if I was writing a recipe book I'd remind the chef that if you notice a big wisp of collected dog fur wrapped around the leg of a piece of furniture, after you tend to it, make sure you wash your hands and wrists thoroughly, or you may drag fur into the gravy while stirring it

I prep the boy's lunch and, after he's gone to school, I eat what remains and think of him later in the day opening his thermos; the meal is leftovers from last night's dinner, so I think of yesterday too, which is the plot of Mrs Dalloway, although I'm older than Virginia Woolf.

kid agrees we're leaving half the hallowe'en decorations in the box -- no severed limbs in the front garden, not after the year we've had, just ghosts, lots of ghosts.

if I was writing a recipe book, I'd remind the reader to have small parcels of fun while cooking -- for instance, it's always joyful to try and remember the contour line of the bread that is currently toasting and form the outline your beaten fried egg to match that contour line

feel like I only share my outdoor experience with toddlers, dogs, the extremely old, and that person finishing a second can of beer while sitting in the park bleachers at 8 am & enjoying a smoke

expecting to read how polling has narrowed down the US election to the decisions of a single household with three eligible voters in Clearfield, Pennsylvania

am surprised to see how banal the Japanese cherry tree is and apparentlly ok with the Green Mountain sugar maple taking over the entire stage

I put on a new pair of dark-blue jeans and immediately my impulse is to open up a big jug of Javex and start splashing it around

noticed a public washroom and needed to use it but also thought it too bad they don't sell lettuce in the washroom as I needed lettuce too

I don't particularly like cold coffee, but my grandmother did, so occasionally I'll take a sip from a leftover cup just to imagine what it might have been like to have been her

in my dream of CBC radio I'd have one station where hyperbole is forbidden, the tone of the announcers is almost without a pulse, you could call it loperbole

admiring the red mailbox that's in the post office that looks like an outdoor mailbox but is made of different materials and slightly a different size, like it's pretending to be a mailbox and thought it best to locate itself inside a post office to be more convinving

I enjoyed having lunch with Charles

sometimes it can take years, but when you finally hit upon the right voice, the right point-of-view, the right timeline and tense structure and pacing, then the story looks simple and easy, a novel that may have only taken you six weeks to write

neighbour's got zevon's "werewolves of london" on repeat while sitting in his front yard with a sack of candy and a huge air-driven spooky light display, so I'm getting in the same spirit and putting on zevon's "jesus mentioned" #Halloween

Took my son to see a specialist, heard the doctor say "goodbye, my dear" to the patient before us. The rest of his intonation was central Canada. Before leaving I asked him about the "my dear". He paused, said he grew up in Ontario and then added, "My wife is from Cape Breton."

tried to watch some conventional TV news about the US election and it was like following a drone flying through the newsroom studio, back to reading...

a man at the egg fridge opened the lid on a dozen and lifted every egg to check its bottom; I couldn't believe he hadn't seen a more experienced customer reduce this inspection by simply running one's fingers over the tops of the eggs, making sure they all moved in their cradle

are boxcars interchangeable, like propane tanks? do various companies borrow them from each other? I love, in Toronto, seeing the top of a train slowly chunking past the car wash on Dupont, and catching the faded cream script of a "Southern Pacific" on a dark brown boxcar

As is true of many of my projects, including washing the dishes (so hard to clean that last cup and fork), I didn't make it to the finish line of 10,000 tweets. I'm over at bluesky and instagram as @michaelwinternet