I grew up in the small village of Carlisle, Ontario. While it’s not like I grew up on a remote farm, or in the wilderness, during the years before I was able to drive it felt like the ends of the Earth.

Fortunately, by lucky happenstance, there was a Canada Coach Lines bus to Hamilton that stopped directly in front of our house on Progreston Road, twice a day, a lifeline to the pleasures of the city that my brothers and I took maximum advantage of. 

When that bus schedule didn’t line up, the alternate way into the city was to have Mom or Dad drop us off on Plains Road in Aldershot, in front of Murray’s Variety, where we could catch the GO Bus into downtown Hamilton.

I’m thinking of this right now because I’m on the bus to Morell, my first trip on PEI’s rural public transit system. I’ve got my folding bicycle with me, and when I arrive in Morell I’ll unfold it and ride the 30 minutes to our place by the shore. Later in the afternoon Lisa will drive out to meet me. The trip, like all rural transit on PEI, cost me $2.

I love public transit, and I’m encouraged by how it’s slowly but surely becoming a thing here on the Island.

It will take a generation, I think.

For young L., age 15, transit is second nature, and she thinks nothing of hopping on a bus to flit around the city.

It makes little economic nor environmental sense for this bus to be carrying only two of us to the north shore—me plus a fellow going out to Wyman’s in Canavoy. But it represents the patience that’s needed to give transit the chance to marinate, for the word to spread, for whatever social stigma is associated with transit to die off. Holding onto this takes political will at budget time, and I’m happy that, so far, that will has held.

There’s a certain anxiety that’s accompanied every single bus ride I’ve ever taken, from age 12 onward. Will the bus arrive? Will it be the right bus? Will I have the right change for her bus fare? What if I miss my stop? The only way through this requires a ceding of control, a suspension of disbelief (it’s why cars have such an advantage, with the extra agency they offer, despite their myriad other negatives).

I remember waiting on a desolate side street in Mestre—the mainland side of Venice—with Catherine and Olivia in 2010. We had tickets for the bus to Ljubljana, a bus that had started its trip in Florence and would finish it in Sofia. We weren’t entirely sure we were at the right stop. The bus was very very late. It was cold, getting dark. And yet eventually the bus arrived, and we had a wonderful journey with our mostly-Bulgarian fellow travellers.

I think of that trip often, and I use it as a way to remember that, in matters transit, things generally work out. And even when they don’t it’s an adventure.

My pre-trip anxieties today were several.

Would I be allowed to take my folding bicycle on the bus? (Yes. They don’t have provision for full-sized bikes, but they were happy to carry mine; I phoned ahead to confirm).

Was I too late to book a seat? (Yes, then no. Online you need to book an hour in advance; on the phone, though, I was able to book 30 minutes before departure).

Did I have the right bus stop? (No, then yes. The bus to St. Peters leaves from Queen Street by the Confederation Centre box office; I’d originally assumed it was around the corner).

Once underway the bus, brand new, developed a horrible-sounding squeal, requiring the driver to pull over on the edge of town for some diagnosing and consultation with base. It was decided we could continue, and after a few kilometres the noise went away (“stone in the brakes” was the diagnosis from my Wyman’s bus-mate).

Twenty-five minutes later I was dropped at the Morell Coop. I cycled over to the Dreadnaught for lunch, and then to the shore, just under 7 km in all.

And I feel like I have a new teleportational superpower. And a greater sense of nimble energy than a car has ever given me.

You had me at “retro Balkan pop music night.”

Sending an email to myself with Siri.

I happened by a page that listed cashback rewards for a particular credit card the other day, and at the bottom I found this fine print:

To earn the rate in each category, eligible purchases must be made with merchants assigned to that category. Categories are assigned based on merchant category codes (MCC) set by Mastercard. The payment networks assign each merchant to one MCC, even if they offer a variety of products and services. For example, gas stations, grocery stores and drug stores all sell several different products, but all purchases from these merchants — regardless of the type of product — are always categorized under the merchants MCC. 

I’d never heard of merchant category codes before, and so got curious. 

It turns out that, by virtue of accepting credit cards via Stripe for our Queen Square Press online shop, we have one of our own, 2741 for Miscellaneous Publishing and Printing. 

