Catherine’s father, Grant Miller, died on Friday. 

Grant’s obituary contains this wonderful phrase:

This peaceful and modest man had a deep appreciation for the wonderments and beauty of nature, delighting in his collected works of art and wood-carvings.

I can think of no better way to describe him than as “peaceful and modest.”

Grant and I were bonded by a love for Catherine: we may have had very little else in common, but we had that; I know that he knew that I loved and respected his daughter, and that connected us.

From Grant I learned about service to the community, about how to be a loving father and a loving partner, about the importance of appreciating good food and good company as a complement to working hard. I may even have developed something of an appreciation for the finer points of curling.

In January, when Catherine was in palliative care, a complicated series of events led to Grant being connected to my mobile phone from his long-term care home in Ontario. Neither of us expected to be talking to the other, but we did, if only for a few minutes. And while the circumstances, for both of us, were less than ideal, that connection, born over 28 years, was obviously there.

My heart goes out to Oliver, who’s lost his two grandfathers in less than a year, and to Grant’s wife, Catherine’s mother, my mother-in-law, Marina, who’s lost her daughter and her husband in the same year.

Grant will be buried on Tuesday in Sydenham, Ontario. Time and COVID will prevent us from traveling to the service, but we will take a walk in Prince Edward Island National Park at Greenwich, enjoying the wonderments and beauty of nature, in his memory.

Marina, Catherine, Oliver and Grant, summer 2007.

Beyond the usual serving of later stage Liam Neeson, there are two redeeming features of The Commuter (now streaming on Netflix):

1. The opening sequence, that drives home the “man commutes every day on the same train” point, is inventive; it owes something to Notting Hill, to the point where I’m almost certain that “just like in Notting Hill” must have been uttered at a production meeting.

2. The end title credits, in the style of a transit map, are imaginative and have lovely attention to detail; they’re the work of Prologue Films, and you can watch them here.

Otherwise there is a lot of grunting, half a dozen standard plot points, and some first-rail train derailment CGI.

If you travel west from Charlottetown on the Trans-Canada Highway, as you leave the city you cross the North River on your way to the Town of Cornwall.

According to the Cornwall Island Narratives Project, the year a bridge was first constructed over the North River at this point is somewhat in dispute, but it seems clear there was a bridge there by the middle of the 19th century.

From 1935 onward we can follow the evolution of the North River crossing through aerial surveys.

1935

In 1935 there was not yet a causeway, but a “narrow bridge, only wide enough to allow for one lane of traffic,” connecting Poplar Island to North River:

Detail from 1935 Aerial Survey of Prince Edward Island.
Copyright Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada,
reproduced from the collection of the National Air Photo Library, Natural Resources Canada. 

1958

By the 1950s, the narrow bridge had been replaced by a causeway:

Travel across the North River was made easier during the mid 1950’s with the construction of the causeway.  The project began in 1953 and was completed in 1955.  In the Annual Report of the Department of Public Works and Highways of the Province of Prince Edward island for the year ending March 31st, 1955, the following statement was made by bridge engineer, J.D. MacDonald: “North River Causeway is near completion and it would appear that this type of crossing is more desirable than a bridge structure in cost, time of construction, life, maintenance and the numerous assets provided by the artificial lake.”

Detail from 1958 Aerial Survey of Prince Edward Island.
Copyright Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada,
reproduced from the collection of the National Air Photo Library, Natural Resources Canada. 

2000

By 2000, the causeway had been modified to include a longer bridge span, and Poplar Island, which had gradually been populated by retails shops over previous decades, was now home to a full-fledged plaza:

Detail from 2000 Aerial Survey of Prince Edward Island,
Corporate Land Use Inventory Project, Department of Agriculture and Forestry,
copyright Province of Prince Edward Island. 

2010

Over the decade from 2000 to 2010, the retail development on Poplar Island was joined by COWS Creamery to the east (since the point there has been even more development, as COWS has expanded and the intersection with the Trans-Canada Highway has been modified into a roundabout).

Detail from 2010 Aerial Survey of Prince Edward Island,
Corporate Land Use Inventory Project, Department of Agriculture and Forestry,
copyright Province of Prince Edward Island. 

