I got my haircut yesterday. When Hillary asked “How short do you want it?”, I replied, uncharacteristically, “pretty short,” and then let chips fall where they may.  

This is as short a haircut as I’ve ever had. I kinda like it. 

My daughter, who just turned 24, has been “Olivia” since she came out in May of 2021. Truth be told, she’s been Olivia, in her heart, for a lot longer than that.

When Olivia first came out—to my assembled family, on Zoom, without any preamble—I am not proud to say that my first reaction was “Fuck! I can’t take ANOTHER THING.” That was close-minded, selfish, rooted in fear. But it’s where I stood at that point.

In the years since, as I’ve seen Olivia soften into herself, become more confident in her gender expression, and be less burdened by the conflict between her gender assignment at birth and how she feels internally, as I’ve educated myself about gender and sexuality, met other parents, other trans people, I have been able to embrace her transition as a lovely, miraculous, positive thing. 

The most recent chapter in her transition has been to have her request for a change of name formally approved. 

She started the process, as I wrote earlier in the year, back in June; it took the summer for the paperwork to make its way through the system, and she finally received a formal certificate, along with an updated birth certificate, a few weeks ago. The process is still more cumbersome and expensive than I believe it needs to be, but the public servants involved in the process were kind, efficient, and gender-affirming without exception.

One of the things that needs to happen as part of the process is publication of the change of name in the Royal Gazette, and this appeared in the September 14, 2024 issue:

From this point Olivia is now free of the yoke of needing to officially go by one name, and otherwise by her chosen name: she can get new ID, a new library card, a new passport, and to be Olivia everywhere.

I am so proud of Olivia. I love her dearly.

Until earlier this week, I wasn’t really conscious of how often I use the ability of my iPhone to respond automatically to me saying “Hey Siri.” But then, for some unknown reason, it lost this ability, and I found that I really missed it.

I did all the usual things: check the Siri settings, talk to ChatGPT, did a lot of Googling, checked Apple support. Nothing solved the issue.

I too often forget that Apple provides excellent, free, seemingly-lifetime phone, and text technical support. Yesterday, I remembered, and opened up the support app on my iPhone to initiate a text chat with Apple support, and got a response almost immediately:

This chat went back-and-forth for about 25 minutes, the agent ultimately determining that my issue needed to be escalated, and I needed to talk to someone on the phone. They scheduled me for a callback for an hour later.

On time, at 3 o’clock, my phone rang, and I was talking to a support agent, who walked me through an additional series of diagnostic steps. They brought some interesting screen-sharing magic to bear: they were able to initiate a sharing request from their end, to which I simply had to click “agree,” and from that point on they could see my iPhone screen. Though they couldn’t control it, they could make a red arrow appear on the screen to direct me where to tap.

Things went a little sideways at the end of this call, as they posited that the reason for the issue was that I had a “profile” installed on the phone, one that I had received from Fastmail, my email provider. They guided me to remove that profile, which caused the phone to need to restart, and for the call to drop, but they reassured me that it would solve the issue.

It didn’t. 

And, in removing the profile, I had uninstalled my email account setup.

I went back to the chat, and requested another call, which got scheduled for 9 a.m. this morning. This was a much more efficient and targeted call, as the agent had access to the entire history of the case so far. We were in and out and solved in 13 minutes.

Ultimately, the solution was for me to reset all the settings of the phone (Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Reset > Reset All Settings). 

To the credit of the agent, he told me the implications of this: my wifi password would be lost, I would need to add cards back to my Apple Wallet. And that’s exactly what happened. There were a few other collateral issues: my Touch ID needed to be set up again, some notification and other settings needed to be reestablished, but the collateral damage was not great. It was certainly much less dire than I anticipated “reset all settings” might possibly mean (I imagined having to download and re-install all my apps, for example, but it was nothing like that).

The upside was that my phone has now started to respond to “Hey Siri” again. I can again easily add items to the household shopping list.

While there were a few bumps along the road to getting the solution, I was, overall, impressed with the sophistication and speed of the Apple support system. Next time something comes up, I hope I’ll remember that it’s there waiting for me.

Epilogue: it turns out that “all settings” affects more than Apple disclosed, including, most importantly, any alarms set on the phone, and, most annoyingly, app permissions (which has meant a barrage of app permission prompts over the last 24 hours). Other things affected: ability to make phone calls from my Mac (needed to turn on in Settings > Phone on the iPhone), ability to have text messages appear on my Mac (needed turn on in Settings > Messages on the iPhone).

Manuel Moreale writes about his frustrations with using Ko-Fi as a "micropayments" system to support his work:

It honestly sucks that in 2024 there’s not a good way to support creators with small donations. The “one a month” model is great from a human perspective but financially it’s quite awful: a 1 USD donation, after fees and taxes, becomes more like a 0.60 USD donation but it is what it is. I’m still grateful to the 85 people who are currently supporting what I'm doing here.

This also sucked in 1995, when I was looking for a way to support the web-based database system I was managing for the PEI Crafts Council, something covered in an article by Dean Robinson in Worth magazine's June 1995 issue:

One Digital Sawbuck

The artisans of the Prince Edward Island Crafts Council may be more comfortable with looms and spinners than computers and modems, but they’re always happy to make some cash—cold, digital, or otherwise. So Peter Rukavina, information manager for the group of weavers and glassblowers on the Canadian isle, decided to try out the cutting-edge technology of electronic money—that is, a purely digital currency that can be ordered and then spent via electronic mail on the Internet. “We’re forced by location and circumstance to be innovative,” Rukavina says.

