Rose's Cantina

We changed veterinarians after the last one put down Hannah, our golden retriever, for cancer (legitimate) then killed my pug Ming. When I say "killed," I mean one of the colleagues of our chief vet guilted us into getting dental surgery for Ming even though the chief had told us months before she wouldn't survive it. She didn't and died on the table. It was horrific. As a result, Gordie, who was also undergoing dental, became an only pug and we were out three grand. Another time, the chief vet nearly killed Gordie when she was operating on him for crystals in his bladder. She sewed him up wrong and had to pay another vet to re-operate on him. That should have been our first clue that we didn't hire the Vet of the Century. In response to killing Ming, Dr. Kevorkian told us how very sorry she was, then sent a donation to the Ottawa Humane Society on our behalf, then sent us a grief card. I'm always amazed at these "random acts of kindness...

Our old Subaru died three weeks ago. It was 13. May it rest in peace. Alternatively, may some talented mechanic get it up and running after buying it at auction. I'm sure a car dealership would have taken our old Sube in on trade. We could have gotten maybe 500 bucks for it. Instead, we donated it to the Ottawa Humane Society. Hopefully it will give some family the wheels to get them out in the real world, and it will provide a little slice of funding for an organization that does great things for animals in this community. This is our form of charitable giving. We don't buy lottery tickets in hopes of winning an over-the-top luxury mansion. We don't go to balls or lavish dinners. And neither of us has the knees to support a run for charity. Anyway, we don't have any friends to shake down for pledges. What we try to do is simple. We try to commit everyday to a random act of kindness, and take small measures to make someone or something's life -- a dog, a cat,...

This is exactly how rumors get started. Scott took this picture and posted the following on Facebook: Congratulations to the expectant Marissa and Jeff who are engaged to be married. I may have a case for accidental strangulation. What did you just do? What? They're not expecting a baby. They're engaged. That's what I said. They're expecting to be married. Seconds later, the notes came flying onto my Facebook status congratulating me on becoming a granny again. Shut the front door. For the record, this will not be a shutgun wedding. Marissa and Jeff have been together for five years. I think they know how the whole reproductive thing works. They are careful, they are responsible, not like Marissa's dear old ma, or grandma, or the millions of other women in this world who become in the family way before wedlock. Marissa's too smart for that. Me, I can't say the same. Me, I had two children before I got married. I had to get a babysitter to...

There is another use for the SodaStream that Marissa bought me this Christmas. It will reduce, substantially, the overflowing recycle box, that one that fills to the brim with soda water cans each week. The SodaStream should reduce our carbon footprint. With fewer cans, there will also be fewer cardboard boxes to throw out. But the real reason I'm happy is that we may finally manage to thwart Sophie Scissorhands whose primary occupation is shredding paper. She could be the inspiration for the saying "the dog ate my homework". Leave out a box, an LCBO bag or have a thesis lying around and you will find bits of it in the bathroom, under the blanket or simply where it used to be. Leave the Vanity Fair in the can and you will find the head of Amy Adams dismembered in another location. And don't even get me started on toilet paper, her favorite of all. By the time I find a toilet roll, it is more or less cement, made so by Sophie's over-active pug saliva ...

I got a brand new soda maker for Christmas, which was a terrific present, all things considered. Many of you will know that pouring soda water on a carpet is an effective means of stain removal. We used an entire bottle of it last night to get at least four stains out that were made by Finnigan who used his tail to clear the coffee table of pop, Scotch, red wine and tea. This morning, I discovered a few trails also left by Sophie who took the late shift, clearing the coffee table of leftover butter tart wrappers and napkins which she pre-chewed. Young dogs make excellent hosts at Christmas. They greet the rellies at the door, keep them at bay until they remove their shoes, jump all over their good Christmas togs, then puke on the humans, just when they are about to reach for their drinks. The pups also thrill at the responsibilities of chewing guest shoes if they are left on the floor, instead of locked in a cupboard somewhere, and opening presents if they are...

