The magazine section at our local Indigo has been condensed over recent months: a substantial section of magazine racks has been removed, and replaced with puzzles and games. 

The area where general interest magazines like Harpers, Monocle,  The Atlantic, and The New Yorker used to be has been removed, and condensed into a new “Business / Entertainment / Young Readers” section that looked like this today:

I know this because I decided today that I wanted to go and buy myself a real live copy of The New Yorker. 

I let my subscription go just before COVID, a big step for me, a longtime subscriber who had once been the magazine’s foremost advocate on Prince Edward Island. I decided I was ready to dip my toe back in the waters, and I knew Indigo to be a reliable source. 

Except it wasn’t. 

No copies in evidence, with “we don’t track inventory of magazines”  the only comment from staff, followed by a suggestion that if it wasn’t there, well, then, it wasn’t there.

This all brought back the memory of an email to the magazine’s then-publisher about problems with delivery of the magazine to the late great Tweels, where I wrote, in part:

For some reason, for weeks where Monday is a holiday in Canada, but not in the U.S. — days like Victoria Day in May, Dominion Day in July, and so on — your magazine never arrives at Tweels Gift Shop. I ask at the counter and they tell me some variation of “we were shorted this week.” I don’t really understand what this means. But it is a reliable and consistent problem, and has been for some time.

I have no idea how the The New Yorker gets from New York City to Charlottetown, PEI. But on those weeks — like this one, where November 11 was a holiday here but not there — when The New Yorker is not available, my entire week is affected.

It’s like a small part of the air I breath is not available to me.

I realize that in the grander scheme of things this problem pales in comparison to others I imagine you have on your desk. But I would very much appreciate it if you could be of some assistance in helping to track down and solve it.

Much to my surprise, Mr. Carey replied within 24 hours:

Thank you for this note, and your connection to The New Yorker.

I will pass this on our newsstand operation, who perhaps can answer your question.

Have you ever thought about subscribing, which may prove to be more reliable?

(I love the prompt to subscribe: that’s what publishers are supposed to do!)

True to his word, the query was passed along, and I received a reply, in part:

We apologize for the difficulty that you had in finding the New Yorker at Tweels Gift Shop. We looked into this.

We found that Tweel’s normally receives 15 copies of The New Yorker and, thanks to loyal readers like you, sells an average of 7 copies each week. However, I was told that one recent issue was not delivered to Tweels for some reason. (That’s what they mean by being “shorted”.) Tweels did not get the issue with the cover date October 8. If you have not been able to get a copy of that issue please let me know . I would be happy to send one to you.

Regarding your comments about the Mondays that are holidays in Canada , I have found out that on those weeks Tweels gets their copies on Tuesday. That’s because the magazine distributor also takes off on the Monday holiday.

I love the humanity of this reply, and the earlier ones, a humanity that seems of a bygone era. 

I also like the historic data point that Tweels once received 15 copies of The New Yorker every week, and sold 7 on average.

In the meantime, I think maybe they still stock the magazine on the front counter at Brighton Clover Farm, and perhaps I’ll head over there.

In 2014, I stopped maintaining my own physical server—an actual computer that I actually owned, and could go and visit upstairs.

At the time I wrote:

At the same time as I made this switch, for the first time I am serving ruk.ca from a server that I don’t own: since the site went live in 1999 it has been served by a series of owned-and-operated PCs. In the early days these were housed in the basement of my house at 100 Prince Street; more recently the server, known as “ross” internally, has been based in silverorange’s Fitzroy Street data center.

At the time, I’d just moved this site, and its cousins, to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This made sense: I was maintaining a fleet of servers for Yankee at AWS, and so I was in and out of the AWS dashboard every day, and it felt like home.

As I’ve written here previously, AWS started to get expensive, and while I was able to tweak things to lower costs, they were still upwards of $125 a month, and that seemed unreasonable given current cash flow. Because I’m no longer working with Yankee, I didn’t have the tethering to AWS that I once had, so I used the opportunity to move elsewhere.

So, as of this morning, this site is hosted on a Hetzner Cloud server in Helsinki (for the technically minded, it’s a CPX31 server, with 4 VCPU, 8 GB RAM and 160 GB of disk). In theory this should lower my hosting costs from the $125/month I’m paying now down to about $20.

The migration has been mostly lovely: the Hetzner Cloud website is both delightfully simple and delightfully capable. 

Migration will continue for the next week or so; until then I’ll be straddling two worlds. But by mid-month I’ll have divorced AWS and fully re-homed in Finland.

A work in progress, an analog spin-off of this blog post from James A. Reeves.

One of the magazines I remember being around my parents’ living room when I was a kid was Toronto Life. We lived about 90 minutes from Toronto, and because we were up high on the Niagara Escarpment, the city frequently presented itself as a Oz-like vision in the far distance. The magazine was a look inside that Oz, and I found myself unusually engaged with it, an engagement which has stayed with me, even though Toronto is now 24 hours drive away.

