eat that?" asked my husband. The "that" he was referring to was a spaghetti squash casserole I made for dinner last night. He watched in horror as I warmed it up for breakfast. "Of course," I said. "It's absolutely delish." I worked nights as a reporter for years, so I can eat anything anytime of the day. My colleagues often congregated at my house for beer, pancakes and Canada AM at the crack o' dawn once a week or so. We scared the neighborhood children. Sometimes we went to Gord Lovelace's tony house in New Edinburgh and sat on the front porch smoking doobies, drinking beer and watching the public servants shuffling off to work in their Harry Rosen suits. One day, a guy named Louis Bertrand decided to trim Lovelace's lilac bushes with a bullwhip. Where did we get the bullwhip? I cannot recall. When I'm very, very bad I eat pizza for breakfast, but now that I'm very, very good and eating h

I rarely go to restaurants. That's because I hate the way people eat. I detest the woman who orders a salad the size of a farming plot who then starts diving bombing her meal with her fork from two feet above the table. Up and down, up and down. It's like watching a performance of Cirque de Soleil. Or the dowager who gets all gussied up for the high priced bistro, who then proceeds to eat her meal like an anteater. The mouth opens, the tongue slithers out, the left hand shoves the food in while the right hand is poised to catch any rogue morsel. It's both fascinating and disgusting. Like watching Miley Cyrus tongue a wrecking ball. And isn't it fun to watch the couples who go out for dinner and don't say a blessed word to each other. All they can focus on is what is on the plates in front of them. They slather the butter on bread like stone masons building a museum, then shove the bread into their gobs. The salad comes, and there's the dive bombing again.

If Facebook and Twitter had been invented when we were teenagers, nothing would ever have gotten done. It is true, we were the first generation of kids raised around the television. But we weren't glued to it. That's because there wasn't as much on television back then except for games shows and soap operas. And cartoons but only on Saturday mornings. Besides, our moms were hard asses who kicked us out of the house. We didn't care because we didn't have air-conditioning. When we were old enough to work, we got jobs. On the farm, we picked berries and bailed hay. In the city, kids had paper routes. The lack of recreational options made us more creative with our spare time. Some of us became activists railing against war and racism and injustice. Others became builders and philanthropists. Still others channeled their energy into creating business and growing wealth. The rest just became drunks. The world would not be nearly as interesting today if we'

I don't know how she did it, but Sophie the Pug got up on the table, traversed the countertop and dropped the recyle bin onto the floor this morning. We've taken all the chairs away and anything she can use as a platform but she still manages to get on the counters. She steals things. We find cutlery under the couch and Gordie's thyroid pills in her bed. I hope she isn't thinking of becoming an endocrine addict. Sophie and Finnigan are starting to remind me of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Sophie is the hyperactive flying squirrel with the high pitched bark. Finnigan is the dumb accessory-after-the-fact. I guess that means Gordon J. Blackstone is Boris And I'm Natasha. I can't imagine what Finn and Sophie would do if we left them together alone. The food fight in Animal House comes to mind. For that reason, leaving the house involves sequestering Finnigan who is now so big he can put his chin on the counter. He can't be trusted to be left a

The first time I visited the Big Apple, I was 22 and on assignment for a newspaper, attending the premiere of the James Bond movie Moonraker. I had no idea what to expect. I had very little money, no credit cards and a suit I'd bought at Reitman's for forty bucks. Hannibal Lecter would have noticed my cheap shoes and bag as the serious signs of a hick. I didn't even have enough money to take a cab from the airport to my hotel which was the tony Essex House, the place where all the guests stayed while appearing on SNL back then. Seriously? I was petrified. When I got to the hotel, I was given a key chain with Roger Moore's face on it and my room key. It was noon and I was alone. The rest of the press corps wouldn't be arriving until the afternoon. What was I to do? "Well," the publicist shrugged. "There's the bar." After about two glasses of wine, I relaxed and started chatting up the bartender. Then my other junket mates began to pou

The Red Ball is a hit at our house. Thank you, Kong. Thank you so much. I've been trying to curb Finnigan's bad behavior. The barking. The menacing. The jumping. Nothing worked. Nothing. Until the Red Ball. Finnigan is now obsessed. He sits at the bottom of the stairs waiting for it. He lays on the ground rolling it over in his gob. He won't even bark anymore lest he lose control of the Red Ball. Instead of a high pitched woof, his bark is like someone stuff his mouth with something. Which in effect, I did. What's best about the Red Ball is that he likes to play fetch with me. He brings it to me -- but only after he's smeared it with dirt, drool and foam. Good boy, Finnigan. I'm going to need new chairs.  

