Looking at life through a funhouse mirror
This week the cottage burned. To. The. Ground. We went up to look at it and it is amazing what a fire will take. The only things remotely recognizable were the cast iron frying pan and the shell of the brand new cast iron sink (minus its enamel) that we had just bought for the …
The Flower Guy About 25 years ago when I first lived on the Danforth in Toronto, we went out for dinner a lot. This is because there are lots of restaurants and because I was too lazy to cook after spending all day at business school. Just about every time we were out for dinner, …
Cockroaches: Nature’s Perfect Pest The first time I ever saw a cockroach was when I was living at the graduate students residence at U of T. I opened my typewriter case one day and a strange bug crawled out. My roommate helpfully identified it. Turns out the building was pretty much infested and although they …
As the third owner of a house that turns 100 this year, I feel like I am the curator of a domestic museum. My house was born before the First World War. It was built on the optimism of the new century, its neighbourhood made possible by one of the feats of engineering immortalized in …