Graham Rogers Lake

When the North River Causeway proper was first created in the 1950s, the body of water to the north, now more geographically isolated, was given the name “North River Causeway Lake,” a rather uninspired if accurate name; this name stood until 1968 when the lake was renamed Graham Rogers Lake by Executive Council, in memory of the late B. Graham Rogers:

Prince Edward Island Executive Council Memo, October 3, 1968
Provided by Elizabeth Gaudet, Provincial Tax Commissioner and
Prince Edward Island representative on the Geographical Names Board of Canada.

Rogers was a long-time public servant, and the Prince Edward Island representative on the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (now the Geographical Names Board of Canada); he was, by all accounts, a dynamic and engaged bureaucrat. Rogers died in the spring of 1968; he was succeeded on the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names by the late Doug Boylan.

As you make your way west across the North River Causeway today, navigating via Google Maps, you will see Graham Rogers Lake off to your right; please tip your hat as you do.

Detail from Google Maps, as of August 2020.

The documentary The Booksellers : A behind-the-scenes look at the New York rare book world is streaming in Canada on CBC Gem.

For more than a month now I’ve been consuming a diet, every morning, of the blog posts I wrote on that day, over the last 20 years.

Beyond giving me a sense of my mortality, I’m using this to triage blog posts that need updating. This involves things like dealing with the Share on Ovi fiasco, repatriating photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube, and fixing any odd early-oughts HTML that needs fixing.

Here’s how I do this.

I use Reeder on my iPhone to consume RSS feeds (see aboutfeeds.com for what this means), and one of the RSS feeds I consume is this one, which contains the “on this day” posts. 

Here I am, for example, reading, reading this stressful blog post from 2019:

When I come across a blog post that needs updating–something I’ll do later in the day, once I get to the office–I invoke an iOS “Shortcut,” like this, selecting “Update Blog Post”:

This Shortcut creates a reminder for me, in the Reminders app:

When, later in the day, I get to the office and have some spare time, I open up the Reminders app, and see a list of URLs to update:

Over a month of doing this I’ve developed the muscle memory to make it a habit, and I’ve come to enjoy the daily bit of detective work that patching up shaky old posts entails.

My Artist Trading Cards entry (from the back), hung in the window of 100 Prince Street on bright orange string. They also come in “Here We Are,” “Are We Here” and “Here Are We” models.

On my computer I had a task list called “Peter” that was empty, and that I never used. So I deleted it. I did not realize that, in doing do, I was also deleting my calendar of the same name.

Oops.

In the normal course of affairs this would have been a cataclysm: appointments, meetings, events, all lost track of. My personal and professional live in ruins.

These times are not normal, though: a weekly Friday appointment, plasma donation tomorrow, Pen Night on Saturday, a dentist appointment next week, two meetings in September. It took me 5 minutes to rebuild my calendar from scratch.

There truly is nothing going on.

That said, I discovered that I need a more robust backup routine for my personal data. I’ve put doing that on my calendar too.

Ellie, who until recently was a #vanlifer with her partner Charlie, has gone solo, ditched Charlie and the van, and flown from the UK to South Korea, where she must quarantine for 14 days. She’s vlogging about the experience, focusing on the interesting minutiae.

Spotted near the Murphy Community Centre on Richmond Street in Charlottetown: “No Parking” has given way to the “circle P slash.”

My font of 120 point Akzidenz Grotesk is missing the apostrophe. But there’s a comma. And what is a comma but an apostrophe in need of a lift.

Every weekday morning for three years I drove Oliver to Colonel Gray Senior High School. When we arrived at the school, I would text his educational assistant–usually Dave, but sometimes Jill or Laura or Maritza—so that they’d know to come outside and fetch him to go on their morning constitutional.

We are here, I texted every morning like clockwork:

Oliver turned this into a stirring recitation one morning when we had a little bit of extra time to kill in the car while waiting.

When it came time to pick a subject for tonight’s Artist Trading Cards event at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, We Are Here popped into my mind as a kind of baseline statement of claim for humanity.

The times may be challenging, but we are here. So to speak.

I had a couple of 100 packs of № 1 shipping tags here in the shop, and decided to use those as a starting point (shipping tags come in standard sizes; № 1 are the smallest, at 70 mm by 35 mm).

I chose 30 point Futura Bold (acquired in 2015 from Letterpress Things) for the typeface, and Southern Ink Dense Black as the ink. I experimented with using upper and lower case, but opted for all caps for symmetry’s sake.

Shipping tags turn out to be a joy to print on: they’re nice and meaty, easy to get in and out of the press, quick to dry.

