If the inter-library loan system can get this book to me, from Edmonton, it means modern civilization has not yet completely crumbled.

I was browsing the call-for-apprentices for a Costa Rican radical queer jungle/farm sanctuary for post-capitalism exploration yesterday, and came across this, one of its goals:

Developing love, care, relationship and eroticism as practice rather than product.

This morning, driving Oliver around the city to drop off slices of birthday cake at a curated collection of influential contributors to his life, I thought for a moment, at a stoplight, “why am I taking this entire day to help my son carry out a labyrinthian questing that involves cakes, Zoom and vodka soda?” It wasn’t so much that I was struggling for a rationale, as I was wondering why it seemed like exactly what I should be doing. 

The only reasonable answer I could come up with is that I love him. So much and so effortlessly that it would never occur to me to do otherwise on this day.

I have thought a lot about love over the last year, but this revelation on North River Road was more about feeling than thinking.

And it wasn’t about the “I love you” kind of love. And it wasn’t really even about the “I have loved you since the moment you were born, will always love you, and will do anything to protect you and encourage you and to help you thrive in this life” kind of love. It was the geothermal force that begets all that. 

Love as practice, rather than product.

We had a good day together, me and Oliver.

We started off with breakfast on the patio at Receiver Coffee: rum & banana french toast for him, vegan breakfast bowl for me. It was sunny and just warm enough: the perfect knife-edge between summer and fall. 

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After breakfast we walked home for Morning Birthday Zoom, held for those in Europe and points east. We were joined by Olle in Sweden, Juliane in Germany, and outliers Kali in Charlottetown, and Peter in Hampton. We had a lovely chat, sang happy birthday, and enjoyed our shared sunshines.

Next it was to Michaels, to purchase cake boxes and party decorations, and then to Sobeys, to pick up a couple of cakes.

Cake number one was a rectangular chocolate sheet cake, ultimately destined to be divided into nine for distribution; we had it iced with purple Os.

Cake number two was for the small face-to-face gathering planned for the evening; it was a round chocolate-raspberry cake, iced with “Happy 20th.”

Cakes in hand, we ducked in to Madame Vuong’s for lunch (Catherine’s voice in my head: “it’s going to be a long day, so don’t forget to eat lunch!”). Then home for cake slicing and boxing.

Cake boxing was perplexed by my inability to divide a rectangle into 9 (I started down the road to making 6 pieces, then caught myself at the last moment). Thirty minutes later we were on the road again.

Oliver’s birthday metaverse consisted of two separate but overlapping themes: “my teen years” and “change: death, retirement, gender.”

Overlapping these overlapping themes were people from nearby who would come to the house, people from nearby who would get cake delivered, and people from away.

On the “people from nearby who would get cake delivered” list were nine destinations: Prince Street School, Birchwood Intermediate School, Colonel Gray High School, UPEI, Stars for Life, the Provincial Palliative Care Centre, and three friends who’ve undergone transitions of one sort or another recently.

Our questing thus involved, among other things, negotiating the COVID regulations of the public school system, being serenaded with Happy Birthday by the administrative assistant at Prince Street from the front steps of the school, visiting Palliative Care for the first time since the night Catherine died (and getting a tour of the grounds from Blanche, who’s been so important to us over the last year), and leaving cake, anonymously, on the doorsteps of a couple of people who will, no doubt, be confused when they get home.

None of this made any sense at all to my neurotypical brain, but it made a heap of sense to Oliver and, of course, Oliver was right by any measure that involves human connection: we saw people and places we hadn’t seen in a long time, brought smiles to faces, and spent a couple of hours on an adventure together.

Besides, having to phone an elementary school office and explain how it is important to your son, who turns 20 today, to drop off a piece of cake at the school he once attended, and to have people get that, and agreed to meet him at the front door for the cake handover: that’s the kind of thing that makes the world seem right.

Deliveries complete, we rushed home so that Oliver could take in his British History lecture at 4:00 p.m., stopping at Hearts & Flowers for balloons and at Upstreet for party beer en route.

While Oliver learned about the 1906 Labour Manifesto on Zoom, I decorated the back deck, and then headed off to the liquor store to buy wine, and the corner store for chocolate milk.

The wine and chocolate milk were in service of two last-minute additions from Oliver, drink specials:

• “The 19” – wine, peppermint iced tea, soda water.
• “The Lunch” – chocolate milk and peppermint iced tea.

