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 ...

Today, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson pleaded with residents to stay home because tomorrow we're going to get a whopping 40 centimetres of snow. This news has already struck fear into the icy hearts of OC Transpo managers who are asking LRT operators to practise breaking in snow (news! The winter started months ago!). I will stay home, watching my puppies playing in the snow, because I am still unemployed after 10 months. This week, I applied for jobs as a communications adviser, a writer/editor, and a sales clerk at the grocery store. If I'm lucky I'll be packing fish on ice within a week. If I haven't heard from the grocery store by next week, I'm pulling out all the stops and applying at Costco and Home Depot. They pay an extra dollar an hour, or so I hear. It's been a very disturbing winter. I'm turning 64 in July, and I currently earn $400 from CPP. I will have to wait until next July so I can top up my earnings with the Old Age Pension rounding o...

Don't you hate when people leave you hanging on Facebook? Say they have some terrible tragedy unfolding, and you wait, with bated breath, for the next post only to hear crickets. Did he die? Is she ok? Was the operation a success? Follow up, people, please! Now back to me. I thought I'd give you a brief update on my living situation -- yes, the heart is still beating -- because, I thought you might like to know. Last fall, I posted an urgent message that I had to re-home my lovely Mini-Aussie, Pearl, because she was trying to kill Sophie the Pug. Faced with my own version of Sophie's choice, I couldn't do it. As I watched Viggo the Lab and Pearl play in the yard, I knew I couldn't separate them. I couldn't give up Sophie, either, because I've had her for eight years, and she really is my therapy dog. So a solution had to be found. First, we hired a doggie behaviourist, a nice fellow named The Dog Father. Dan came to the house and gave us som...

Mike Sloan died today at 1:25 p.m. He opted for MAID, medically assisted death, and left this world peacefully with his friend, Bob, holding his hand while his cat snuggled nearby. He was sad for his cat, whom he loved unconditionally. He worried about that damned cat and that is why Mike opted to die at home instead of in hospice. He said the other day that hospice wasn't an option because they didn't allow cats or beer. I told him, I knew for a fact, they allowed beer. I brought my friend a 40 pounder of vodka when she was delivered to hospice, all eighty pounds of her. He liked that story. Mike Sloan was the bravest man I never knew. I didn't know him at all. Never shared a beer with him, never met him for coffee. That's because, like thousands of Canadians, I only knew Mike from Twitter. And I'd only seen him in person when he was on television after he became a reality sensation. After he discovered that he was dying of Anaplastic thyroid cancer...

John Simpson is one of the kindest, most caring, people I know. But he's just about at the end of his rope. It's been nearly three years come April since his daughter Ashley disappeared after having a fight with her boyfriend. His families still has no answers, or closure. There haven't been answers, either, for the families of the other women who have gone missing and are now presumed to be murdered in the area of Enderby/Salmon Arm.  It's cold comfort for the families that the justice system released Curtis Sagomeon, under a probation order, in December even though he was found guilty of three charges of uttering threats, intentionally discharging a firearm and terrorizing a woman near his farm, which is a short distance away from where Ashley and the other women disappeared. And it chills John to the bone that a body was found near Sagomeon's farm last year.  The RCMP have reassured the public that there is nothing new to see here, that these ...

"You finally got rid of all the kids," my landlord said. "Why on Earth do you want three dogs?" ...At my age.   He almost said it, stopped short of insulting me in my own backyard. I shrugged. "I'm here by myself," I explained. "I like the company." What I wanted to say was that I prefer the company of dogs to landlords who come around every bleeding day in the summer, and hammer while my husband is sleeping off his shift work.  Like the dogs, there's no point talking to Doug. Scott asked him not to come over on my birthday, and he showed up with his girlfriend and chatted up my entire family over the fence. Doug is like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz -- tall, made of straw, and with few brains.  He doesn't have any kids or dogs. He is, it seems, allergic to anything with a heart.  The next time Doug encountered my dogs, he found himself pinned to a wall with Viggo, the Chocolate Lab, licking his ears, ...

It's always heartbreaking to celebrate Christmas without a loved one. But most of us cannot imagine what it is like to live without a child who was taken by violence, and whose body has never been found. In April 2020, it will be four years since my cousin Ashley Simpson disappeared without a trace, and for her family, it never gets easier.  There is no closure. No resting place where they can visit her. No idea how she met with her demise. And so the wound reopens every time the family gathers, on birthdays, on holidays. And this year, the sadness drove her dad, John Simpson, nearly to the brink. And it led him to a very sad decision.  Please read his post on Christmas Day, and say a prayer for this family.  Hmfffl. Well Merry Xmas and all that jazz that goes with it. Hope ur season is better than ours and it should be for most...hoping next year will be better, and it should be. So the reason for this post. It's been three years since we heard the new...