I'm not lazy exactly, but I'm heavily spoiled. I have one of those husbands every girl wants, the kind who does everything around the house. He cooks, he cleans, he fixes everything, and he shovels. Since we've been together, I haven't picked up a shovel, not once. Except the other day when I arrived home, alone, to discover that the city snow plow had left a three foot snowdrift in front of my driveway, compacted into a mixture of dirt, salt, ice and snow. We recently got a new car and I am always superstitious, you know, I'm one of those glass is half empty sorts that fully expects someone to come along and schmuck it before we've made our first car payment. I've seen this happen to others, more than once, in this long life, and I was not going to let it happen to me. So there I was, outside my fence for the very first time since we moved here nearly four years ago, and I began to chat with my neighbor across the way. I had never spoken to him before....

This photograph was taken by my cousin Pat on a Polaroid camera when I was 23. I was home for Christmas with the swagger of a girl with her first -- and only as it turns out -- newspaper job. I had many stories to tell back then, about life on Parliament Hill, drinks with celebrity journalists, reporting on the issues of the day. Just a year out of journalism school, I had managed to get a ticket to the Big Show, but my relatives didn't care. They didn't want to hear about it. Sometimes I felt like an alien who had landed in Pleasantville where everything had stayed the same and people lived their lives in black-and-white while I was being colorized. My mom and my Aunt Alwyn were always listening, though, fascinated by the stories of a time and a place that they could only imagine. And how I loved to talk about my new life, for hours into the morning. Sometimes, we would stay up til 3 a.m. talking. At Christmas, especially, I miss those talks. Like man...

My neighbor had to move away, at the beginning of the holiday season, because she was being terrorized by her former crackhead roommate and his chums who kept breaking into her house, taking nothing, but leaving wet smears on her carpet. One night last fall, she realized someone had been in her bedroom while she and her daughter were in the next room. Being a seasoned member of the 'hood which we call Elmvale, I lent her my nine iron which she kept under her bed. On my advice, she also changed the locks. We felt bad for this fearless woman, a person about my age, who rented the house so she could let her grandkids sleep over. Recently, after a last straw visit by the Ottawa cops, she moved into a small apartment, driven from her home by the walking trash that had lived beside her and kitty-corner in the very same apartment building teenaged girls were held, against their will, for the purpose of prostitution. This is not a story about my sketchy neighborh...

This time last year, I set out on a journey of faith hoping that a new puppy would take away the sadness of losing my beloved Ming who died tragically the year before. At the time of Ming's sudden passing, I was inconsolable and believed there would never be a pug who could replace her. Besides, it's not like we needed another dog. We still had the geriatric Gordie and of course, The Black Bastard Finnigan. But the house was short a fawn. It just didn't seem right without one. It was a cold day like this one when Scott drove me into the backwoods of Quebec in search of a single mom who was trying to sell a five month old puppy she could not afford to keep. The story was a crock, of course. When we arrived, we found Sophie who was not five months. She was barely five weeks old. She had no food, no training pads just that little sad sweet face. I'm sure she had been weaned shortly before we arrived. We couldn't leave her, not in that house with no food or wa...

I did a piece of work a few weeks back for a client in Vancouver, and she immediately issued a cheque. I got my payment eight days later. It's what I've come to expect from Canada Post; anything that's mailed from the left coast takes more than a week to get here. It also takes four days to get a piece of mail from Toronto. I don't use Canada Post anymore. I haven't bought a stamp in five years and I'm certainly not intending on buying one single sticky stamp in the future if I can help it, particularly when it costs a buck to mail a letter now. If I need to do some print communications locally -- like income tax -- I usually get in the car and deliver the thing myself. I know how to get from Point A to Point B and I know how long it takes. My bills are paid over the Internet. Even most of my clients pay by electronic transfer. I don't think I'm alone here. So the announcement last week that Canada Post was ending urban mail delivery came as no s...