Thus a drink menu was in order:

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Upon my return home, and the finish of the lecture, Oliver added some additional quests to the list: Oliver Trivia, “Ton-style Questions,” and Oliver’s Interests, each of which required some attention by me and some typing by Oliver. We finished those up, hooked the Google Home up as a playlist speaker in the back yard and had a few minutes to relax before our first guests arrived.

Under the letter of “the new normal” COVID dictates released today, we were allowed a wild socially distanced rager of 20 people; I opted to limit things to 9 people, as otherwise we’d run out of chairs and plates and social distancing space. The question was then “which 9 people” (remembering that this is a young man who had 50 people at his 18th birthday). Oliver rose to the occasion, not an insignificant feat given his challenges with winnowing: he opted to celebrate “the teen years” by inviting important people from his education. 

And so gathered in our back yard after 6:00 p.m. were his grade 7 and grade 9 home room teachers, his two educational assistants from high school, his current UPEI professor, and two of our closest friends. We were a motley bunch, but we were united in our connection to Oliver. We drank “The 19” and “The Lunch.” We played Oliver Trivia, told Oliver stories, answered Ton-style questions, and caught up on the months or years since we’d last seen each other.

I almost forgot to bring the cake out; fortunately Oliver reminded me. And so we sang the second Happy Birthday of the day, and enjoyed a (surprisingly very good) cake. As we said our goodbyes, darkness had fallen and the Full Moon was just starting to rise.

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As I cleaned up the deck, Oliver was warming up Birthday Zoom Two, the North American edition. This included Oliver and Cheryl in Portland,  Johnny and Kae, and nieces A. and M., in California, my mother, Mike and Karen in Burlington, Steve and Monique, and nephews V. and E., in Montreal, Marina in Napanee, and Sandy here in Charlottetown. We all got a chance to hold Oliver in high regard, got a chance to make (or renew) ties (“oh, you’re Riley and Bailey’s mother: we met you at Rainbow Valley when Oliver was little”), and enjoyed Happy Birthday Mark 3.

During early planning sessions with Oliver for this day, on a lark I added “father and son drink at Upstreet” at the end of the schedule, not realizing that at the end of the day I would be exhausted. But once something’s on the list, well, it’s on the list. And, besides, we needed to have supper (I forgot to listen to Catherine’s voice in my head telling me to not forget to have supper). So we got take-out chicken wings and a veggie burger from Hopyard, ate them on the patio at the Jean Canfield, and then looped back to Upstreet for a vodka soda (Oliver) and a kombucha (me).

As we rolled home the Moon was high overhead, we were in a fine mood, and were in agreement that it had been a day well-spent.

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Happy Birthday, my son.

A new sign sprouted on Prince Street this morning, in front of our neighbour’s house:

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The C1A 4R4 Arts District is the lucky recipient of the art and presence of artist Melissa Peter-Paul, who is mounting an installation inspired by the weeping birch on the street (a weeping birch that I have an unusually complete photographic record of).

The tree, City Tree 482 it’s called, was one of those selected for the City of Charlottetown’s Rooted in Art project:

Rooted in Art is a new tree appreciation initiative that will run from October 3rd — 17th and is intended to celebrate the importance and beauty of Charlottetown’s urban forest. Five Island artists will use some of downtown Charlottetown’s most distinctive and historic trees as inspiration for a temporary art installation. 

The tree is one I love, as it’s part of the day to day landscape of my life; I got to meet Melissa in passing this afternoon–she was sitting under the tree with her art–and I’m looking forward to seeing the piece in place.

After reading the placard I’ve learned not only that it’s a weeping birch (which I didn’t know before), but that weeping birch trees can be tapped in the spring, which makes me think that the city should organize a follow-on project to do exactly that.

It is de rigueur of late for phones and operating systems and apps to provide analytics on usage time, and YouTube is no exception. I was somewhat surprised to learn just how much time I spend on YouTube: for the last week it’s been an average of 1 hour and 20 minutes a day, for a total of 9 hours and 22 minutes over seven days:

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Not only is that a lot of video watched, but it’s a lot of advertising consumed, especially as YouTube has been on a tear recently to run at least two unskippable pre-roll ads and an increasing number of embedded in-video ads (that simply appear, seemingly at random, during watching) per video.

