Author: Kenn
My journey with AIDS...and more!: Nine years older nine years later
It’s been so long I had to look up what SARS stood for (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). That was part of the underlying score as I spent five weeks in two hospitals starting nine years ago early this morning. Why was I laid up? Well an item from Montréal in
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Reading today (when I’m not writing)
When I read it’s a bit like grazing in front of the dessert table (minus the diabetic considerations). So it is that I am currently reading, roughly a chapter or section at a time: The Scottish Pioneers of Upper Canada, 1784-1855: Glengarry and Beyond by Lucille H. Campey Robert
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Plan ahead – before it kills you
h/t to my friend BA! Today, April 16th, is National Advanced Care Planning Day in Canada…have you started the conversation? Here’s a link for more information and a 3 ½ minute video produced by the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association. Please forward this video, share on your Facebook page, tweet
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Somei-Yoshino Sakura Blossom Festival at Toronto’s High Park
Last year I went in the evening. Today I went at dawn. I learned the other day that the cherry trees in High Park—2,000 Somei-Yoshino Sakuras, a gift from Tokyo bestowed by the Japanese ambassador in 1959, were hitting their peak Saturday. The blossoms only last about a week, usually
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Town of Perth, Ontario moves to conserve downtown’s beautiful buildings
Perth Town Council has taken the bold, even if obviously necessary, step of creating a formal Downtown Heritage Conservation District. It comes in the form of a by-law which outlines the boundaries of the district – North and Harvey Street (to the south) and Wilson and Drummond Streets on the
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: My camera survived!
This was the last photograph I took on Sunday before going ass-over-tea-kettle into the waters of the Tay River’s Grant’s Creek at Allan Mills. I then walked across the arched, stone bridge I’ve photographed on other occasions to get to the other side of the creek. In order to get
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Newspaper clipping from Mom: “A GAY JOCK TAKES OFF THE MASK”
It was on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen’s March 17 “Saturday Observer” section. The paper sat on a table beside Mom’s comfy chair, where she keeps anything she wants to pass along to me. She knows that, like Jamie Hubley, whose passing touched me so deeply, hockey stories wouldn’t
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Holiday weekend pictures from Perth and Calabogie
by kenngc
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Scanned: my first post-positive lab results
I found this in a plastic-covered folder in my Rubbermaid file drawer: My physician at that time, the late Ed Kamski, ordered these tests as a baseline after giving me the results of my “positive” HIV-antibody test. (He also told me that a blood sample taken about a year earlier,
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Honouring Dad for his birthday
This Sunday, yes April Fools Day, would have been my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. I last saw him when the whole family gathered in Perth to mark his seventy-fifth, within months of his first stroke. It was a very happy occasion, given the warning scare we had experienced when he was
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Ending the week on a positive note
I checked in with my doctor today to get results from my latest blood tests and the news was all good! CD-4: 310 (up from January) viral load: undetectable Hemoglobin A1c: .063 Weight: 144 lbs. So I’m good again until June, by which time I’ll have had some more routine,
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: With this early spring, Toronto’s Forsythia Festival (in Cabbagetown) is blooming far sooner than May!
27 thousand words Cabbagetown, Riverdale Far
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: No sentence could undo the harms caused by Graham James
I join the outcry today over the sentencing of convicted serial pedophile Graham James to two years in prison for the sexual abuse of Theo Fleury and Todd Holt. Counter-intuitively (because I knew it would just get me stirred up) I watched the news coverage of the lawyers’ statements and victims’
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Two names to be added to Craig Chaplin Memorial Award
This spring’s presentation of the award in my brother’s memory will include a couple of firsts – two individuals are being cited and they’re from across the Canada-U.S. border in neighbouring Vermont. To be more accurate, one-half of the couple of Dr. Delores Barbeau and Carol Olstad, R.N. will be
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Adieu Madeleine Parent
Aerial view of Montreal Cottons Valleyfield works, 1950. Copyright undetermined as per citation at Université de Sherbrooke’s Bilan du Siècle I was saddened to learn of the death last night of the iconic Québec labour activist Madeleine Parent. She was 93 so I knew that when I wrote this tribute
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Smoked meat, Céline-lean
It’s official – the families of Céline Dion and well–known restaurateur Paul Nakis have purchased the 84-year old Montréal institution Schwartz’s deli. Opened in 1928 on Montreal’s fabled “Main” (St. Laurent Boulevard) by Reuben Schwartz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania, the city’s best-loved diner has a worldwide reputation for smoked meat sandwiches so
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