This invitation arrived at my door the other day.

It is an invitation to party with the whole family at Mount Pleasant Cemetery to celebrate the opening of their new Visitation Centre. It is promising ice cream and cotton candy, along with many other family delights.

I don’t want to sound like a cemetery party pooper. Mount Pleasant Cemetery is gorgeous, filled with spectacular gravestones of wealthy families, rare trees, and is the final resting place for high profile Canadians such as the co-discoverers of insulin Banting and Best and pianist extraordinaire Glenn Gould. It was one of my favourite places to go running back in the day when I used to run. It is lovely.

I am not against the idea of melding life with death, it’s unavoidable after all. I have always admired other cultures that make death more a part of their lives. I love that some cultures set a place at the table or leave offerings for their passed on loved ones. I would love to go to Mexico to celebrate the Day of the Dead.

But henna tattoos for the kids? Balloons? “Fun for kids of all ages’? It kind of throws me. It feels a little macabre. It’s not the first destination that springs to mind when I think of a fun family outing.

I had the same feeling when I saw a sign outside Hooters advertising Family Day. It just seemed out of place somehow. Hooters, synonymous with bountiful chested girls in satin shorts and tank tops, doesn’t strike me as the first place to go for a family meal. “Come on grandma, grandpa, kids! We’re going to have lunch where daddy likes to stare at boobies!”

Perhaps I am a cemetery and big boob chicken wing eatery prude. Breasts, death, chicken wings, it’s all natural, right? Shouldn’t everyone be entitled to find their fun where they can? Maybe I am old fashioned killjoy.

As much as I am a tad curious I will have to miss the cemetery party this weekend. My nephew is turning one and I will be attending his party instead. I can only hope that there will be ice cream and cotton candy.

I finally saw 500 Days of Summer with my girlie movie girlfriends. Then I saw it again with The Sweetie.

I adored it’s quirky charm and the soundtrack and Zooey Deschanel’s vintage-y outfits. I was smitten with the sweet lovelorn hero. In fact, the hero reminded me of The Sweetie, which made me love the movie all the more. His sincerity and how he wore his heart on his sleeve melted my heart and made me swoon. Aloof cool guy hipsters are so tiresome. Earnestness should be celebrated and embraced yet remains so underrated. Give me sweetness any day.

One friend shocked me by merely feeling lukewarm about the movie. A self admitted sucker for a six pack and cockiness, perhaps she was immune to the sweet non-arrogant charms of the protagonist. She managed to redeem herself, however, by presenting me with adorable owl soaps.

I am easily bought. Owl soaps allow me to agree to disagree with my friend about 500 Days of Summer, even if her taste in men is questionable and her movie opinions are wrong. At least we won’t have to fight over my new imaginary boyfriend.

If only we had 500 days of summer this year. Toronto has only had 17 days, tops.

Oh Neko, you titian haired fiery booming voiced colossally talented goddess you. You were spectacular at Massey Hall last night. It was one of those concerts where I felt ecstatic and kept catching myself grinning and clasping my hands with glee. Perhaps the pre-concert gin and tonics helped. Perhaps it was the amazing cranial sacral treatment I had on my neck (damn you Cameron Diaz!) earlier that day. But mainly it was you, Neko. I was dazzled from beginning to end. I wish that I too could be a red haired vixen with shiny red shoes and rescue dogs waiting for me at my home in the country.

Instead I have to be satisfied with a concert t-shirt. This is what you have done to me Neko. I am a forty year old reduced to acting like a giddy high school girl buying a concert t-shirt to advertise my cool quotient and show the world that I experienced your magic. I will toss my brown hair and warble to my cat. A sad substitute but at least I have lovely memories and a cool shirt.

At last this week feels like summer should: hot, sunny and glorious. The Sweetie and I decided to frolic at Centre Island for the day. We traipsed to the ferry docks, slathered with sunscreen and dreaming of riding the giant plastic swan that swims through the pond on rails.

The ferry was closed due to the Toronto City worker’s strike. Gahh!

I never expected to be a reverse Norma Rae, but I have little sympathy for the city worker’s strike.  When people are losing their jobs or hanging on to them by a thread, it feels wrong for employees of the city who are being paid taxpayer’s money to strike just because they want to bank their sick days for retirement. The Sweetie and I have already had a few heated debates where he is trying to defend their right to strike but as someone who is self employed, I have zero job security, zero benefits and zero sick days, let alone sick days I can bank for my retirement, so I am not overwhelmed with sympathy. I was even less sympathetic when my dreams of a tacky swan ride and soft serve ice cream were thwarted.

Luckily it is summer and the sun was shining and it is hard to remain cranky when the weather is so beautiful. We strolled around Harbourfront like tourists and had a wonderful day despite the city strike. Furthermore, if we had made it to the island I never would have met Bill. He was sitting on the boardwalk surrounded by pigeons eating bread straight from his hands. Bill was kind enough to teach me his special bird feeding method- start by scattering crumbs to whip them into a bit of a frenzy, then hold a piece of bread (crusty Italian is their favourite apparently) in your palms and wait, quietly. Eventually I too was a pigeon whisperer and had birds landing and pecking from my hand. There will be other opportunities to go to the island but a lovely interlude with a gentle, generous man felt like a surprise gift and far outweighed a swan ride.

