Rose's Cantina

Those of you who are forced to "social distance" will be happy to know that it will get better. The children will eventually grow up and move into their own cocoons. The pets will die, and your husband will leave you after listening to you beak at him for 18 months.  Then you will have peace, real peace. No more fighting over the remote. You will be able to eat everything you want and not care if you can no longer see your feet in the shower.  And Trump will be gone, so you'll have that. He will have succumbed to his Adderall addiction, syphilis, or the chemicals in his spray-on tan. Trust me when I tell you that. I have never lied to you.  In the meantime, I am here to keep your spirits up.  You see, I know how to socially distance. I have been in social isolation since 1984. Today's assignment is called the Cupboard Challenge. ™  It will involve having a look in your pantry and your freezer, then making a plan to either ...

Update: Since this post was published, an internal memo from Loblaws, obtained by Canadian Press, revealed that French's ketchup was being pulled from stores to stop the "cannibalization " of the Loblaws' brand by the Canadian product. Loblaws denies this, of course. Maybe they're smarter, and dumber, than I gave them credit for. Loblaws had some 'splainin' to do yesterday after it pulled French's ketchup off the shelf because it wasn't a big seller. The people spoke, and the grocery chain had it back on the shelves before you could say, "Want fries with that?" Despite its claims that it sources local whenever possible, it's quite clear that the Westons don't give a rat's ass about where they get stuff. Either that, or they simply don't pay attention to the news. There was great uproar when Heinz took its act on the road and left Ontario throwing hundreds out of work. And yet, Heinz is still front and centre in L...

#79365416 / gettyimages.com Lately, the manager at my local Loblaw store has been avoiding me. Every time he sees me, he suddenly remembers an unattended problem and does an about face. He's not the only one. All the other managers and stocking clerks head for the hills when they see me. That's because, like a growing number of shoppers, I have become addicted to PC Plus points and I spend hours harassing the staff looking for my deals. For those living without cable, PC Plus is the brainchild of the scion of the Weston family, Galen, who has replaced old Dave Nichol as the pitchman for the companies owned by the family of Ontario's former Lieutenant-Governor. He is on television about every thirty seconds pitching expensive Black Label products and Ontario fresh farm produce in his cashmere sunflower blue sweaters and rich boy goggles. Most of what he's selling is harmless enough, some is even good for you. But the PC Plus points are downright danger...

A few months back, Loblaw introduced a new program called PC Plus in Ontario. It is basically a loyalty program, the same as Air Miles, except all you can do is buy groceries with your points. But who doesn't like to get a free turkey now and again? And, on paper at least it is pretty sophisticated. Every week, you get an email giving you special offers based on your love of, say spinach or green onions. Buy these groceries and you get massive numbers of points, not one or two like Air Miles. Each 20,000 points nets the consumer 20 bucks worth of product and the purchase of a number of products can bring in more than 1,000 points. One weekend, Loblaws offered 2,000 points for the purchase of 80 bucks worth of groceries. That's 20 bucks worth of swag on an 80 buck order! Chaching. Unfortunately, the program has a few glitches. For one, good luck finding the products. Two weeks ago, there was an offer of 1,200 points for the purchase of Cascade bathroom tissue. So Sc...

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...

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...

Dear Air Miles: Thank you for embarrassing us at the grocery store. We were soooo excited that we were able to redeem our Air Miles at Metro, the nearly 3,000 Air Miles I've carefully accumulated at the Liquor Barn, by buying bad Chilean wine. We got to the checkout only to be told that we had no cash miles. "What do you mean no cash miles?" I asked little Elliott at my neighborhood store as the woman behind us hurrumphed while putting her groceries back into her cart to go to another line. "Nope," he shrugged. So our dream trip to Metro turned into a fiasco. This was a big deal for us. When you're like me and you don't get paid for nearly three months because you work at a magazine that pays on publication every other month, sometimes you have to live on fumes. We'd allotted our remaining funds to go to a wedding tonight and expected to be able to buy our groceries on our Air Miles account. We had to scramble. Our food went on our cred...