The kid's name was Nick Zselaniak. He was a classmate of mine at West Park Secondary School and he died trying to out run a train in my hometown of St. Catharines, Ontario. The man's name was Steve. He was my neighbor growing up. His 18-wheeler stalled on the train tracks and he miraculously survived, though he spent a year in the hospital. I babysat his kids and held his wife's hand through the terrible ordeal. And then there was Donnie, the son of a good friend. He couldn't live with himself anymore and he walked in front of a train at the very place six people died yesterday in Ottawa in a horrific bus-train accident. I told Scott yesterday, if you live long enough you'll know somebody who died in an argument with a train. With the exception of the Lac Megantic tragedy, death by train is rarely the fault of the train. In the majority of cases, the incidents are caused by someone driving a vehicle or walking on the tracks. In the end, it really doesn't m

I'm staring at it, right now, the brand new GE fridge that replaced The Piece of Shit KitchenAid  TM  which died on us after only seven years. I'm also thinking that this fridge will never be this empty or this clean again. Ever. Time was, a fridge would last thirty years and become one of those antiques they sell on Craigslist. Not anymore. According to everybody, the modern fridge is built to last only ten years. How did I not know this? If I had known this, I would have bought a cheap fridge like this GE instead of spending $2,200 bucks on The Piece of Shit Kitchenaid TM. When I bought TPSK, I also bought a warranty -- for five years. They don't sell warranties over five years for the same reason they cancel your life insurance after age 65. They're betting on the untimely demise of the product. This GE (aka Cable Town) fridge cost us $695.  The warranty was $149. The delivery was $100. So even though we bought the cheapest fridge at Home Depot t

Finnigan taught me how to play fetch this weekend. Here he is with his new red ball. Before this summer, Finnigan had no interest in the fetching process. He was content to bark and jump and menace the pugs and the children. But something's changed in him of late. It sounds corny but it was like a switch went off in his reptilian brain. Finnigan was looking for a connection. I will admit in front of a jury that Finnigan is not my dog. He is Scott's dog. I have pugs. Finn waits at the door for Scott to come home and hugs him. Me, he barks at. Sometimes, he bares his teeth. There is no respect there, none. He is a punishment from God, at least that's what I think sometimes. But about a month ago, Finnigan began to reach out to me. He began interrupting our Dominoes games by bringing me twigs, drooly, foamy twigs laced I am certain with E coli. It was a real nuisance. The twigs landed on my pants or my bare thigh and as many times as I tried to throw them out

It was all over the news last week that Pamela Pitstop had coughed up nearly 200 grand to pay back the taxpayers of Canada for her fraudulent travel claims. For her part, Pammy says she has done nothing wrong, that the Deloitte auditors changed the rules and that she was only guilty of being a bad beancounter. She may be the only person in Canada who thinks she's a victim. But it made me wonder: why are there so many political crooks in Saskatchewan? To begin with, Saskatchewan has a bit of a reputation for being a crime culture. and Saskatoon and Regina are always within the top five cities in Canada with the highest crime rates in all categories. Did it begin with Al Capone in the tunnels of Moose Jaw? Or it is part of a wild west mentality every man and woman for themselves? I think it all began with Conservative leader Grant Devine, the former premier of Saskatchewan whose government smelled like Regina before the invention of the water softener. During the Devine ye

On any given day, I am blessed by the gifts I have received. A wonderful husband who came to me mid-life Who rubs my feet and cools my temper. Three children who teach me hip hop and video games And the possibility of love. A grandchild who schools me on the potential of popsicles and honeydew. An old dog who teeters on his wobbly feet but never gives up. One puppy who reaches for the tree tops. Another who chases her tail and meets my gaze with disturbingly baleful eyes. Looking out the window on the street below I watch the people. Texting, eating, smoking, reading Too busy to smell the autumn air. Lousy with caffeine and cigarettes and Smartphone induced brain coma To use their senses, not their hands to breathe and look and feel. My life is small but my heart is big. I'm blessed with the ability to discover. Remember. Believe. There is no app for that.  