If YouTube’s goal was to push me to become a YouTube Premium customer, it worked, as I signed on for a $17.99/month family plan yesterday.

(Pro tip: if you subscribe to YouTube Premium through the YouTube app for iOS, you’ll be charged, by Apple, $22.99/month, but if you subscribe through a web browser you’ll pay only $17.99/month, and thus save $60/year, and you still get the benefits of YouTube Premium in the iOS app).

So I’ve bought my way out of advertising jail.

Beyond the aversion to advertising, the aspect of YouTube Premium that pushed me over the edge to purchase was that there’s a revenue share with creators:

Currently, new revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, most of the revenue will go to creators.

Knowing that my viewing habits support the creation of that which I’m viewing is a lot more palatable than knowing that my viewing-of-annoying-advertising millstone supports creators. I’m pretty sure creators appreciate it too.

How long have I been blogging?

Long enough to see public library fines introduced, in 2004, and eliminated, today, 16 years later.

The bookending CBC stories: 2004 and 2020.

This is a great move.

It’s not Architecture Week on Prince Edward Island this week, although, according to the celestial calendar, it should be (2011, 2012, 2013).

But it is World Architecture Day, and the architects of the Island are marking the day with a virtual seminar, Exploring the World of Tiny Houses Through Design-build Research, tonight, October 5, 2020, starting at 7:00 p.m. Atlantic Time, presented by architect and championship kayaker Ben Hayward:

Tiny Houses have presented an alternative to a cookie cutter model by offering design flexibility; and have yet to be proven as either fad, niche, or viable housing. Join Ben Hayward as he discusses how to get the best of all worlds-low cost, high quality, and mass market desirability when it comes to Tiny Homes. The Solar Thermal Tiny House aims to be a testing bed for four key areas of research: Energy, Art, Craft, and Place.

Because it’s virtual, anyone, anywhere, can attend.

On this night, around this time, 29 years ago, this woman asked if she could kiss me. The rest is history.

I have, slowly but surely, been cleaning up the room on our first floor variously known, over the years, as “the office,” “the situation room,” and ”the library.”

Catherine designed the mantlepiece and the shelving, which included a liquor cabinet complete with its own light. Last fall, around this time, when she could no longer navigate the stairs to the second floor, she moved her bedroom here, and so it was, for a time, “Catherine’s room.”

Some weeks ago Oliver and I somehow managed to wrangle the couch, from Catherine’s studio, across the street and into the house; it fits the room well, and arrived just in time to serve as a makeshift bed for our friend Yvonne, who visited this weekend from Halifax. Her visit was all I needed to make the last push toward cleaning the room up: I loaded up a Kia Soul’s worth of various and sundry and dropped it at the thrift shop, dusted and vacuumed, and generally got things ship-shape.

Which allowed me to open the curtains for the first time in a long time.

And to discover that the room gets wonderful sun in the afternoon.

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There are problems that are gnarly and hard and take years or millions or both to solve.

Then there are problems that, relatively speaking, are easy to solve.

Like getting books into the hands of Prince Edward Island children, something the PEI Literacy Alliance has undertaken to do with its simply-named Free Books for Kids project:

Each month, enrolled children receive a high quality, age-appropriate book in the mail, free of charge. Children receive books from birth up to their fifth birthday.

This project, launched last week, was almost instantly fully subscribed, the CBC reported:

“We thought we would spend a year encouraging people to register and promoting it and all that sort of stuff, so we were very shocked,” said P.E.I. Literacy Alliance executive director Jinny Greaves.

“Within 24 hours we had exceeded our goal for year one, and we’re really going to try … within the next weeks or months or a little bit more to be able to serve another additional 1,000 children or maybe even more.”

Last week my mother told me that a Lorraine Eastwood, librarian at the Waterdown Public Library, a short walk from my high school and a refuge therefrom, died this summer. In her memory, upon reading that a project to give free books to kids was too popular, I made a $100 donation to the PEI Literacy Alliance.

You’re probably saying to yourself right about now, “can I do that too?!” 

And you can: just go here to donate. It takes about 58 seconds.

I was telling my friend Martin about this on the weekend, and he said “that could be a contribution to making PEI Canada’s first Heaven on Earth province.”

