Rose's Cantina

#181600697 / gettyimages.com I may have slept through the Summer of 2014. Certainly, I didn't do much else. Last week, it hit me. I'd only consumed corn on the cob, my absolute favorite vegetable, twice. When I was a kid, the oldsters teased me that I could eat a dozen corn on the cob in one sitting -- when I was twelve!  For some people that would mean hugging the toilet for a couple of hours. In my case, living in a house without indoor plumbing, that would not have been an option. It just didn't seem to affect me that way, whether I ate one cob or a dozen. I was like a little beaver sawing logs. RRRRRRR; in thirty seconds the cob was done. Alas, as I get older, corn does get me runnin' a bit, but I still love to slather the butter, salt the little number and scarf it down. It's a horror show really, with condiments dripping from my face. Shirts are never the same after a good feet at the trough. But this year, the oompf went out of my corn dog...

#85183166 / gettyimages.com Right now, your BMI is 35, said Dr. Ben. After the breast reduction, you'll be 30.1. So, I'm not obese? No, you're just overweight . I stood in front of Scott the other day, in my underwear, and showed him my rapidly shrinking middle. He couldn't believe it. I had to show him in my underwear because, to the outside world, I don't look a hell of a lot different. And that's because of my boobs, cup size G. They are all you can see when I'm coming at you. They hide the middle, giving off so much shade that it really doesn't matter what the rest of me looks like. Nothing can live under there. To repeat a hurtful joke once told to me, I haven't seen my feet in years. And so it was, at my last physical, I asked Dr. Ben to book me a breast reduction, something I've been fighting for years. I always thought that breast reductions were selfish things in a world when women were losing their lobes to canc...

In the end, I've realized, genetics win. Genetics and middle age. I was recently thumbing through the family album looking at my Aunties and saw myself in those wonderful women, those Scottish shortbreads with the pug faces in house dresses. Fashion-wise, there were good reasons women wore house dresses. They were cool when you didn't have air conditioning, they were inexpensive because the only shapes were made by cinching and darts, and you could let them out easily when your body started giving out. In my Aunties' day, there were no expensive gyms to go out, no plastic solutions to be had, only house dresses and sensible shoes. Aunties weren't athletic, but they worked hard, used something they called elbow grease, got on their hands and knees several times a week to scrub unscrubbable floors, hung clothes on the line instead of throwing them into the dryer, and cranked their own windows in cars. Their weight in middle age couldn't be explained by their e...

If you were Rob Ford, a person considering treatment for binge drinking, wouldn't you be a little frightened right now? For months, the poor fellar has been hounded by a thousand cameras and that Katie Simpson who talks over everybody. He can't even get his drycleaning done. Rob Ford has become the most famous drunkard in the world, more famous than Hemingway or Ronnie Wood. More famous than Charlie Sheen or Justin Bieber. Winning, he's not. So how does a guy like Robbie, as his sister Kathy calls him, get treatment? Well, he certainly can't go to AA. There's nothing anonymous about Robbie Ford. He could lock himself away in a treatment facility somewhere, but that hasn't exactly worked for a lot of people. The success rate for in-house treatment or any treatment for that matter is less than 10 percent. So why spend upward of $100K on something that's probably not going to work? Even Rob Ford's mom says rehab is not for her little guy. What he...

Tired of hearing about my exercise and diet regime yet? Well, go find something else to read. What do you expect from an obsessive-compulsive ADD girl anyway? It's hard for people like me to commit, but when we do, we go all in. Today, I started the day with a mushroom egg omelette and a trip to the gymnasty. Right now, I'm drinking a 90 calorie vanilla almond latte which tastes EXACTLY like a Tim Horton's double double. I shit you not. Then I'll do housework after which Scott will return home to barbecue some lovely beef tournedos I picked up at Farm Boy today. We'll have that with a tomato salad littered with bocconcini pearls and red onions and maybe we'll have a nice slaw. That's right baby, I'm turning into Martha Fucking Stewart. Deal! Oops, I forgot about lunch. Can't forget about lunch! I'm trying to decide between a sweet potato and chicken stew or a bowl of chili. Maybe a stir fry? Why the choice? I've been cooking all ...