It's Friday the Thirteenth and I stepped in shit. In front of the mailman. I was shooing Finnigan away from Sophie's poo -- which he adores as a little after breakfast snack -- when I stepped in a warm pile he'd recently deposited. I was in sandals. Sandals. Warm retriever poop is impossible to get off the bottom of an over-priced Mephisto sandal noted for its traction. Running water doesn't do it. If you try to wipe it off with toilet paper, it lands on your foot. And all the rubbing in the world won't get it off. It's like the tar the township used to put down on the dirt road when I was a kid. Even if it looks like it's gone, you still feel it's there teasing you. God, I almost barfed. After the cleanup, I sat down to write this and Sophie started playing with something in the corner. It was a piece of glass. When I picked it up, I cut myself. There is blood on the keyboard. Blood. Then she decided to sharpen her falanges on my calf

Hello. You there . Did you miss me? I've been a bit busy this past week buying food, then making it the same day. Seriously, I'm not trying to be French. I'm trying to avoid death via a lethal consumption of salmonella and E Coli, courtesy of our homemade fridge. It's called a cooler. That's right, a cooler. The thing you keep beer in, except we're now keeping milk in it and cooling it with frozen beer bottles. We're also spending valuable video game time rescuing the cheese and tortillas from what must seem to them to be the bottom of the Titanic. Monterey Jack, come back! It's been two weeks since we lost our fridge. The only thing that saved us was one of those apartment sized freezers that used to store frozen cherries. It's now our lifeline. It's also been about two weeks since that piece of shit neighbor Kenny seized our lawnmower and more than three months since our vacuum cleaner lost its battle with Finnigan's hair. I was

It's cheat day in our house and I could not be happier. Not that I'm complaining. Last night, Scott made a luscious cod en papillote, basically fish in parchment paper, which was brimming with leeks and carrots. Normally, I don' t like fish much except for fish and chips which is a zillion calories. But ever since Scott learned the art of papering fish, I'm a convert. Bring it on baby. Over the past week, we've feasted on mushroom omelettes, Asian soups, beef stew and wonderful salads that do not include one hint of kale. I will not ever eat kale. I can drink it, but cannot eat it. Too bitter for my taste. We've been on a diet for two weeks and Scott has lost one dress size. My results are not evident on the scale but the pants fit a little looser, so I suppose that's something. I've also been working out like fiend at the gymnasty, pounding the elliptical, lifting weights and rowing like there's no tomorrow. I feel pretty great about all of t

Dear Mayor Watson: I have a bum knee, otherwise, I'd have tracked you down at one of the shopping malls where you've moved your office. I have a bone to pick, yessiree, Jimbo. And here it is. My dog park, located at Conroy Pit, has dog poo in nearly all of the trees these days. Some of it is low hanging, some of it is hidden away in tree crotches and some of it is speared onto branches to resemble piñatas. It's in festive blue and red bags, but most of it has Galen Weston's brand on it. President's Choice, the King of Poo. If you look in the bushes, there is poo there, too, on the mossy landscape. It's not laying there like the dogs decided to take a crap and the owners didn't pick it up (although there is some of that, too). Nope, the owners have been vigilant about wrapping their dogs' turds before hanging it up. But sometimes, they forget where they leave it. I believe this is the fault of your council. Perhaps it is the fault of th

With the KitchenAid fridge gone to the dumpster, we've had to be creative with our food supply. The loaner fridge we have now sucks the big one. The ice box works but the rest of it doesn't even cool food to the temperature of the air conditioning. We have to wait to get a new one until we get paid for a video job, and that could take two weeks. In the meantime, we've resorted to storing our food in coolers, literally camping out in our kitchen. This has mixed results. I'm having to shop differently for example. No more trips to Costco for the great deals on meat. I'm now shopping like the French, marketing I think they call it. Buying food for a day or so and resisting purchasing anything that won't last until the weekend. The being who is happiest about this situation is Sophie the pug who now has numerous new methods to get onto the stove and the counters. She is a virtual Cirque de Soleil acrobat who is capable of leaping from box to box, then

