Category: Eclectic

I don’t think any of my friends or family members would ever accuse me of being spontaneous.

For instance, I already know what I’m doing next weekend (visiting my sister and my nieces) and the weekend after that (hibernating at home, albeit one hour less of it due to the start of daylight savings time). Not knowing what I’m doing three weekends from now is about as impulsive as it gets for me.

I plan out meals about a week in advance – case in point – I knew last weekend that we would be having beef stew tonight and spaghetti with meat sauce for dinner tomorrow night. Grilled jerk chicken and a home-made Caesar salad is on tap for Monday and grilled pork chops, jasmine rice and steamed broccoli with butter is on Tuesday’s menu. If I get to M &M Meats tomorrow (which, of course, I’m planning in advance) I’ll grab some burgers and we can have those on Wednesday night. Keep Reading!

It seems like every couple of years, when I park my car at my sister’s house, a couple of creatures hop along for the ride home.

What you have to keep in mind is that my sister and her family live in the forest. Well, not literally, but her house is surrounded by 10 acres of land, so of course it’s home to some undesirables. Like mice. And I guess my car is popular among those undesirables.

Two years ago, there was a strange smell coming from my car shortly after I had visited my sister’s place, so when I took it for regular maintenance I mentioned the smell and the mechanics told me a mouse had been using the cabin air filter as a nest. Lovely. Keep Reading!

Everyone in Southern Ontario and even in the rest of Canada, is excited about the Toronto Blue Jays. The Jays currently sit at the top of the American League East standings, having won the last 11 games in a row. Most of this is due to a recent trade for a shortstop named Troy Tulowitzki and the acquisition of a free agent pitcher named David Price.

Dougie has been a loyal Jays fan for years. For me, not so much. It’s not really the Jays fault though. I’d like to be excited about this team and I probably would be, if it weren’t for another Toronto team that used to break my heart every year, the Toronto Maple Leafs. I used to be a hockey nut, waiting outside Maple Leaf Gardens to meet the players before playoff games or practices and I was even lucky enough to go to the games once in a while. But year after year it was the same old, same old. When they made the playoffs they would get to the quarter finals and lose. I remember in 1978 they actually beat the New York Islanders to make the semi-finals but then lost to the powerhouse Montreal Canadiens. For the past 10 or 15 years, they have barely made the playoffs. Keep Reading!

I’m not sure what kind of genes my parents passed on to my brother and sister and I, but we are all freaks in our own way.

Dougie has seen ghosts on several occasions. His first haunting was at our parent’s house in East York. The previous owner of the house had killed himself in the garage, running his car until he choked to death on the carbon monoxide. I remember washing the windows of the garage with my dad before we moved in.

One evening in the middle of the night, when Dougie was about nine years old, he heard a car running, looked outside his bedroom window and saw the lights of a car running inside the garage and my father’s car parked in the driveway behind it. Keep Reading!