One of the favorite places my friend Esther and I like to meet for visiting and sketching is the beautiful Folio Cafe on the Canadian Mennonite University grounds at the corner of Grant and Shaftesbury Avenue. 
Big windows provide plenty of light. 
There’s a patio where you can eat on nice days.
The lunch items are delicious. Homemade soups and sandwiches and desserts. Last week when I visited I ordered the beef borscht and a sandwich with goat cheese and marinated tomatoes on crusty fresh bread. 
For dessert there was a lovely latte and gelato.
After lunch I drew my own versions of portraits of artists Picasso
and Tom Thompson. 
The Folio Cafe is spacious and welcoming and it is easy to spend several hours there visiting and drawing in the comfortable airy space the cafe provides. If you’ve never been to the Folio I suggest you give it a try.
Other posts………..
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Scott Sawatsky was a young man teaching English in Korea when he met a German brewmaster living there who taught Scott everything he needed to know about making beer. That’s the story we heard when Scott gave us an interesting tour of the beer making process at the 
We had a fun Monday night at the Peg Beer Co. with three other couples. First we took a tour of the brewing facility and learned so many interesting things from Scott about how the beer at Peg Beer Co. is made. One fascinating thing I remember is that after the barley has served its purpose flavoring the water for the beer, a Manitoba farmer comes and picks up the mashed barley to feed to his pigs. The kitchen at Peg City Beer Co. buys some of those pigs back from that same farmer to use for the pork items on the Peg City Beer Co. menu. Talk about recycling! 
He owned our home! Yesterday we celebrated our anniversary by having lunch at 529 Wellington. We had never been there before. I’d always wanted to visit though, because the restaurant is located in the former home of Mr. James Henry Ashdown a Winnipeg mayor who once owned the warehouse where our condo is located. 
Mr. Ashdown who immigrated to Canada from England in the late 1800s sold hardware at a store on the corner of Main Street and Bannatyne and housed his stock of merchandise a block away in a warehouse that has now been converted into a hundred condo units. 
We had a nice lunch at a table in the home’s former library. 
The wallpaper in the room intrigued me. It featured an old-fashioned illustrated alphabet. The border had words adapted from the Biblical book of Isaiah 35: 1. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. But perhaps because the wallpaper is in a home it was chosen because the exact phrase on the wallpaper is used in a poem by Christina Rossetti called From House to Home. 
I had a spinach salad 
and Dave had a roast beef sandwich. 
We ended our meal by sharing a blueberry bread pudding. 
After lunch I toured the other rooms in the house which offer different options for dining 
and the friendly maitre de showed me the patio and offered to take my photo there. 
I had lunch at the new Stellas restaurant on Pembina Highway yesterday. I used the gender neutral washroom and really didn’t think about the fact that it was gender neutral till I came out of my private stall and a man was washing his hands at the sink. Sure it seemed a little strange because it’s not something I’m used to. But I had no problem with it. It made me wonder how segregated bathrooms had started in the first place. 
Apparently there never used to be public washrooms for women since they weren’t encouraged to ‘go out’ in the world of men. Their place was in the home. “How archaic,” we think now. So in the early 1900s when laws requiring public restrooms for both men and women came into effect it was really a step forward for women. 
I suspect my great-grandchildren will read one day about gender specific bathrooms in public places and say, “How archaic!” Many newly constructed public places are installing gender neutral washrooms and as older buildings are renovated their owners are making the change too. Within a generation or two gender specific bathrooms will be a thing of the past. As we continue to learn more about the science and sociology of gender identity, gender neutral bathrooms make sense and besides they save space and are more practical for families with young children. 