That, and being a student of magazine design, make me particularly interested in the rebranding that was launched in the latest issue. Here’s the before (left) and the after (right):

The editor explains the “new” logo in the latest issue:

The task of capturing this spirit in a logo fell to Toronto Life’s art director, Colleen Nicholson, and Commercial Type’s Christian Schwartz, who were inspired by the magazine’s debut. The inaugural cover, from 1966, featured Barbara Amiel, then a young writer and budding society fixture, under an orange logo featuring a bohemian “T,” a renegade rainbow “r” and a dignified uptown “L.”

I had some affection for the just-departed design, but the new one is growing on me.

(A reminder: if you’re an Apple News+ subscriber you can read Toronto Life there.)

There’s a feeling I get at the drug store blood pressure machine, the feeling that comes from wanting to win at blood pressure.

I find myself breathing deeply, trying to will my blood to stop having so much pressure. I calm myself  down, and try to not ruminate about anything that might agitate me too much.

That’s meditation. 

When I was a kid, my family subscribed to the Waterdown Review, the local weekly newspaper. Every week, I was an eager reader of the column from editor Ken Bosveld, a breezy mix of village news and personal reflections. I don’t know why I loved it so, but I did.

One of the topics that Ken would write about frequently was visits to a place called Chapleau, where his family, if memory serves, had a camp of some sort. 

I never knew where Chapleau was: it was a mythical place somewhere in Ontario. And that’s where I filed it away in my memory and my imagination.

In the same file as the town of Strathroy.

I’ve never been to Strathroy. 

I don’t know anyone from Strathroy. 

I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about Strathroy. 

But, somehow, I’m aware of its existence, in the same imaginative neighbourhood as Chapleau.

(Strathroy and Chapleau are not geographically close; depending on which way you drive, you’ll need to travel about 900 km to get from one to the other).

Strathroy, meanwhile, after languishing in this liminal space until now, has suddenly emerged onto the scene.

First, Strathroy is the home of Crystal Clear Bags Canada. 

A month ago, we were looking, wouldn’t you know it, for crystal clear bags. The Google pathway led right to their door. 

We are now repeat customers. 

Great selection, good website, quick turnaround, reasonable prices, not U-Line nor Amazon: they check all the boxes!

You’d think that would be enough Strathroy.

It wasn’t.

Yesterday, the post The Bureau of Library Tourism, from Mita Williams’ Librarian of Things blog, showed up in my RSS reader.

In the post, Mita writes:

I just walked back from the lovely Cookie Bar in Ford City, Ontario, where I was one of the six “fun” speakers at the Bike Windsor Essex AGM.

The theme was transportation and the format was pecha kucha: 20 slides that auto forward every 20 seconds.

This is what I was supposed to have said.

She then goes on to include the slides for her delightful talk on the topic of helping “libraries give tourists things to do when they visit.” 

For a fan, like me, of both libraries and travel, and visiting libraries when I travel, this is heady stuff. (Go read it; it’s lovely).

(An aside: earlier this week, Lisa and I were visiting St. Dunstan’s Basilica, a few blocks from our house, and we ended up chatting with a tourist from Colorado, newly arrived on a cruise ship. She asked us for directions to the public library and explained she was a library trustee in her hometown, and liked visiting libraries when travelling. Library tourism is real.)

Right, Strathroy.

How could I not click on the Cookie Bar link in Mita’s post!

Cookie Bar turns out to be exactly what’s on the tin. 

A bar. With cookies.

Here’s their story:

Started mixing one cookie as a time, customizing each recipe from scratch, laid off in 2020 because of the pandemic, in a small apartment kitchen. Upgraded to renting a kitchen in Walkerville, then having a spot of my own at 471 Pelissier. Serving over 18 different 1/4 lb craft cookies and over 80 different craft beers.​

Mita’s event was at their Windsor location, in Ford City (that’s a Wikipedia entry worth reading), but Cookie Bar also has a location in, you guessed it, Strathroy.

So. Much. Strathroy.

As no laterally-slithered-together blog post would be complete without a neatly tied bow, I present The Ghost in the Waterdown Library, originally published in 1987 in Heritage Happenings, which starts with:

Now I don’t believe in ghosts, but I can tell you there are a lot of people who won’t use that elevator.”

—Mrs. Lorraine Eastwood, Head Librarian, Waterdown

I went to high school in Waterdown, and the Waterdown Library—the same one, with the ghost, though I didn’t know about the ghost at the time—was a frequent refuge for me, a place to get away from the overload of Waterdown District High School.

I knew Mrs. Eastwood: she was ever-present, and the very model of how you might imagine a small village librarian from literature. (My mother, also a librarian, was a colleague of hers in later years.)

That piece on the ghost mentions Waterdown Review editor Ken, he of camp-in-the-Chapleau-in-my-imagination:

Later on the same day, Mr. Ken Bosveld, the Editor of the Review, came to the library and interviewed Mrs. Eastwood about the elevator’s strange behaviour. Within seconds of focusing his camera on the tombstones, the door mysteriously opened and remained so, long enough for two photographs to be taken.

Libraries. Travel. Ghosts. Newspapers. Elevators.

And Strathroy.

Time for a visit? They have a library!

