Oliver’s holding part two of his unconference this Friday:
An opportunity for people to gather to talk about things they are working on. These can be presentations, “show and tell” or discussions about projects and ideas for projects, and can be about anything you like: a work project, a hobby, a passion, a new product, an art or craft.
When Steve Howard was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island in the spring of 2019, I made it my life’s mission to create the conditions that would allow him to drive his Mitsubishi i-MiEV from his home in Summerside to work at the Legislature and back, something that required a charge in Charlottetown where chargers are few and far between.
So in December I purchased a Kia Soul EV, and with it came an EVduty level 2 charger, which I installed off my driveway this winter.
Making my driveway ready to receive Steve’s car.
Which it did this morning:
I’m quite proud that our house can provide the energy infrastructure for the transportation of the Green Party Shadow Critic for Transportation, Infrastructure, and Energy.
Matt Webb writes, in How I would put voice control in everything:
Because it is really appealing to me to turn on a light, set the stove timer, play music, pause the TV, snooze an alarm etc just by saying something. What’s not cool is
- having a device in my home that harvests every sound in the house and sends it to cloud servers for eternal recording, or not, who knows and that’s the point – an audio panopticon dressed in plastic
- needing to remember arcane vocal syntaxes
- latency.
I was an early “smart” speaker adopter, and our collection has grown to two Alexas (one in the office, one at home) and three Google Homes (one at the office, one in the kitchen, one in Oliver’s room). Like Matt, I’m uncomfortable with the audio panopticon I’ve visited upon myself.
After three years, our use of these devices boils down to three simple things:
That’s it. I haven’t used any of the “skills” or “actions” that Amazon and Google and related third parties have created in a long time. I never did, really.
All of the above I could accomplish, with slightly more friction, otherwise: I could play Spotify to a Bluetooth speaker from my phone, I could turn the TV and lights on and off as our ancestors did, and I could learn to do math in my head. But, my behaviour suggests, I am unlikely to do this, having given up all of my audio privacy to eliminate the friction.
I would really like to be able to say “light, turn on” and have that be a relationship between me and the light, and not between me and the world’s largest retailer and/or the world’s largest advertising platform.
Three day old homemade waffles, heated up in the toaster, covered with tangerines and fresh mint (from Heart Beet Organics) and drizzled with melted 90% Lindt chocolate.
Bonus pandemic pro tip: sprigs of fresh herbs wrapped in damp paper towel and sealed in a Ziploc bag in the fridge keep fresh much longer than ye olde “stick in a glass of water in the fridge” method.
From the Dairy Queen FAQ:
How come my Dilly Bar doesn’t have a curl in the middle?
Some Dilly bars are made by the staff of DQ stores and those have a curl. Others are manufactured for those DQ restaurants that do not have the space or the staff to make their own. Those Dilly Bars are packaged in clear plastic and do not have a curl.
The manufacturing equipment is not able to duplicate the trademark curl on our Dilly Bars. There are positives, however, to the manufacturing process. We can offer our Dilly Bars in additional flavours, including Mint and no sugar added.
I have no idea what the “curl in the middle” of a Dilly bar is, as I was never allowed a Dilly bar at Dairy Queen. But it’s nice to know we still need humans to put it there.
(There was a Dairy Queen across the street from my high school; its parking lot was the place where fights were held: “Jimmy is fighting Danny in the Dairy Queen parking lot after school, pass it on!”)
Six years after the boulder was carved, it occurred to someone that maybe the “Quebec Garden” should be marked in both English and French, so an aftermarket add-on was installed.
From the opening titles of Louis Malle’s Black Moon.
On Prince Edward Island, if you want to go to the shore you don’t have to think about it too much: you just drive until you can’t drive any longer. I decided I needed to get out of town to clear my head this morning, so I did exactly that, driving out the Union Road, across to Suffolk, and then out to Tracadie.
This was the view from the road to Tracadie Harbour:
And here was the view along the beach once I’d parked and walked out onto the shore:
While it wasn’t foggy at all onshore, offshore it was thick enough that at times you could barely see the dunes across the water.
Being at war with Japanese Knotweed, and having no semblance of a green thumb, I’ve feared that at least some of the shoots I’ve been digging up haven’t been Japanese Knotweed at all but rather, well, regular everyday non-invasive species.
This was confirmed for me today by my friendly and helpful neighbour, who told me I’d dug up the Hostas.
I’ll get better at this.
You had to see this coming: Oliver and I walked the 1.3 km to Dairy Queen tonight after supper so as to throw off the shackles of my childhood and have Dilly Bars for dessert.
And to engage in investigative journalism: are Charlottetown Dilly Bars made in-store and have the curl, or are they curl-free and made in some far-off factory?
No curl.
And, truth be told, not worth the walk.
The Dilly Bar of my childhood imagination was a dense thicket of fudgey goodneess. The Dilly Bar of University Avenue was a hunk of milk-flavoured ice wrapped in the thinnest and least satisfying sheen of chocolate possible.
My parents were wise to keep them from us.
