Suzanne....this one's for you

For the record, I have not been fitted for a pair of customized cement shoes and I'm not on the bottom of the Palgrave pond. I'm alive, kicking and doing just fine. I've had quite a few inquiries as to my health, my state of mind and if I'm ok. I'm ok. It's actually quite comforting to get so many notes from people asking about me and wondering if coopSpeak will ever fire up again. I can tell by the metrics bar that the blog is constantly opened so I know people have wondered where I've gotten off to.

My hiatus from coopSpeak is really about two things, neither of which has anything to do with politics, elections or being afraid of that late night call. Rather it has a lot more to do with actually writing about something I truly love, which is just simply food. Long before I started coopSpeak I'd been an active social media food blogger with my coopspeak Eats blog. Writing about food and looking at the world of food through a camera lens is just a whole lot more fun than writing about local politics and the mediocrity and more so the hypocrisy that seem to be the circus here in Caledon.


I'm busy working on a photo journal about Farmer's Market's all across this province and have been from Leamington to Ottawa, snapping happies, meeting people who bring food from earth to table and just having a great time. My goal is to photograph every single Farmer's Market in the province. It's a lofty goal but it is a worthwhile effort. I'm considering dedicating the book to Galen Weston and calling it "Flock Ewe". :) Since according to him one of these days Farmer's Markets are going to kill someone. Has anyone reminded Galen this week that there was a recall on Loblaws hamburgers for tainted meat. Wonder if the Junior Weston would be interested in coming over for a bbq.

The second reason I took a hiatus from coopSpeak was also in part because of a clandestine meeting with a woman who I'll just affectionately refer to as Dizzy Lizzy. She'll know who she is. It was actually Dizzy Lizzy who asked me for the meeting because as she put it "I'd just really like to get to know the woman behind the blog". Which as it turns out was really code language for I'm just going to see if I can bully you in to not writing coopSpeak. Darling Dizzy Lizzy tried so hard to infantilize me throughout the whole meeting, it was like the Theatre of the Absurd. I remembering thinking to myself what a shame it was that the Second Cup wasn't licensed because ordering up a double double would have come in very handy during those 45 minutes of my life that I'll never be able to get back.

Later that evening as I sat with a friend sharing some wine and recounting to her about this silly woman I couldn't shake the sense of how serreptitious, caustic and virulent those 45 minutes had really been. In hindsight now I realize that those 45 minutes were probably one of the best things that I could have experienced because it made me understand how I just would never want to be like this person and somewhere along the line, in my own coopSpeak kinda way, I had in fact become just like her. It shook me to my core. The only difference between us was that I have far better taste in boots and I unlike her I would never qualify as a candidate for a What Not To Wear episode. Thank goodness for small mercies and good fashion sense. So I turned to food, not to eat it, but to glorify it, in script and through my camera lens and on my foodblog.

So here I am. I still here and I'm still full of piss and vinegar. I would like to weigh in on a few things, not only on the political scenery in Caledon but also what's happening at both the provincial and federal level. These are scary times and I wonder why people continue to sit complacently by and not speak up. There is so much going on. Let's start with the whole Robocalling fiasco. Has it occured to anyone that our Federal Government may have actually broken the law in getting themselves elected. Then there's the Drummond Report, get ready Ontario the cuts are coming, they will be deep and there will be blood. Then we come to Caledon. There are 18 parties recognized at the Ontario Municipal Board who are stalking Caledon and hounding for changes to our OPA. Hello, is anyone paying any attention here? Do I need to bang the drum on the apathy is boring tenet again?

Oh by the way, Matthew Strader (aka Darth Strader), you suck as a journalist and haven't you just become Mister Pro-Growth and the developers best buddy. It makes me wonder who you've been eating lunch with lately. And I don't give a rat's ass what a bunch of 3rd year university Planning students have to say about Bolton's growth. Like I'm prepared to handover the OPA for Peel to a bunch of post-pubescent kids who have absolutely no real time experience in planning other than schooling exercises. Hey while we are at it why don't we get a bunch of MBA students together to see if they can fix the financial deficit of this province. Thank goodness that piece of trash flyer disguised as a newspaper that you write for has some credible writers otherwise the Caledon Enterprise would be nothing more than a bluebox filler. I'm so crushing on my fave column curmudgeon, Bill Whitbread. He is still my most favorite old fart in Bolton. You Darth Strader could take an old school lesson from him.

So stay tuned....the girl is back in the saddle. Oh, and Suzanne, thanks.