Martin has, with uncommon patience and candour, been wearing down my natural cynical resistance to his Project Heaven on Earth, which he introduces with:

There is a desire, a longing, in each of us for a world that works.

A statement that’s hard to argue with. 

And so this is, indeed, a small contribution to that.

With an important coda: once you make your generous donation to providing free books for kids, please ask someone else to do the same thing.

This is easy to do, in my experience, as getting behind the idea providing free books for kids is roughly equivalent to getting behind the idea of providing free oxygen to kids.

The word will spread.

The program will re-open its floodgates.

All kids who request them will receive books in the mail every month.

And there will, indeed, be a world that, at least a little bit, works.

New from Ani DiFranco, Do or Die.

It’s taken me almost 9 months and one pandemic, but I’ve got Catherine’s fabric, yarn, fleece and various and sundry tools boxed and ready for pickup by volunteers from the G’ma Circle of Charlottetown. They’ll be part of the Fabric and Yarn Sale, in support of the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign (the sale will, touch wood, happen sometime in 2021, pandemic-willing).

Getting to this point has been bracing: Catherine’s collection was vast, collected over decades, and the clearest representation of her and her sensibilities; wading through that has not been without its emotional challenges, and I got here only be rationing the work into small chunks, a little every day.

Grandmothers to Grandmothers is a project that Catherine would have loved, and knowing that her materials and tools will be in the hands of people who will make them into things takes away some of the sting of imagining all the things that went unrealized by her hand.

This is not to suggest that her studio is empty yet: I’m hopeful that Habitat for Humanity will come and pick up the furniture and shelving, which will leave me only with the task of finding an appropriate way of documenting and preserving the archive of work she left in her wake.

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In the summer of 2017, Catherine started a round of Docetaxel, a chemotherapy drug, with the goal of reducing the size of the tumours in her back, shoulder and skull. Because Docetaxel is known to cause an allergic reaction. she was given the steroid Dexamethasone beforehand to counteract this.

The effect of the Dexamethasone was dramatic; as I related in my newsletter to friends and family:

Catherine tolerated her third treatment of the chemotherapy drug Docetaxel well on Monday, and her plan to more gradually come down off the high of the Dexamethasone (steroids she takes to help control allergic reactions) seems to be bearing fruit. She’s still reaching a point where she crashes into fatigue, but the crash is gentler (and is happening today).

While she’s in thrall of the Dexamethasone the effect is not unlike what one might imagine it must be like to take large amounts of cocaine: everything’s sped up, she has lots of superhuman energy, and she talks faster than you’ve ever heard her talk.

Fortunately she’s learned that the superhuman energy doesn’t correlate to superhuman abilities, so has taken to locking herself in the care of our friend Carol to prevent herself from taking on large renovation projects by mistake.

It’s Dexamethasone that President Trump has been taking as part of his COVID-19 treatment. Having a President who thinks he’s superhuman (when he already thought he was superhuman) seems like a recipe for (even more) disaster.

Watching Sylvan Esso at work makes me want to chuck it all and become part of an electropop duo. Or at least to cultivate a better fashion sense and a more delicate quotidian choreography.

The first on-street EV charger in Charlottetown sprouted this week in front of Maritime Electric‘s headquarters.

Ten years ago in Copenhagen I heard my friend Elmine’s brother Siert Wijnia, with Erik de Bruijn, talk about the RepRap project:

Democratizing fabrication — The beginning of this talk will be about the RepRap, a Replicating Rapid Prototyper. In short, it is a fabricator, or 3D printer, that makes things that YOU want. Besides being able to make products as you like them best, it can make parts to assemble another RepRap machine. Hence, it has a viral distribution model.

The next year, Siert and Erik, along with Martijn Elserman, went on to found Ultimaker, a company that, in the intervening years, has grown into a major manufacturer of 3D printers.

Cura is the software that drives Ultimaker printers and, because Ultimaker is a company that has openess baked into its DNA, Cura is a remarkably open piece of software, capable of driving a variety of 3D printers that aren’t made by Ultimaker, including my own Monoprice Select Mini.

Until today, my use of Cura had been limited to using its ability to render 3D printed objects I create as STL files into the G-code files that my printer needs to print them.

