It was the summer of 1981. I was eighteen years old. My dad had got me a job at a French restaurant called Au Cepage. Which was cool because I had been to France the year before and fell in love with French food. My job was a prep chef or cook’s assistant. I chopped…
I went for a cemetery walk today in Grove Cemetery in Dundas. Stan Nowak gave a great tour telling us about some of the residents and the stories of their lives. It was also a great reminder that none of us gets out of here alive. I’m still reading The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman. The…
If you had asked me a year ago if it was easy to lose weight during a pandemic, I would have said, “Heck, yes!” I saw the movie Contagion. A pandemic brought hoarding, looting, scarcity of resources and scavenging. It would be like the Zombie Apocalypse without the zombies. But the reality of a pandemic…
Seventeen years ago, I started training to run a marathon. I was turning 40 and I figured that it was time to start working on some things on my bucket list. Running a marathon had been something I wanted to do since I was a kid. I trained and ran the marathon. And then I…
I was listening to the song “A Plea from a Cat Named Virtute” by the Weakerthans the other day. I love that song but it always gets me. It hits me in the emotional gut. The song is the imagined monologue of a cat to its depressed owner. I remember the first time I heard…
Everyone knows how to lose weight: Make sure that your calories “in” are less than your calories “out”, right? Wrong! According to The Obesity Code by Jason Fung most of our concepts about weight gain and obesity are incorrect. And the obesity explosion over the last few decades reflect this. More people are trying to…
The other day, I got an email from Amazon. They were going to be paying me my royalties for my book Laund-O-Mat at the End of The World and Other Fringe Favourites. It was published in 2014 and I was going to receive a whopping $17.95! Whoo hoo! To be honest, I didn’t think I…
It’s the day after the night before and I survived the play reading. It went better than expected. People laughed. Which is good when the play is a comedy… Even if it’s a dark comedy. The actors did a great job reading all of the excerpts! But it still felt weird. I sat in the…
Next week, Theatre Aquarius puts on its Reading Week. The artists in the various programs that Theatre Aquarius supports during the theatre season will get a chance to present an excerpt from the piece that they’ve been working on. My turn is on Wednesday (June 19). It’s always good to get your work in front…
It seems ridiculously long since my last blog post. Six whole days. But that’s what happens when you switch from doing a daily blog post to a weekly blog post. Listen to me. I make it sound like I’d been doing it forever when it was only for thirty days. But I’ve had time to…
peter gruner 