Our weekend travels took us to Scales Pond in South Freetown. We toured the International Children’s Memorial Place, explored the infrastructure left over from the pond’s old life as driver of a hydro-electric generating station, and then crossed the road and walked along a trail that runs down the Dunk River:

It took a while for me to connect the presence of the “No Fishing” signs stuck up everywhere with last month’s Dunk River fish kill — it was Catherine who noticed the odd fact of there being no fish in the river at all.

The ocean being ever-present here, I don’t usually think of PEI as having a freshwater ecosystem, but it obviously does. I’m as aware as the next guy about how hard it is to wean from a chemical economy, and you’d be hard-pressed to call me a nature lover, but when you walk along a stunning river on a warm summer day and realize that the river has been stripped of life so that we might eat properly-sized french fries, you gotta wonder about our priorities as a society.

Regular readers may recall that I spoke at the annual meeting of the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market about the possibilities for encouraging customers to get to the market by means other than automobile. Judging by the state of the parking lot on Saturday morning, my work has been a complete success:

This is not to say that the Market folks haven’t taken steps to improve things: they’ve made pedestrian and bicycle access from the Confederation Trail a lot easier by mowing the path at the back of the parking lot that joins the trail, they’ve installed a new bicycle rack (they old one was stolen), and they’ve posted public transit maps.

The sad irony in all of this for me is that one of the anchors of my talk was the fact that a city bus stopped several times every Saturday morning right at the front door of the Market. Alas when the bus schedule was reworked in May, that bus was a casualty, and so the closest you can get by bus from downtown Charlottetown is either the Atlantic Superstore plaza or the UPEI student centre.

That said, Oliver and I did manage to get to the Market, out to Owl’s Hollow, and back, all by public transit on Saturday morning. We had to walk some, and the schedule wasn’t exactly “frequent,” but it worked, and it’s certainly easily possible for almost anyone.

Bluegrass, as everyone knows, is the one true music. And the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market was graced with an excellent bluegrass quartet on Saturday morning, the Grass Mountain Hobos. The sign on their guitar case says “We’ll play your next house party.” If you want to see them otherwise, they’ll be playing Old Home Week on August 17th.

Kudos to The Guardian for embedding a Google Map in a breaking news story about a major accident:

Catherine told me last night that she would go to the beach every day of the summer if she could. Her desire is stymied by the fact that she doesn’t drive, and by my own beach aversion (all that sand — between my toes — uck).

So yesterday, when I announced that I was driving up to Park Corner for a L.M. Montgomery Land Trust meeting, she jumped at the chance for a free ride to the ocean. And so at 5:00 p.m. we three all headed north towards Cavendish; the plan was that I would meet and they would beach and then we would rendezvous.

Alas as we were pulling out of town it started to rain. At first a drizzle, then a torrent. With delusions that it was a temporary kind of rain, we pushed on.

It was with visions of a Lucky Duck burger that we pulled in to the Cavendish Boardwalk. Only to find that the Lucky Duck is gone, replaced by some crazy knick-knack store. So, unable to bring ourselves to eat at Subway or Pizza Delight, we headed to Captain Scott’s Fish and Chips.

Captain Scott’s, perhaps due to the demise of the Lucky Duck, has added “and Burgers” to the end of their name. Oliver had a tasty fish burger and Catherine went all traditional and had fish (which was piping hot but, she said, very good). I had a veggie burger, something made magnificent by the veritable wonderland of self-serve condiments: lettuce, hot peppers, two type of relish, sauerkraut, bacon bits. So it turned out to be a not-too-bad meal. But the loss of the Lucky Duck stings nonetheless.

By the time we were done eating, the downpour had reached a steady “I’m not going anywhere you foolish humans” pitch, so Catherine and Oliver drove up to Park Corner with me, hopeful that the storm would eventually pass and they could frolic on the beaches that entranced L.M. Montgomery.

The storm did not pass. And so Catherine and Oliver entertained themselves with fun iPod-based freeze-tag games on the covered porch of the Anne of Green Gables Tea Room while I discussed Serious Cornboil Issues inside.

By 8:05 p.m. we were headed back to town in an upgraded “super-torrential” downpour that covered the roads with a 1/2 inch thick layer of running water.

Needless to say, the first hint of sun this week, I will be leaving the office and driving my family to the beach, sand-in-toes aversion or no.

Although, in a way, it seems like posting naked pictures of myself, here’s what 515 grams of my own plasma looks like, freshly centrifuged out of my blood across the street at Canadian Blood Services:

Every time I donate it runs the same way: after about 30 minutes of paperwork (“Have you ever had sex with anyone who has received money or drugs for sex?” and so on), I get hooked up to to the Haemonetics PCS2 machine. The machine sucks out a bunch of my blood, whips it around and magically takes out the plasma, puts my blood back (that seems the most unlikely process of all), and then repeats. Here’s how Haemonetics explains it on their site.

Apparently some people can get their allotted due of 515 grams in two go-arounds; I always seem to take 3. In general I’m in and out in about 90 minutes; sometimes it takes two hours, especially if I linger for an additional chocolate chip cookie.

My friend Lowell’s son Mark is on the tail end of a charity bicycle ride from Carleton Place to Charlottetown. I have ancestors on my mother’s side with Carleton Place connections; in Our Caswell Relatives the town is described:

“Carleton Place, at the present time wears quite a lively appearance, and looks pretty much like a man who has been awakened from a sleep long enough to have suffered his clothes to get sadly out of fashion and repair, but was at length getting into a new suit.”

Right now the ride has taken them into New Brunswick; they should be on the Island later this week. It’s an amazing achievement.

David Byrne writes about the process of scoring the second season of Big Love.