As I watched the junk guy take my KitchenAid fridge away yesterday, I went to my happy place to see if I learned anything from my experience with appliance ownership. As you may know, my seven-year-old fridge bit the dust on the weekend. It was taken to wherever dead fridges go, somewhere perhaps like the desolate world of Walle where the 30-year-old Amana beer fridge lies in a heap next to the KitchenAid, an old man sitting next to a kid who took crack one too many times. It's so depressing to think about the appliance cemetery because fridges like ours can't even be refurbished. They'll just lay there until the planet explodes from cow farts and freons. My intuition tells me that the geniuses who get rich selling appliances have finally figured out that they can't make money selling fridges to people who keep them for 30 years so they install innards that are designed to become obsolete in a few years, just like Pontiac Sunfires. After I wrote that post, I re

I suppose it's a lesson in modern consumerism. Let's recap. Our $2,200 KitchenAid refrigerator died on us on the weekend after only seven years. The repair guy, who was nice enough to come by yesterday, said there was nothing we could do. The compressor was kaput. So after spending a few hours crying, we called the junk guy who was scheduled to come to our house this morning. Scott wrestled the beast out of the house yesterday where it sat in a monsoon. And Nick wrecked his back helping out. Then we resurrected an old fridge in the garage to get us through our fridge crisis until we could afford a new one. Meanwhile, I wrote a blog, as I always do when something comes crashing down in my life. One of my Facebook friends reposted my blog on the KitchenAid Facebook site and someone from social media contacted me saying someone from KitchenAid would be in touch today. Which they were. A woman named Theresa called Scott, saying she was from Whirlpool, and Scott called ba

Twenty-one years ago, when most parents were getting their kids ready to go back to school, I was tending to the burial of my mother, Vera. A few days before, she had slipped into a coma at St. Joseph's Hospital in London, Ontario after developing an infection from an operation to remove most of her intestines. It had been Vera's choice to go to London, after checking herself out of the Toronto Hospital, the place that had been her home for most of the previous year. She was fed up with spending her days attached to an I.V. pole, with doctors doing test after test, and finding nothing. She wasn't in any pain; she was just tired of being treated like a medical misfit and took a chance on moving to London to stay with my brother, Gary. The visit was not a long one; before she knew it, she was in excruciating pain and was immediately booked into the OR and sliced open. It took a doctor with a scalpel to locate what all the fancy equipment could not find: the bowel blo

What a holy mess. Our beautiful KitchenAid refrigerator blew up on us this weekend. The nice repairman said the compressor was gone and that meant the $2,200 investment I made seven years ago is nothing but a piece of junk. I wonder how many years seven is in refrigerator years. It was working fine on Friday. Then everything in the freezer melted. And that was that. We had to bring in a last-minute replacement, a second stringer, which looks very much like its on its last season, final play. The replacement doesn't even have a bottom crisper drawer, and it's too small for the space allotted it. Maybe it's so much worshipping of false idols, but I loved my false idol. It had a bottom drawer for the freezer where I kept all my frozen berries and meat now spoiled on the counters. It was big enough to hold a week's worth of groceries along with all the weird Thai and Chinese condiments that make cooking healthy worthwhile. It was beautiful on the outside

It's the day I've been waiting for. The cheat day! To celebrate last night, I watched Les Miserables and had a margarita. I know what you're saying: "Wait a minute, missy. Sunday is your cheat day. Saturday was a low carb day." Okay, so a little slip. I've been good all week. I've lost four pounds since Monday. Thank you, Chris Powell. Thank you, The Athletic Club! Thank you fish and salad and roasted turnips. Take that Doritos. You know longer own me. Yesterday was a bit of setback. I was frankly a little bummed. Truth is, I went to get ice and it had all melted. Our $2,000 KitchenAid fridge was on the fritz. Funny how my mum had the same fridge for twenty years and it chugged along sucking electricity and eventually became a beer fridge. The old fridges never died. They just ended up in land fill spewing freons and causing global warming and sharknados. These new fancy appliances suck. I've been through four food processors in my cooki