One of the greatest lessons a parent can teach a child is how to be poor. The ability to navigate the treacherous waters of poverty is not a skill that is easy to acquire, especially in this day and age. A lot of people our age (late middle age to baby boomer) heard about the Dirty Thirties and how our parents and their parents had to scrape by, with one potato to feed the family. (Insert eye rolls here.) There were no jobs back then, we were told, so people did pretty much anything they could: take in laundry, barter for services or dig ditches. My grandfather was the master of this. He was a mechanic, a barber and a farmer, and a bit of a hoarder, who kept a treasure trove of riches in our attic, curiosities, Needful Things, that were given to him by people who could not afford to get their cars fixed. As a kid, I had a whole room full of weird and useless stuff to keep me entertained, including a Victrola which I loved to windup to play my favorite Patti Page ...

Good morning and welcome to Canada AM. There's a lot going on in news today so let's get started. On the business file, it was discovered that the head of LuLulemon Athletic didn't look right in his yoga pants, so they cut off his penis. In Canadian politics today, it was announced that the Senate of Canada would be shut down due to attrition. Conservative members are dropping like flies from the Mike Duffy flu. The Nelson Mandela memorial was rocked by drug scandal this week. First they found out that the interpreter had forgotten to take his medication for schizophrenia and nobody told him Mandela wasn't dead. Then, it was revealed that Barack Obama and David Cameron had been slipped Viagra by the Danish Prime Minister. Joking with the media later, Obama quipped he was simply glad his wife Michelle didn't have diamonds on the souls of her shoes at the time. In Toronto, Rob Ford has been served a libel notice by the Toronto Star for a not-so -veiled attemp...

Memorandum     To: Fearless Leader From: Rona Ambrose, Health Minister Re: Obesity strategy   Dear Leader:   Thank you for providing me with this opportunity to give some input into your wonderful, nation-building agenda. I know, I haven't been much help in the past, but I'm trying, I'm really, really trying. Bruce and I were in bed the other night and he noticed that I was getting a little round in the tummy, not a good look for me, I know. "Why don't you get a bit of exercise?" he said. "You're not getting any younger, or thinner. Still, your hair looks great." At first I was a bit mad, but then I thought: why not turn a negative into a positive? As I was brushing my hair in the morning, the light bulb just went off. Bam. Nearly knocked me out of my Uggs. I'm not getting any younger or thinner, just like the rest of Canadians. I remember something Dr. Oz had said to me. You remember, we retained him to help u...

The first time I met Leigh Chapple she came breezing into the newsroom at CJOH wearing a pair of white sweat pants. That was 1977 and she was only 22 or so, hardly chunky with a honey voice and pretty face. She announced to the newsroom that she was joining a gym. Even back then, she was worried about her weight. I was there as a Carleton University "intern," something that the newly branded CTV Ottawa stopped doing after Max Keeping left the station. For me, a committed print person even back then, the internship was a fascinating glimpse into the face of broadcast news in Ottawa. Every night, somebody would be dispatched to get a bottle of rum and boutonnieres for the gentlemen. After the broadcast, Max would sit down with the crew and have a belt or three and conduct a relaxed post-mortem. It was clear from this experience that I was too nervous for the television game. The one piece I managed to put on the air sucked the big one and I didn't do television again f...

The sheer volume of technology in my house is starting to freak me out. This is my desk. I have a Koba, a Nintendo 3DS, a computer and a Motorola Smartphone which is taking this picture and which has become the devil that directs my entire life. Right now, I'm trying to read Les Miserables which I got for free on Kobo, but I keep getting distracted by the phone two minutes into each page. It's taken me four hours to read three pages because every few minutes, I have to check my Facebook, Twitter, email, Messenger, Blogger, Wordpress. Then I put down the Kobo and pick up the 3DS and play four hours of Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story . At one point, I look up and wonder: where did the day go? All the while I'm doing this, I have CTV Newschannel, CBC, or CP 24 on the telly to make sure I don't miss one single minute of Rob Ford calling a journalist a pedophile or bowling over an innocent senior citizen. Today, the Rob Ford channel was interrupted by...