Scott and I pass this place every day on the way to the Conroy Pit Dog Park. This would be a fantastic place to take your kids for a birthday party or in place of going to the movies. Get them away from the video games. Take those Skittles out of their hands. Burn off some energy. It's only $9 a person for a half hour! Sky Zone is located at the corner of Walkley and Conroy. You're welcome.  

I get up at least four mornings a week to bust a gut at The Athletic Club. Exercise has become an important part of my life, along with juicing and the baking of strange manifestations that resemble bread but are, in fact, almond and garbanzo laden nutbars. I'm still over-weight -- I don't think it's even possible for me to win the battle of the bulges -- but I consider myself in good physical shape. I am strong, I am invisible, I am middle aged woman. Unfortunately, I am no match for a toddler. Yesterday, Nick was going for a job interview so I agreed to take his 15-month-old daughter for a few hours, and that meant a trip to Pleasant Park, a sprawling little bit of heaven in the middle of the city. How hard could it be? Compared to the other grannies, I'm ripped. I envisioned a good half hour pushing her on the little swing, talking to the other mums and grannies while our little charges played together in the sand. The reality didn't exactly resembl...

There is a new study from the geniuses at CHEO which says that kids should have one hour of exercise every day and they should limit their screen time to two hours. I wonder how much the taxpayer paid for this study. I could have told you this, if only you'd asked. Did we need a study to tell us this? Any mom could tell you that our kids are fat and lazy. What I'd like to see is some kind of strategy to get the kids off the couch. In my day, that strategy included a bull whip, lube and perhaps some brussel sprouts. We live in a Pillsbury Dough Boy society where kids are coddled and entitled. They are given every indulgence. Just try to pry the controller out of a braindead kid's fingers. Just try it. Kids aren't interested in exercise. They want others to do it for them, as in soldiers and ninjas. So how are we supposed to enforce this? Come on, Johnny, let's go to the park. To do what? Let's throw a ball around. You throw a ball around. No ...

Over the years, I've developed an appreciation for God and her mystical sense of humor. God likes to play parlour games, to test the limits of human endurance and suffering. She's sort of passive-aggressive in that way. It's as if God were writing a sitcom and we were the buffoons playing the parts. Sheldon and Leonard. Laverne and Shirley. God likes to give us stuff, then take it away just to see what would happen. So the person who loves sweets gets diabetes. The runner gets bad knees. The wine lover gets cirrhosis. The reader loses her eye sight. The writer loses her mind. My own mother loved nothing more than a brisk walk. Unfortunately for her, by her mid-life, Vera had developed deteriorated discs and she was unable to walk more than a few feet without experiencing excruciating pain. By the end of her life, she couldn't walk at all. I've seen many other people who are denied life's great pleasures. The New York Times food writer Cra...

I had a truly Brigitte Jones moment at the gymnasty yesterday. Just before my workout, I stepped on the scale for the first time in about a month and found myself weighing 219.5 pounds. I could not believe my eyes. I have been working out nearly every day since March as well as watching my diet and I have lost .5 pounds. Half a friggin' pound. Everyone finds this incredibly hard to believe -- even Scott who has been with me through the entire exercise. I have lost inches around my waist and hips -- that is a fact. I have even lost a little, just a little boob weight. And yet, the scale doesn't lie. How is this possible? Indeed, my pants are no looser, in fact, truth be told, they are actually a bit tighter. I no longer have a muffin top; it's more like a fallen souffle where certain bits are quite a bit smaller. And it is true, the muscle I've been building weighs more than the gelatinous, pock-marked goo that used to be there. Nope. It's not...