Somewhere back there this spring we celebrated 15 years of living here in Prince Edward Island. Our anniversaries were a little out of sync: I came in the true dead of winter, Catherine followed on a month later when the trees were just opening up. I was 26 years old when we made the move, an age that I recall seemed very old at the time and now seems impossibly young.

I’d known Catherine for all of two years; as her grandmother told me the day before I set off from Ontario, moving east was about as close as we were every likely to come to getting married. And she was right.

We came for 18 months, two years if I did a good job and had my contract extended. I truly don’t think either of us expected to stay longer than that. But we bought a house, found some friends, got other jobs, found some more friends, moved to town and bought another house, had a child, got other jobs, and just kind of forgot to leave. Not a unique experience, certainly — the woods are full of summer visitors with a VW microbus that broke down in 1968 and hasn’t gotten around to being fixed yet.

Our love for the Island has been nowhere near consistent, nor has it always been requited. There have been months — years — when it felt like we were trapped on a remote Island prison. Mostly these episodes have passed. But not completely. What can one day feel like the warm embrace of a close-knit community can sometimes, the next, feel xenophobic and insular. But the good, somewhat aided by inertia, ultimately outweighs the bad.

As much as here feels like home now — I’ve lived on PEI longer than I’ve lived anywhere else — I’ve reconciled myself to always being more of an anthropologist than a true resident. For the longest time I found this frustrating. Then I began to realize that anthropology can be fun too (and the well here is very deep — and it grows deeper the more you look at it). And so I’ve ended up in a not-unpleasant purgatory with one foot on the Island, the other in the, um, real world.

David Weale, in his book Chasing the Shore, writes the paragraph that for me best captures what being a Prince Edward Islander means:

Being a Prince Edward Islander is something different: something layered over top of being an islander. It’s not about land, sea, and shore, but about custom and tradition, and being influenced by powerful undercurrents of ethnicity, piety, and political tribalism. It’s about the unwritten laws of community life and the tricky and deliberate dynamics of inter-personal relations within a tightly knit community where little is forgiven and nothing forgotten. It’s about feeling alert to those nuances of body language, and subtleties of vocal inflection that signal approval or anger; about being proud and prickly and deferential all at the same time; about learning the art of understatement; and, sometimes, about making a fist in your pocket. And, as in every other place in the world, it’s about pursuing our own visions of kindness, and our own habits of cruelty.

You could spend a lifetime parsing those words and trying to understand how they play out in those that circle round you. I suppose that’s what I’m doing.

One of my favourite blogs at Yankee is Justin Shatwell’s New England Music Reviews; we have very similar tastes in music, Justin and I, and I find myself liking almost everything he writes about.

And if you’re hungry, Food Editor Annie B. Copps is Eating New England. If you’re a fan of Annie’s, be sure to listen to her podcasts on Thanksgiving Turkeys, New Hampshire Brewmasters and Think Organically, Eat Locally.

The Reed College Grades at Reed card “accompanies transcripts to give the recipient a better understanding of the Reed grading system and lack of grade inflation.” It says, in part:

Students are encouraged to focus on learning, not on grades. Students are evaluated rigorously, and semester grades are filed with the registrar, but by tradition, students do not receive standard grade reports. Papers and exams are generally returned to students with lengthy comments but without grades affixed. There is no dean’s list or honor roll, and Reed does not award Latin honors at graduation.

Steve Jobs somewhat famously dropped out of Reed after 6 months. My friend Sophie, however, graduated with a BA in biology and, like a large proportion of female graduates from Reed, went on to get her PhD.

Google Translate will now translate between English and Croatian. Which is how I learned that the title of the TV series Dobre namjere translates to Good Intentions. Google translates the Wikipedia page about the series like this:

The series is a family drama whose action konstruirana through warble, and its zapleti provlače through crime, murder and corruption. This is the story of four friends from childhood who after many years of re-gather for a joint business venture that will face them with our own weaknesses, and focus their lives in entirely unexpected directions. Their wives will be one in the second to find a new friendship, rivalry, but why would they trust each other constantly be on kušnji. The series follows the lives of Deveric families, their friends and enemies.

