Heavy retirement
A friend of mine was telling me that it is almost impossible for a bloke he knows to get a licence to operate a new nursing home facility here in Wellington. The County simply lacks the population base for a provincial go-ahead. That is not great news. It means those of us who hope to […]
Openings
Museums! I love museums. My love of museums began in the 1950s when our teacher took the class to the Schmidt-Dalziel Barn in Vaughan, Ontario. The barn was built in 1809 by Johannes Schmidt in the Pennsylvania barn fashion. The farm was purchased by the Dalziel family in 1828 and was a working farm until […]
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Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia, in 1919, and attended high school and university in California. An outstanding athlete, he chose baseball over the other sports, and played for the Kansas City Monarchs for several years in the Negro League. Branch Rickey worked for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and he loved winning. He wanted […]
Social tippling
The easiest and most social method to develop one’s taste buds, of course, is to join a formal (or informal) wine club. The former debate and deliberate on the merits of a particular wine from a specific region. The latter is usually a group of like-minded folk who tend to enjoy wine for wine’s sake. […]
Lifestyle voting
There was an interesting piece in the Toronto Star the other day by provincial affairs columnist Martin Regg Cohn. Cohn was taking to task Ontario’s Chief Electoral Officer for the limited scope of his proposed solution to persistently low voter turnouts—below 50 per cent in the last Ontario election. The solution proposed by the CEO […]
The real job bank
I don’t know. I just don’t know. On a cold, early spring day, the Royal Bank of Canada fills out a pile of Records of Employment for 45 of their Canadian staff, probably using Reason “K” because we know it isn’t Reason “A”, for issuing the documents. Then RBC human resource officials turn on their […]
5 o’clock in the parlour
The sign along Greer Road reads: ‘Simpson Farms, Since 1947’. I stop to ask permission to scavenge lumber bits from a nearby burnpile. I figure the bits to be ideal to build a tree house for my son. I’m directed to the hired hand. I follow through a complex of outbuildings toward a concrete structure […]
Coming down the home stretch
The season began in mid- January. Since that time, neither the fans nor the players have had time to catch a breath. Because of all the crunching done to the season following the lockout, teams have had to play far more games in a shortened season than they would have normally. For the contenders, nothing […]
Nice yeasty nose
Last week I described the most common (and possibly the simplest to detect) bottling flaw: corked wine. Keep in mind, however, that defects do not always originate at the vineyard. Extreme temperatures during transport of imported wines, or improper bad storage within the licensed establishment, are factors beyond the control of the winemaker. Here are […]
Ready for a takeoff?
Sometimes, life’s opportunities seem so blindingly obvious that, when you spot one, you worry that you’ve missed something everyone else has understood. Take Porter Airlines—the one with the racoon, and ever-present seat sales—and its plan to add 10 new Bombardier Q100 jets to its inventory, with an equally ambitious plan to serve more southern destinations. […]