I printed 50 each of WE, ARE and HERE:

Once they were printed and dried, I decided that my artist trading card partners would need something to lasso their sets together, so I purchased three boxes of 1 inch silver “loose leaf rings” from Staples:

While I went into this project thinking WE ARE HERE, I realized, as I continued, that there are many combinations that can be made from these three words:

WE ARE HERE
WE HERE ARE
ARE WE HERE
ARE HERE WE
HERE WE ARE
HERE ARE WE

Mathematically, to calculate the number of permutations in this case, where there are 3 objects combined into sets of 3, you simply add up the integers from 1 to 3, so 1 + 2 + 3, to get 6 possible combinations.

I’ll be trading sets tonight at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, starting at 7:00 p.m. Unfortunately, due COVID, it’s not a public event, so you’ll have to use your imagination to recreate the thrill of the trade.

Oliver and I went over to Memorial Hall at Confederation Centre of the Arts for the Artist Trading Card event last night.

The setup was similar to previous years, but for the palpable feel of COVID in the air. Oliver, ever receptive to any hint of tension coursing through the zeitgeist, was somewhat on edge, to the point where minor violations of (his) protocol, like only my name being written on the Ziploc bag provided for card-collecting, came close to sending him over the edge. But we made our way, and things simmered to a low, sustainable boil.

There were 40ish participants, each of us bringing 39ish cards, so that we all left with one of everything. My entry was unique inasmuch as there were four parts to it: WE, ARE, HERE, plus a loose-leaf binder ring. I put an example of the ring-grappled cards at the head of the table as a guide, but otherwise left it to people to figure out what to do (leaving one of the most interesting aspects of the night, for me, eavesdropping on conversations among the others: “what, um, are we supposed to, um, take all three?”). Because I put 40 of each card, and 40 rings, out on the table, at the end of the night I had analytics to show that 5 people took only a WE, unable to take the hint (and/or perhaps having nobody to whisper to for support).

It would be a stretch to call the evening “fun,” given the heat, the noise, the mask-wearing, the aforementioned tension. But I’m glad I did it nonetheless, and I’m glad Oliver came with me.

Many years ago, Catherine and I, and our friends Lisa and Stephen, set off from Charlottetown to drive Stephen to the train home to Ontario.

For reasons of whimsy, we opted to drop Stephen at a flag stop in northern Maine; for reasons of lateness we split the trip in two, camping just the other side of Moncton halfway.

These were the days when Catherine was a serious coffee drinker and I was not a coffee drinker at all, and so when we woke up the next morning it was vital for Catherine to get coffee in a way I didn’t understand at all. At my assholish insistence, we drove all the way to Saint John—about 90 minutes—before coffee was secured. It was almost the death of us.

Now that I am a serious coffee drinker myself, in retrospect I take Catherine’s side of that divide. And so I was sure to acquire coffee to take with us for our weekend cottage stay in Georgetown Royalty.

Starbucks “Via Instant” turns out to be significantly more than palatable instant coffee, leaps and bounds better than the instant of yore. Boil water, add packet of “microground” coffee, stir, drink.

If only such innovations existed in the mid-1990s.

There is much to love about Mandy Patinkin’s YouTube channel, including considering the prospect of Mandy and his wife Kathryn Grody living in an RV for six weeks.

This past weekend was the 2020 edition of the Cloggeroo folk festival in Georgetown, an event that Oliver’s attended almost since it was founded; indeed, it was among his first nights away from home without us when he spent the Cloggeroo weekend camping with Derrick in 2015.

Except that this weekend wasn’t the 2020 edition of Cloggeroo, as, due COVID-19, Cloggeroo was cancelled this year.

This cancellation wasn’t enough to deflate Oliver, however: he insisted we carry on with the standard Cloggeroo operating template, without the folk music parts. He did this with his typical deft crafting of a series of suggestions that ultimately led me to arrange this without his coming right out and stating his case.

And so I booked us two nights at Deroma Waterfront Cottages in Georgetown Royalty, and our visit east coincided with the start and end of the non-Cloggeroo.

I’d been part of the Cloggeroo weekend myself before: in 2017, absent other support, I was Oliver’s assistant photographer, but we returned to town every night that year, and I’d never had the full-on nights-on-the-Brudenell experience.