I come to this obscure knowledge through Tomislav Rukavina, who has directed 43 episodes of the series. He’s also the director of the this Daj mi kino short film (more on this here).

Big news on the Casa Mia front this week is that, starting Friday, they’ll be open for supper, with a new menu cooked in the new kitchen that’s been under construction all spring long. You can get a preview of what to expect by looking at the new menu board out front as you walk by.

Lesser news, although still cool if you’re an RSS geek, is the Casa Mia Daily Specials RSS Feed. Every morning, as soon as the Daily Specials Email goes out, the RSS feed gets updated too.

When I saw this article in the Globe and Mail about how the U.S. imports Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are running in the fall 2008 CBC Television line-up I thought it must be a misprint. Or a joke. But apparently it isn’t. I wonder what part of distinctive programming of the highest quality this falls under.

Apologies for the sudden explosion of Arial. I’m feeling a cold coming on.

Today’s musical obsession is Hem, a group that, it says here, works in the “alt-country folk pop orchestrated lullabies for adults” genre. My route in was Radio Paradise, where I heard Half Acre, which begins:

I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
And folded in this scrap of paper
Is the land I grew in

Think of every town you’ve lived in
Every room you lay your head
And what is it that you remember
Do you carry every sadness with you
Every hour your heart was broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with you

You can download selected MP3s for free from the Hem website. If you like Hem, be sure to also to check out Cry Cry Cry, which is cut from similar cloth.

For the longest time our summertime routine, when we’re headed out for a night at the drive-in movies, is to go out early and have supper at The Lobster Claw in Brackley Beach.

The first time we went there, likely about 12 years ago, at the end of our meal they brought around the dessert tray and went through our choices: “apple pie, cherry pie, apple crisp, cheesecake, sex in a pan…” As is my wont I immediately blushed upon hearing the last option. I had no idea what our waitress was talking about, and thought perhaps that I had fallen victim to some bizarre Island mating ritual.

It turns out that Sex in a Pan is this:

On that first night I managed to overcome my shock and actually order it. I’m not entirely sure what’s in it — various pudding-related products figure prominently, as does whipped cream — but it was very good, at least in a “remembering 1975 at the Carlisle United Church Turkey Supper” nostalgic kind of way.

So good, in fact, that we took to referring to The Lobster Claw as “Sex in a Pan.” As in “should we stop for sex in a pan before we go to the beach?” Or at least I started doing this.

Unfortunately every time we’ve been to the Claw since that fateful first day, Sex in a Pan has not been available: they’ve either been sold out, or it was just off the menu that week.

On Friday, however, having supper with Oliver before Indiana Jones, Sex in a Pan showed up on the dessert tray for the first time in a decade. I jumped at the chance. It was as dreamy as I remembered.

When our check came I noticed that Sex in a Pan is abbreviated SIAP, so if the notion of appearing to proposition your waitress makes you uncomfortable, I imagine that scrawling that on a napkin would wordlessly get you what you want.

Indiana Jones is on at Brackley Drive-in next weekend too, playing with Iron Man as the second show. Things get started around 9:00 p.m., leaving you plenty of time for Sex in a Pan before the show.

When Oliver and I arrived at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning as usual, we were greeted with the sad news that Kim Dormaar had been abducted by aliens:

While, of course, we had some concern for Kim’s welfare — what kind of aliens? for how long? are they treating him right? — our chief thought at this point was “what are we going to have for breakfast?”

Fortunately Karin LaRonde was standing by, ably assisted by various members of the Nicholson clan, with tofu scrambler and walnut cranberry tofu crumble cake (the name of which I probably have wrong, but it’s very good).

I should be smart enough to reason that if Kim was too occupied by his alien adventures to properly service the market, he would also be too busy to provide smoked salmon to Casa Mia. But I am not, and thus visions of smoked salmon bagels danced in my head when Oliver and I showed up on Sunday morning. Alas there was no smoked salmon in the house, and so I was forced to innovate.

Being an egg liberationist as I am, most of the breakfast entrées were off limits. Fortunately Chef Cam came to the rescue by agreeing to prepare an egg-free variation of the breakfast burrito, substituting grilled vegetables for the eggs. It was fantastic, and I may be forced to place it into the regular Sunday rotation.