Sometimes the best moments are accidental ones, although if it had been a cold and miserable winter’s day there would have been nothing but cursing at the city workers and a surly subway ride home. Thank you summer, thank you Bill the bird whisperer and a back handed thank you to the striking city workers.

The Sweetie and I attended an amazing event the other night at the Baycrest Centre to support our dear friend Sarah Robichaud. She is the founder of Dancing With Parkinson’s, an organization that helps people with Parkinson’s Disease through dance and music. Sarah runs a dance class twice a week for people with Parkinson’s, helping them find a way to enjoy freedom within their bodies. Studies are now showing that music and dancing helps initiate movement and bypass pathways in the brain affected by lack of dopamine. It’s an exciting and hopeful prospect.

The event provided an opportunity to see what happens in the class, as well as seeing choreographed performances. It was incredible to witness the grace and beauty of the performers.

What is even more striking is seeing the joy these people obviously feel when dancing and how movement makes them feel like their body is their own again rather than being at the mercy of this awful disease. The courage, dignity and humour of the people on stage was astounding. I spent the entire evening crying into a single crumpled and very damp tissue.

Sarah is an inspiration. Many of her dance students commented that she is the light in their week and that her energy, charisma and enthusiasm keeps them going. I was struck by the love and energy she pours into this project. It almost made me forgive her for also being drop dead gorgeous and having a gravity defying dancer’s body with an apple bum. She ruins my catty and desperate theory that beautiful women can’t also be smart and kind and funny.

It was an entertaining and positive evening. It was also a true perspective maker which I need on a regular basis. I may bitch about my pot belly and saddlebags (and I bitch a lot) but when I am reminded of how lucky I am to have a body that is healthy and functional I realize I have no reason to complain.  I sometimes need a good slap on the face to take me out of my vanity induced haze. So nice that this slap arrived in the form of a gentle, beautiful performance. I came away from it awed, humbled and inspired.

As part of Birthday Month a girlfriend and I went to the fabulously atmospheric Southern Accent on Markham Street for a birthday dinner. I love the Cajun voodoo vibe and am a huge fan of their bourbon sours and bourbon bread pudding.

I was excited to treat myself to a fifteen minute psychic reading offered at the restaurant. I hoped to gain a little insight into my new year and decade ahead and perhaps have a supernatural epiphany of sorts. I wasn’t expecting a life altering experience, it’s a fifteen minute reading at a restaurant after all. Basically, it is the equivalent of a palm reading from a scarf wearing fortune teller at a makeshift card table at a carnival. I didn’t think it would magically set me on a new path but I expected a fun little psychic nugget to entertain my boozy bourbon evening.

The alarm bells should have sounded when I saw the psychic sitting on the patio wearing a tablecloth around her shoulders. After setting her timer for fifteen minutes she explained that she was wearing the tablecloth as protection from minuscule green bugs that were falling from the trees onto her shoulder. She told me about a David Suzuki lecture she had attended about the disappearance of bees but assured me that “the higher creator made all of this, the higher creator will fix it, so it is all good and we don’t have to worry, blessings all around.”

She looked at a row of cards and promptly declared that this was the year I would meet my soul mate, marry and have two kids. At this time I probably should have packed it in and gone back to the drink waiting for me at my table. I explained that I have already married my soul mate and the only additions to the family will be a dog.

“I see,” she nodded knowingly and reshuffled her cards.

After a moment she announced,”You will be getting a divorce.”

I tried not to roll my eyes.

“You will want to get back to your roots and return to the ocean, does that make sense to you?

It didn’t. Unless the hydro fields and strip malls of my suburban Scarborough childhood were concealing a beach unbeknown to me.

“Hmmm, well, I see you near water. You will be spending time near the lake at your cottage meditating.”

I don’t have a cottage, nor do any of my friends, nor does anyone I know for that matter so my only hope for meditating by the lake at a cottage was now pinned on my new soul mate/husband who would be impregnating me with twins this year.

She asked if I was a teacher, if I wanted to reconnect with someone from my past, if I was dealing with legal issues.

No, no and no.

She announced that I had important things to do and people to meet and, “Life is going to change and all that kind of stuff.”

All that kind of stuff? Now I really felt cheated. Surely she could try an little harder than a breezy all that kind of stuff?!

Luckily the timer buzzed and my psychic enlightenment was complete. We sat in awkward silence for a few moments and I briefly worried that if she had any small smattering of psychic ability she would realize that I thought she was the laziest charlatan ever. She adjusted her tablecloth around her shoulders, spread her arms expansively and declared “blessings all around!”

I returned to my dinner companion and bourbon sour, thirty dollars poorer, unenlightened and uninspired. It looks as though I will have to create my own destiny this decade.