Arrived in today’s post from Latvia, a copy of Internet Phone Book:

Has there ever been a publication more laser-targeted at my inclinations and eccentricities?

I had to move some things around this week, so I skipped my regular workout yesterday, and worked out with Lisa this morning, with her coach Matt Cormier.

The conditioning part of the workout was a 15 minute AMRAP of 10 ring rows, 10 plate squats, and a 200 meter run. 

The running route was out Matt’s garage door, up his driveway, onto the street, around the corner, and back.

In my later rounds, as I was getting fatigued, I thought about stopping for a break, or at least slowing down, at the 100 metre turnaround point.

Matt couldn’t see me.

Lisa couldn’t see me.

Who would know?!

But I didn’t.

Because I realized that I wasn’t there for them.

I wouldn’t be cheating them out of anything, I’d be cheating myself. Robbing myself of the opportunity to discover if I could keep going.

So I kept going. I completed 5 rounds.

Later in the day I read this, from Matthew McConaughey, in his weekly newsletter:

​Self-Determination Theory, developed by psychologists Richard Ryan, PhD and Edward Deci, PhD, has changed the way we look at motivation: it shows how intrinsic, high-quality motivation (that satisfies the basic human needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in work) leads to the best experience and performance – as opposed to extrinsic motivation that is driven by rewards like money or social status. So define success for yourself. The real you.

I’ve always believed that, in my heart of hearts. I was glad to have it confirmed empirically on the asphalt this morning. 

Just after the new year, our friend Betty suggested we come to the winter session of an acting class in Victoria that she’d been attending, a class taught by Becca Griffin.

We procrastinated: a 35-minute drive? in the winter? every Thursday night? for an hour of out-of-comfort-zone activities with Central Queens strangers? 

That didn’t sound like fun.

But we pushed through our resistance—I can’t remember whether it was me or Lisa who pushed us over the edge—and signed up.

Last night was our last class of 8. What started in March as  a night drive, through blinding snow that almost drove us off the road, ended in an open class, for friends and family, on a balmy spring evening.

The core of the classes was working on a two-person scene. Lisa and I, for convenience of cohabitation rehearsal schedule, paired ourselves and we picked this scene from the 2019 Scarlet Johansson-Adam Driver film Marriage Story. Not a light comedic romp.

Acting, and all that goes into it (memorizing lines, pretending to be someone else, feeling, listening) turns out to be really hard. 

In fits and starts, we threw ourselves into it. By Lisa’s estimation, by the time we performed the scene last night, we’d run through it 100 times together. 

Every time we started with my character’s line:

CHARLIE

It’s not what I want…I mean, it’s what I want, but it’s what was…WAS…what’s best for him.

NICOLE

I was wondering when you’d get around to Henry and what HE actually wants.

CHARLIE

Oh, fuck off—

and finished, 5 minutes and 5 pages of script later,  with me overcome and weeping, and Lisa’s character comforting me:

Nicole stares at him, incredulous.

CHARLIE

What?

NICOLE

You’re so merged with your own selfishness that you don’t even identify it as selfishness anymore. YOU’RE SUCH A DICK.

CHARLIE

Every day I wake up and hope you’re dead— Dead like—

And then Charlie starts crying.

CHARLIE

(through tears) If I could guarantee Henry would be OK, I’d hope you get an illness and then get hit by a car and DIE.

He sinks down, weeping. All this vitriol has taken its toll. Nicole watches, taken aback. She walks over and gently puts her hand on his shoulder. He shakes and cries.

In between, leading up to that, a lot of intensity. 

A lot.

And so much learning.

In the beginning, our scripts closely held to our chest, we yelled our lines at each other, didn’t listen to each other.

Gradually, through repetition, and with Becca’s coaching, we discovered that the key to memorizing is to listen, to cue ourselves from each other, to embody the scene so that the progression from section to section (sections we named “Henry,” “About the Past,” “The Affair”) is not from rote learning, but because it made sense dramatically.

I said last night on the drive home that it felt like we’d gotten to the point where we were ready to start working on the scene now: there remains so much to explore, and getting ourselves to the point where we can just make it all the way through from beginning to end is simply a necessary precondition to truly digging in.

We won’t do that. If only because one can only yell “Every morning I wake up and wish you were dead!” at one’s partner so many times.

But we will go back to Becca’s classes in the fall. She proved a patient teacher with infectious enthusiasm (I went into the class afraid of her infectious enthusiasm; I need not have worried). Our classmates threw themselves into their scenes, and the games and exercises we did every week; they took risks, and that helped us take risks.

Eagle-eyed readers of this blog in its website version may have noticed a new element at the top, a search box:

There’s almost always been a way to search this blog; for the longest time it was backed by Apache Solr, and then, when I migrated to Drupal 10, I switched to using a simple database-backed search, which was slow and inflexible.

A few weeks ago I installed Meilisearch, and its module for Drupal, and now the search is both fast and flexible.

It may be that I am the only real client for this feature: I search this blog every day, both looking for things like “when did I move my printing press into The Guild” and looking for older blog posts to reference from new ones. Having an efficient way to do this feels good, like having a mainline into the timestream of my last 26 years.