Together We Can Make Family Holiday Dreams Come True This Season! 

Monday-Tuesday

We all speculated why the parade suddenly stopped yesterday after the first float.  After all the clowns, who I think almost enjoyed throwing candy at people a little too much (note to clowns:  those little boxes of smarties can leave a mark.  Toss underhand only in future.), after they marched past...there was nothing.  For a long time.  Half an hour at least!  It felt far longer, maybe thanks to the snrain (Snrain:  Looks like snow, feels like rain!) But nothing.  Our guesses for the delay:  1) when the floats paused, the city ticketed them for violating the anti-idling by-law;  2) an upside-down-walking-clown realized he'd been spending his whole life walking upside-down, and collapsed in tears; or 3) Santa needed a bathroom break.  Bet you can guess which theory was mine!

Someone has to pay.

Ontario must do a better job of monitoring the "hazard distance" between volatile fuel depots and residential areas, says a report commissioned after a massive propane explosion in Toronto forced 12,000 people from their homes and left two dead.

You think? My friend Vicki and her family are still dealing with the fallout and still not back home. This is her story.

I feel it's time to share my story with my fellow Torontonions. SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE. PLEASE READ

Sunday August 10, 2008, 3:50 a.m., I don't really know what catapulted me from my bed, but there was a force that seemed to push me out of my bedroom and down the hall to my daughters room in a terrible panic............I remember throwing myself on her bed screaming "oh my God, what's happening" all I remember is that the house was moving and rumbling like it was possessed. My first thought was that we had been struck by lightning. It was horrifying to say the least. As I started to yell what's going on at the top of the stairs, my husband who had been sleeping on the main floor in the back room, walked by the staircase towards the kitchen and started to ask what was happening as well. As he entered the kitchen, the second explosion went off and at that point the windows blew out, the fixtures started to come down along with parts of the walls and ceilings and my husband realized that the propane tanks were blowing up. He yelled to us to get in the basement for safety. As he opened the door to the basement he noticed that the side door had been blown open and the handle completely blown off the storm door. Our tenant was standing at the basement landing also thinking we were having a bad storm, but my husband explained the tanks were going up and we needed to get to safety. We could feel the intense heat from the explosions within the house. As he ran to the basement with my daughter and tenant, he fell down the stairs in the panic that was surrounding us hurting his back.