Dear Friends: Merry Xmas, Happy Chanukah and Feliz Navidad: I am so happy to welcome you to our annual Christmas card. Retirement is such a bitch, y'all. I'm so glad we've stayed together all these years and didn't get divorced like most of our friends who are still working -- at age 55. Just imagine. Poor souls. Somebody really should have introduced them to the Wealthy Barber, who was our neighbor in the Glebe. We recently sold that old pile on Second Avenue, the one with the drafty attic where we put up a number of MPs while they were in town. Boy, I miss those days. Wine and cheese on the back deck. Mini-golf in the backyard. But the place was just too big for us now that the kids have entered into their Ivy League years. We've bought a condo not far from the old homestead and we like to stay up at the cottage, just fishing, reading and watching the stars. I'm so glad we invested in real estate in Quebec back in the 70s when we first got married j...

On Friday, Scott presented me with my first Christmas present and I'm sharing it with you. It's a brand new (to me) desktop computer complete with Word for professional typists. That means I'll be able to chuck the old Student version of Word that has been the bane of my existence. I know, you're all saying: "Hey, Roseanne Rosanna Danna! I thought you were poor! How did you score the new tech?" The answer is this. Scott found a guy who refurbishes old government computers and sells them on Kijiji for, like, two hundred bucks. Oh you're skeptical? How can you possibly get a computer for two hundred bucks unless it fell off a truck in Gatineau somewhere?  It might have come from Idontgiveashitistan, for all I care. Who am I to look a gift horse? It's better than the six hundred dollar laptop I got from HP, the one that comes with a screen full of ads and free offers from other companies, the kind that gives you viruses unless you buy the vi...

Over dinner last night, I said something to Scott I believe he never thought he'd hear. "I'm going to learn French." What the what? I'm not doing it because I need it for a job. Though I do. I'm not doing it because somebody told me I had to do it. Hell, no! I'm doing it because I want to read Les Miserables in the language in which it is written. It was the same reason I wanted to learn Spanish, so that I could read Don Quixote in Spanish. I did read it in Spanish, but I read it very badly indeed, and I suppose the same will be true when I pick up Les Miserables , Victor Hugo's mammoth masterpiece that has become my recent obsession. I've never read it in English, so I'll do that first. I actually found a copy at Value Village a couple weeks back, nearly bought it, but saw it as an immense undertaking and put it back. I'm planning on returning to snatch it up; I don't think anybody will have taken it unless it's an Engli...

In a couple of weeks, I'm giving Marissa her first great wedding present. I know, I know, she's getting married a year from now. Why such an early present? Well kids, she hinted that she was going to start tanning to get ready for her big day which will be in January 2015. I don't want her to do that. She's already had a mole removed as a precaution against skin cancer, and she's so fair that she's high risk for the stuff. But I see her point. She's marrying Jeff, a black man, and she doesn't want to have the flash bounce off of her during the wedding photos. So as my gift to Marissa, we are visiting my old friend Dr. Greg Antoniak at the Facial Surgery and Cosmetic Centre on Riverside Drive to get a mother and daughter one-year makeover and skin strategy to make the two of us look our best on Marissa's big day. I'll be bringing you updates on our progress. I had the Visia Complexion Analysis done a few years ago -- note the hair -- and i...

I don't have a nice photo of Nelson Mandela to show you. Seems like everybody has one. Or at least a story to tell. Which says a lot about the man. He understood better than anybody the power of the photo op. He was kind, he was gentle, he was patient, a man who embodied grace, and laughter and good will, a man who was quick to dance a jig. Diamonds on the soles of his shoes. We can talk all we like about his accomplishments, but mostly, I think of Madiba as having the butterfly effect. His work, his sacrifice, has had a profound effect on little people, like those who occupy a place in my own family. Like the lovely Maya, my wonderful niece who works hard every day to improve the lives of the disenfranchised in Manitoba. Maya is my niece by marriage, a girl whom I met at the age of five when my brother Gary married her mother, Marilyn. She is such a light in our lives. And in 2015, my own daugher, Marissa, will marry her beloved Jeff, a man of Haitian ancestry. This kind...