Karine Polwart in today’s edition of her email newsletter:
My home, like some of yours too, I’m sure, has become a place of industry these past two months. I’m a writer, so my kitchen has long been a working environment (and I don’t just mean the dishes and the laundry). But my home has never before been a place of performance, a place into which strangers are invited to peer. To be frank, it requires a whole lot more hoovering and tidying than I can ordinarily be bothered with. And then there’s the need for careful curation. I mean, how clever and idiosyncratic are my books? How manky is that carpet? Where am I going to stash all these non-minimalist piles of guff out of camera view? And how is anyone else, distantly appraising my home, supposed to know that so much of the stuff in this or that shot, represents memories, kindnesses, gifts and losses, rather than any innate aesthetic sensibility I’d want to stake my identity on?
Ocht, who cares, really, given what’s upon us? It’s vanity. Still, it’s oddly unsettling on an intimate, personal level.
We’ve gone through a similar version of the same thing this week: Oliver’s workers have been supporting him based out of our house rather than from Stars for Life, which is turned our home from being a private hideout into a more public workspace. Meaning that I need to be more attentive about dishes left on the table, socks left on the floor, and toilets left without fresh hand towels. To say nothing of losing a place to escape when the exegencies of work become too much.
Not quite the same as opening our home to YouTube, but a change nonetheless.
I have not had my hair cut since January 20.
That’s 130 days ago.
A long time.
Playing a logistical game of cat and mouse, I reasoned that a Friday afternoon, after a week of Island barber shops being open, would mean a lighter line at Ray’s Place.
I was right: there was nobody was waiting outside when I arrived. Or at least until I was steps away, when the universe intervened in my luck and saw two men arrive just before me.
I’m currently standing on Social Distancing Sticker № 3 in the chair-free waiting room. I should be having my hair cut in less than 15 minutes. I’m very excited.
Postscript: it was 10 minutes; Rhonda cut my hair with enthusiasm, same as it ever was. Feels great.
The duvet cover on my bed had a couple of holes in it that were only getting bigger with time. Duvet covers are expensive, and I kind of like this one, so I decided to see if I could patch it.
The most frequent suggestion you run into online for patching things like this is to use fusible interfacing, essentially an iron-on patch. Seemed reasonable but for Charlottetown being sold out of it (now that all the pandemic bread has been baked, are we turning to pandemic patching en masse?).
At Walmart, however, I did find some fabric-patching glue, and decided to try that.
I cut out a piece of similar-looking fabric about an inch larger than each hole, tucked them inside the duvet, and then applied a thin layer of glue. I managed to make something of a mess of things, but, in the end, it all held.
I wasn’t content to leave my patch in the hands of chemistry, so I supplemented the glue with some hand-sewing around the edges. I managed to make something of a mess of things, but, in the end, it all held (I should become a better sewer).
The result isn’t elegant or invisible, but the holes are patched.
We drove east today. Wood Islands for a picnic lunch. Visited Trudy on her farm, met a dog and a pony and a cow and enjoyed ice cream bars. To Montague where we charged the car by the marina and walked up the hill to get Oliver an urgent hot dog at Gillis’ Drive In. A good day.
This is one of my favourite photos; I took it two years ago at Receiver Coffee Brass Shop, and magically managed to capture the People of Receiver at just the right moment in their smiles:
Receiver has been a lifeline for me and Oliver during the pandemic; their weekly deliveries of coffee beans, bread and “Seany’s Suppers” have been invaluable both for their sustenance and for allowing us to retain a tether to the world outside our doors. This will be the first week I haven’t placed a Receiver delivery order, but that’s simply because Receiver is open again, now that we’re in Phase 3. So I can pop in any time. In fact I might go there for lunch today!
This is what happens when we allow Twitter to make editorial decisions.
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From this month’s edition of The Craftsman Newsletter:
Second was the encounter with textile artist Rachael Matthews who introduced Noguchi to the use of darning mushrooms, a tool for mending and not a hallucinogenic substance. The view of a sweater that Matthews had patched up time and time again using colourful yarn challenged Hikaru’s understanding of repairs. Until then, she believed that you had to make the damage become invisible, the repaired object needed to look like brand new. Hikaru started darning her own clothes.
This seems like a way of maintaining clothes but also a way of maintaining oneself.
I have two text shortcuts set up on my Mac, px and pz, which, when I type them, automatically get replaced by Peter Rukavina and peter@rukavina.net respectively. Setting these up is easy: System Preferences > Keyboard > Text:
Given that I have to type my name and my email address dozens of times a day, this is a big timesaver.
The key here is to make sure you don’t use a key combination that occurs frequently in nature: on my first go I set pr as the shortcut for my name, and got really confused every time I typed probably or procrastinate.
Since Catherine died in January I’ve been lurking on her Instagram, drinking in the daily dose of heavily weaving, spinning, knitting and woodworking photos that she would have seen.
It’s been nice. I’m inspired to make more fetching outfits for myself (fetching outfits seem to be an Instagram staple).
But it was time to shut it down. So I did.
A reminder, though, that you can see Catherine’s Instagram photos in this archive I created earlier this year.