Deroma turns out to be an entirely pleasant riverside cottage resort with the kinds of cottages that you might remember from childhood vacations in the 1970s: not architectural masterpieces, but solidly-built, spotlessly clean, well-equipped cottages generously spaced over a nicely treed lot. There was a badminton court, a volleyball court, a basketball court, kayaks for the borrowing, fire pits on the beach, and warm(ish) water to swim in.

Without The Rubber Boot Band to entertain us, we made our own fun.

On Friday night we grilled (veggie) burgers on the barbecue on the deck (which I managed to do without blowing the place up; fire-affairs was always Catherine’s department), went for a walk on the beach, and the went into Georgetown to do our regular Family Zoom from the beach in Georgetown (thus achieving a kind of Cloggeroo-simulacrum).

On Saturday we had smoked salmon bagels for breakfast (some habits cannot be broken, no matter the location), went in search of Poxy Island (yes, there is an island called Poxy Island, named because it was a place for smallpox quarantine; we failed in making our way there, but did have an angry owner of a highfalutin cottage shake his fist at us for trying), walked up the road to visit our friend Ray (and then walked back down to the cottage along the shore at low tide), made an attempt to participate in Pen Night despite the very shaky wifi, and enjoyed a spectacular sunset back at Ray’s afterwards.

Sunday morning we woke up, had (store-bought) waffles for breakfast, packed up our gear, and checked out, happy to have had a short break from town. We stopped to top-up the EV in Montague, had tacos at the newly-opened Totally Taco for lunch, and were home mid-afternoon.

Postscript: Oliver prepared four Spotify playlists to go with each of the days:

• August 21, Evening/Night
• August 22, Day/Evening
• August 22, Night
• August 23, Day

These playlists correspond to what would have been the four chunks of Cloggeroo, had it happened.

I first reported on the number of electric vehicles registered by the Province of PEI last year; I received updated numbers for 2020 late last week, and here’s a year-on-year comparison:

“Battery electric” vehicles are ones that run entirely on electricity; “hybrid” vehicles run on both gasoline and electricity but don’t plug in (the battery is charged by the gasoline engine), and ”plug-in hybrid” vehicles run on both gasoline and electricity (and the battery is charged both by the gasoline engine, and if plugged into the mains).

I suspect that the dramatic more-than-doubling in electric vehicles over the last year is due a combination of an actual increase and in better data quality control, spurred by the fact that electric vehicles are entitled to free motor vehicle registration. Nonetheless, the growth is good to see.

I didn’t set off knowing what I was going to create last week, but it ended up as something of a visual expression of what grief feels like.

I started off with the words “I’m okay” in my head, evolving this into the all-caps I’M OK.

I set this in 120 point Akzidenz Grotesk, using a comma for an apostrophe:

I sliced up some letter-sized Staples house-brand 67 lb. card stock into cards 5½ by 4¼ inches in size to print on, just large enough, give or take, to qualify as a postcard for mailing.

Since seeing a printer mix inks with a palette knife the other day, I’d been eager to try this out for myself, and so I started with white and added just the faintest touch of yellow

Seeing that I’M OK hovering on the card, barely visible in some lights, I was struck suddenly with the feeling that a very tentative sense of “I’m okay” was something I’ve felt frequently over recent months. But it’s not always tentative: sometimes it’s very strong. And sometimes it’s halfway in the middle.

So I added a little more yellow, and printed some more obviously-yellow cards. And then added some red to get some orange cards. And then even more red to get what amounts to a bold declaration, more an “I’m okay!” than an “I’m okay.”

Put together in a montage, these various shades of being okay ended up becoming something even more familiar, the ebb and flow of being okay, and not being okay, and being very okay, and then shudderingly not being okay at all. That is what grief feels like. And I accidentally found a way to express it typographically.

Can you make money buying “forever” stamps before a postage rate increase and then reselling then after? These reporters did the math.

It’s been 88 days since my last hair cut, at the end of May.

After lunch I got caught in the thunderstorm at Alambé Coffee on Kent, and, fortified by a hearty Alambé Phin Ice Milk Coffee, I made a run for Ray’s Place. I caught them on a good day: walked right in and I was first in line.

Since my May visit they’ve started to require masks for customers, so everyone, barbers and clients, were masked-up. Ray himself was working, and the luck of the draw put me in his chair.

We had a good mask-intermediated chat while he was cutting my hair, and I learned the gymnastics moves required to have him trim my sideburns (I hold the mask on, he manages the ear-loops).

For some reason I feel it’s important to mark events like haircuts in this digital commonplace book.