For example, here’s an object, a piece of custom letterpress furniture I designed, in Tinkercad:

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I exported a STL file from Tinkercad and loaded it into Cura, which tells, me, among other things, that it will take 5 hours and 14 minutes to print:

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At this point it has been my usual practice to save the G-code needed to render the object to an SD card, pop the SD card out of my Mac and insert it into the 3D printer, and use the printer’s controls to select the file and print it.

Today, though, I discovered a plug-in for Cura that allows it to print to the Monoprice Select Mini directly, over wifi. And it worked, out of the box. So my new practice is to simply click “Print over network” in Cura and wait for the printer to start.

Because I wasn’t eager to spend 5 hours and 14 minutes waiting for the printer to finish, but also not eager to let the printer, and its 210ºC head, alone to malfunction and catch fire, I wanted a way to monitor the printer from afar.

Fortunately, under the aegis of another side-project, I’ve been experimenting with video streaming from a Raspberry Pi Zero; following the helpful instructions here, I set up the Pi to stream video to YouTube, pointed it at the 3D printer, and, presto, I had a remote monitoring solution.

From the office side it looks like this:

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That’s the 3D printer on the left, and the Raspberry Pi Zero on the right, stuck into an iPhone box (it’s really really tiny, has the camera built-in, and only needs to be plugged into power to operate). With the YouTube stream set up, I was able to watch the printer from my phone:

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Even more helpfully, though, for something that I wanted to keep peripheral attention on for several hours, I was able to stream YouTube to my Chromecast, plugged into my screen projector, resulting in a hard-to-miss 3D printer monitor on my living room wall:

I kept an eye on the printer over supper, and afterwards, and came back to the office once things were getting close to complete.

In the end, it took 5 hours and 41 minutes to print, and this was the result:

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And here’s a sneak peak at what this was all in service of:

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There was a story told in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner that, during the days the type was cast from hot metal, a typecasting machine got stuck–perhaps while its operator was distracted, perhaps distracted by the drink–and started spewing freshly-cast type out the window onto Water Street. I suspect that the story was apocryphal, but that newspapering was well-lubricated by alcohol, and typecasting machines among the most complex ever created by 19th century humans, led some credence to it.

A few weeks ago, after hearing the word “unprecedented” used dozens of times in a single day on the news and in advertising, I started to imagine a letterpress print that would capture the word and its role in the COVID zeitgeist, I thought back to that story, and imagined type waterfalling out of the composing room and onto the sidewalk below.

Setting type in straight lines is, relatively speaking, easy. Setting type meant to be falling out a window, hmmm. Outfitted with confidence from this summer’s daredevil printing workshop, I set out to find a way to translate what was in my mind’s eye into the chase.

What resulted, as described here, was a 3D printed piece of letterpress furniture to hold the cascading letters; it took some jimmying, but I got the type slotted into the furniture and locked into the chase with the typically-set type, and the result, once inked, looked like this:

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Getting to the point where the printing of UNPRECED and ENTED matched took some makeready (I had to increase the packing under UNPRECED); the resulting print, which matches what was in my imagination to a very satisfying degree, looks like this:

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I find myself getting a little destabilized every time I look at it. Which, of course, is kind of the point.

Oliver is over on the couch, with his laptop on his lap.

I assume he’s surfing the net, or watching YouTube, or doing any of the myriad other things he does online.

Except he’s talking to someone.

“Who are you talking to, Oliver?”

He doesn’t answer.

I stand up, walk over, and take a look at his laptop screen.

He’s on a Zoom call with the Green Party candidate for District 10.

Of course he is.

I’m getting the eavestroughs replaced on 100 Prince Street this morning, and the crew from North Shore Eavestroughing needed the parking spots in front of the house for their truck.

Irrationally, this is the kind of thing that gives me anxiety. So I nipped my anxiety in the bud, invested $5 in a set of four safety cones at Home Hardware, and affected a professional-grade street-blocking with absolutely no legal right to do so.

It worked.

As seen through the front doorbell camera. Ladders in every direction.

Earlier in the month I found myself on the north shore, between Rustico and Cavendish, and I took a photo with my iPhone. Yesterday my iPhone suggested that it could automagically transform this photo into an animated GIF if I wanted. So I took my iPhone up on its offer.

It’s a remarkable effort on my iPhone’s part, with waves that seem like they never end. You can see the edges of the loop if you stare carefully, but otherwise it looks like endless waves.

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