Kenn
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
With this early spring, Toronto’s Forsythia Festival (in Cabbagetown) is blooming far sooner than May!
27 thousand words Cabbagetown, Riverdale Far
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…
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…
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…
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…