I had to set this when I first signed up for a Stripe account, and I wasn’t aware that it might affect things like the interchange fee. 

Or, as in the case of the credit card I was looking at, whether or not purchasers would receive cashback rewards for their purchases. In our case, they won’t: 2741 isn’t in the list of eligible MCCs.

Confusingly—a word that can be used for a lot of credit card-related things—per Stripe:

A frustrating aspect of MCCs is that there is not one universally accepted set of merchant category codes used by all entities and organisations.

Also confusingly, although whole industries—5812, Eating Places and Restaurants—are covered by a single MCC, in certain industries, like hotels and restaurants, one MCC is assigned to individual businesses, like 3009, Air Canada and 3600, Saddlebrook Resort–Tampa.

It all has the flavour of something made up on the fly, as it all likely was, with edge cases and exceptions evolving over time. A good reminder that while international standards bodies can appear arcane and overly complex, what they produce is, well, standard.

Remember our backyard plum tree, the one felled by Hurricane Fiona? 

The remediation of the tree to vertical didn’t work out—we followed advice from our Siberian handyman that, untethered, it would find its way back; it didn’t.

But the tree is undeterred by its near-horizontal state: after a mediocre plum crop two years ago, this year’s harvest is bountiful, and the tree is filled with beautiful, firm, tart plums like this:

I picked a few pounds of plums yesterday, and turned them into a plum pie that we will have for dessert tonight:

I have another pie shell in the freezer and I’m going to try turning some of the tiny apples from our orchard into an apple pie next.

From The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits (emphasis mine):

The X-ray department seemed completely deserted, but then there was a light at the end of the hall, and a woman was waiting for me.

What happened next I can’t completely account for. Maybe it was because I hadn’t eaten all day, and then I took a lot of steroids, and then I had a lot of calorie-rich food. I had to stand up for the X-ray and press my chest against a vertical scanner, while the technician retreated to another part of the room. I also had to hold my hands above my head. She wanted me to do this twice, she needed two scans.

After the first one, I told her, “I have to sit down for a minute.” There was a gurney in a corner of the room, and I sat on that. My head had started to fill with blood, at least that’s what it felt like, and I was aware that my body had entered system protocols my conscious mind could no longer intervene in.

My body has done this. My mind has done this.

Craig Mod writes:

Here’s a good example of two books in similar genres, but one full of platitudes and one of unmistakable voice: Simon Boas’ A Beginner’s Guide to Dying — it’s fine, but it reads like the kind of book someone thought they were supposed to write, rather than a book that embodies the weirdness of who they were when confronted with death’s knock. (I’d love to read the end-of-life book that says: Be nasty, brutish, get as much money as you can, and die alone on your pile of treasures!)

I wrote an end-of-life book full of platitudes, a book that “reads like the kind of book someone thought they were supposed to write,” so this stings with the ring of truth.

Lisa and I drove out to Murray Harbour yesterday for one of the final days of the Brian Burke exhibition, Light Before Shadow. I spotted this piece on the first floor through the floor grate on the second.

Charlottetown is organizing Week Without Driving from October 1 to 8, 2026:

How would your days change if you had to give up your car for a week?

The Week Without Driving experience was created to give firsthand knowledge to those who have the option to drive about the barriers and challenges that non-drivers face.

This initiative is about more than just avoiding the driver’s seat. It’s a commitment to experiencing and understanding the daily realities of those who rely on alternative forms of transportation due to disability, age, economic factors, or personal choice. Participants are encouraged to engage in all their daily activities without driving themselves—employing any other form of transportation. 

I’ve thought for a long time that City of Charlottetown councillors should commit to travelling to council meetings by bus, simply to experience public transit and its opportunities and challenges firsthand. Here’s their chance, at least for a week.

Back on August 12, I made tweaks to this blog’s setup with a goal to improve its speed. 

I can now see the effect of these changes in Google “Core Web Vitals” report:

This chart shows that before I made the changes, every single page tested by Google was rated “Poor.” Starting in late August, Google started to pick up on the changes I’d made, and by early September, all pages were reported as “Good.”