For the past two weeks, I've been coming up with all sorts of schemes to make Gordie the pug's life better. He can't stand to pee anymore. He poops while sitting. He can't eat without me propping him up between my legs. Yesterday, I decided to build him a little skid to keep him up on his feet, one that rolls around so he can get places, like to the food bowl or to his water. He still loves to eat and he has a wonderfully silky coat, so he still has life in him, right? I knew I was kidding myself. I've been in this space before with Hannah the retriever who was so riddled with cancer that the only respite she found was lying in a snow bank or on the tile floor. And also with Ming whose eyes became wild as she fought to breathe. When I look at pictures now, I see a different story. Look at this photo. Lovely Hannah, still smiling on the outside while wasting away on the inside. She was dead six weeks after that Christmas. These are lies we tell ou...

Anderson Cooper was incredulous. "I'm obsessed with this story," he admitted in the promo for AC 360. He was, of course, talking about Rob Ford who is referred to in the U.S. media as Toronto's "crack smoking" mayor. In Canada, we had hoped that Rob Ford's story would end with his bulldozing of an elderly city councillor, but Americans knew better. Americans knew that this story not only had legs, but it had tentacles. There's an upside to all of this. The Toronto Star's Robyn Doolittle has become a media darling at CNN. I'm sure she's already received an offer to work in Atlanta. Why not? She is the body double of Erin Burnett, she with the flowing locks and Bambi eyes. A few weeks ago, Robyn had her first star turn, in two segments on CNN and she changed her hair twice. Then there are all those Liberals who are getting a second life in the media thanks to those Conservative stalwarts in Ford Nation and in the Senate. PM-for-a-da...

Crime Minister Hairpiece looked like a lugubrious eel sitting in the front row of Paul Desmarais' shindig yesterday. It might have been a celebration of life for the great power baron, but it certainly looked like a funeral for Harper. There he sat amongst the great and powerful looking more like a homeless person than the Prime Minister of the Day. His once almost handsome face has dropped like an ill timed soufflé and his eyes are baggy and drooping underneath his specs. Dude is in serious need of some Botox. I bet if you looked at his shoes, they'd be all scuffy from all the battering he's taking from the Inquisitor--in-Chief, Tom Mulcair, the beard who walks like a man. Even his own MPs are weary of all the shit kicking they are taking whilst the Duffster recuperates from heart surgery in the Ottawa Hospital. (Here's to you, Duff, live long and prosper at the expense of the Hole in the Wall Gang.) The latest knee slapper involves the Privy Council Office ...

We donated our old Subaru to charity yesterday. Whatever it brings will go to the Ottawa Humane Society, our cause of choice. I was thinking of putting Gordie in it to save the euthanasia fee, but he seems a bit better so we'll keep him. I arranged for my elderly friend Doris to drive us around yesterday to get some groceries and hooch and to buy Scott his very own Presto! pass. He works just up the street, too far to walk, but he only has to toddle a block up and catch the bus which will take him right to the door of the brand new Subaru store where he works. Ironic, isn't it? A car salesman with no car? It reminds me of Carol, a now-since-passed drinking buddy who was a manager in a local BMO. She gave people mortgages and loans all the time but couldn't get them herself because ex-husband had gambled away all their savings and ruined her credit. That's not really our problem. We don't have a lot of debt but we've been working poor for six years now. Th...

  I've been married three times -- not too proud of that -- but I've never had one of those big weddings with poofy dresses, veils, a gaggle of attendants and the big hall. It's a good thing considering how pissed I would have been when each of the marriages went South and all that money was spent for nothing.   My first marriage was kind of special. It was on Parliament Hill and I got to wear a nice dress and some flowers. It didn't cost much. In fact, we got the hall and the preacher, the Hon. Stanley Knowles, MP, for free. (I know, the picture's not very good but I tried to find one which didn't include my ex-husband.)   The second and third affairs were homemade weddings and on the cheap.   The second one was in a judge's chambers, the Hon. Hugh Poulin presiding, and we ate at home. My second ex was so cheap he wouldn't let me buy a new dress. Should have seen the end of that one coming.   The third -- and hopefully final one ...