Rose's Cantina

I've often wondered how people with dogs keep their homes so neat and tidy. You know the people. They have two English sheepdogs and three cats, pristine terra cotta pile carpets, microfiber sofas and gleaming floors. There are no shit stains on the microfiber where the dogs have scooted themselves, no puke marks from the time the dogs ate the ham they retrieved from the ice box, no half chewed spindles on their chairs. These are the people who happily act as valets for their dogs instead of writing blogs complaining about them while the dogs chew their prized runners in the background. My friend Suzanne is a master dog manager. She has an incontinent, blind, 16-year-old dog named Buddy who keeps falling in the swimming pool. When Buddy poops himself, she and her husband have to spend an hour cleaning his gnarly fur in the laundry room. He often pees where he stands. And yet, her house is always pristine. I could have -- and perhaps...

The bedroom looked like a crime scene a couple of weeks back. There was so much spatter I nearly called in Dexter. Ah, life with dogs. It reminded me of perimenopause, that time when God's mystical sense of humor gets the better of her and you're wearing a white skirt at a summer party and there's nowhere to hide. Sophie became a woman this month and boy did the neighbors know it. The bastard hounds at Shameless across the street were howling well into the night. We thought the fire marshal had come calling again. Now before all you do gooders get on your fancy horses, let's be clear. We have no intention of breeding her and we will get her spade in a couple of months, but the money put aside for the spay went to save the life of Gordon Blackstone, our twelve-year-old pug who has fat where his thyroid gland used to be. He's sitting here, right under my writing table as we speak. Instead of thanking me, he's whining at me. Thanks a lot pal. You cou...

This video courtesy of Online MBA Thoughts?  

For the past two weeks, I've been thinking about Gord Rhodes, a man best described as a visionary and legend of the Ottawa music scene. In recent months, Gord has been spit polishing his collection of rock and roll memorabilia and posting the pictures on his Original Barrymore's Facebook site. I was trying to get hold of him to say that Scott and I wanted to help him put together a documentary. We wanted to interview him about the grand old days of Barrymore's. Never heard from him. Today, I heard the news, oh boy. Gord had entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the sky. God bless him. I  knew Gord back in the last 70s, when I was a little girl reporter who covered the music scene for the Ottawa Citizen . I got to know him and his business partner, the brawny, colorful Sonny Thomson when they ran Barrymore's and brought some of the greatest acts to the former strip club. Nobody knew how they got B.B. King, or U2 to come to the shabby theatre. I was j...

It was like a bomb going off. Yannick looked at the pretty English girl, who was sitting across from him speaking the broken French she learned in high school. He would be speaking to many pretty English girls in the coming days, some from Canada, some from Atlanta or New York. Most who had never heard of Lac Megantic, the place Yannick had called home all his life. Minutes before the crash, the popular bar owner had left the Musi-Café to get his daughter from the babysitter. Seconds later, his livelihood was incinerated. So were his friends, his staff who were like family. One wait staff member, 18, had just started working there three weeks before. For years, his bar had been the epicentre of life in Megantic. Now it would be known as the epicentre of the worst rail disaster in Canadian history, a place the small town's young people can gone to die. Musi-Café had been like Cheers -- Yannick knew the names of all his customer, he knew what they liked to dri...

Now this looks like something fun to do this weekend. Here is more information on the Osgoode Medieval Festival. If you're too lazy to look at it, watch this fun trailer.

It's hard at my advancing age to resist nostalgia for the good old days. Especially when you're on Facebook with your former high school and university classmates, coworkers from dead newspapers and old drinking buddies from the press club. I used to laugh at oldsters who put up plaques with old sayings all over their cottages and trailers along with little "kits" like the one with this label: Open in Case of Emergency. Inside was a candle with the instructions to light when someone farts. On the candle was another wrap around slogan: Silent but deadly. Lately, I have been bombarded with Facebook messages and posters that read "remember when?" that are pictures of old toasters, eight tracks, washing machines with rollers and other crappy gizmos invented long ago by snake oil salesmen. None of those devices were good. The toaster burned your fingers -- and the toast -- and the roller-style washing machines caused multiple amputations in weary housew...