Too bad, then, that the council’s experience with NetCash, a digital currency created by Software Agents in Germantown, Maryland, has been a bust. “It hasn’t been successful in any way,” says Rukavina. In fact, the group has received less than $10 in digital bucks since joining the NetCash system last July.

The council had hoped to collect money from those accessing its database of North American suppliers over the Internet. (Fees are used to keep the system up-to-date.) Conventional systems were unworkable—“We can’t have our staff answering telephones to process Visa and MasterCard transactions,” Rukavina says, “and we don’t want to send an invoice to someone in Colorado for 60 cents.”

NetCash seemed to be the solution; users of the database could pay the fee and, if they preferred, use it directly from their computers. Alas, Canadian customers cannot get NetCash easily; it takes time and effort to purchase digital cash north of the border. And an even bigger drawback is the dearth of ways to spend NetCash. When the PEI Crafts Council first opened an account with NetBank last July, there were three or four other merchants that took NetCash. The number has now grown to more than 100, but they’re mostly local bulletin board systems and information vendors. Says Rukavina, “It still doesn’t have wide enough acceptance to make it worth going through some extra step to pay for a 60-cent database search.”

All of which doesn’t mean Rukavina is done homesteading the digital frontier. PEI Crafts Council continues to accept NetCash, and it’s also considering accepting other electronic “currencies.” For now, however, the council will get most of its money the old-fashioned way. “People give us a call and give us their MasterCard or Visa numbers,” says Rukavina. “Or they send us a check.”

—Dean Robinson

"It hasn’t been successful in any way" was a blunt way to characterize our experiences, but it was true.

Here’s a sketch I made of the house, at 233 5th Avenue in Cochrane, Ontario, where my mother grew up:

I loved that house. It started off life as a bottling plant, and was later converted into apartments by my great-grandfather Ed Caswell. I loved the smell of my Grandma Ada’s fur coats, stored in the bedroom on the second floor behind the glassed-in porch. I loved the door stop used to hold the bathroom door open, the microscopic kitchen, the plant that grew up and around the entire living room. Making the sketch, I imagined my grandfather, Ross Caswell, sitting in his chair, looking out the big window, twiddling his thumbs.

A few years after Ed died in 1950, Ross converted part of the back of the house into an additional apartment. Dorothy Gray and her husband Chuck, newlyweds, saw the construction at the back of the house, talked to Ross, and Ross agreed to rent to them. They lived there for four years, time that overlapped with my mother’s teenage years.

I didn’t know about Dorothy and Chuck’s role in the life of my family until last month when, out of the blue, I got an email from Dorothy, 66 years after she and Chuck moved out. She had come across my post about the house from a few years ago, and sent me a message wondering if I was related to Ross. 

I’m not sure who was more amazed and delighted by this 6-decades-later connection, Dorothy or me, but I can tell you that I was awfully amazed and delighted.

It is no secret to longtime readers that I love coincidences, and Dorothy delivered more of them, as I found out as we chatted back and forth by email: she grew up in here in Prince Edward Island, near Alberton, where her 103 year old brother lives still. She went to nursing school in Summerside, and on graduation she was offered a position at Lady Minto Hospital in Cochrane. Lady Minto was the hospital where my mother was born, where my great-grandparents died, and where my grandfather Ross spent the last years of his life in de facto long term care.

Hearing from Dorothy, and being able to tell Mom the story, made my day. What a gift to have a simple noticing of a house unearth such as wondrous connection.

In the past couple of months I’ve had an unusual bunch of delightful things happen as a result of things I’ve written in this space over the last 25 years.

Earlier in the summer, I received an email from a woman named Angela, in Switzerland, referencing this post I wrote 17 years ago about my late friend Sandra Furrer. 

Angela and Sandra met, in the mid-1980s, when Sandra apprenticed in the Swiss hotel where Angela was working. They became fast friends, and were part of each others lives until Sandra’s untimely death at age 39.

In her email, Angela wrote that she and her husband Beat were travelling to Prince Edward Island in August, and wondered if I might facilitate their visiting people and places that were part of Sandra’s life. I put out a call, and was able to connect them with several. Then, when Angela and Beat visited, Lisa and I had lunch with them at The Cork & Cast, which, in a former life, was the Black Forest Café that Sandra owned. They were a delightful couple, and we enjoyed meeting them. 

A meeting that happened because I’d taken a few minutes, a couple of decades ago, to memorialize Sandra.

Memorializing also came to play last month, when I received an email due this 2010 blog post about Len Russo. A friend of Len’s in Halifax, where he’d moved in the years following his time here on the Island, wrote:

Though we knew him for 25 years, we knew very little, for certain, about him. We were hoping you might know more about when he came to PEI?

I didn’t, in fact,  know Len all that well. He was friends with Catherine Hennessey, and it was at Catherine’s house that I first met him, as I wrote in 2010:

I met Len for the first time when he walked into Catherine Hennessey’s old house on Dorchester Street one Saturday afternoon.

I was sitting at the kitchen table talking to Catherine about something or another and Len walked in a started, unbidden, making focaccia (it was very good). And then he left.

After that first meeting I’d see him around and about, but I didn’t know much about his back story. I suggested the correspondent contact Paul MacNeill, Publisher of the Eastern Graphic newspaper where Len’s column, referenced in my blog post, had once run.

A few days later, Len’s obituary appeared, and I learned a lot about the man I knew only a little about, starting:

This obituary is based on Len’s own words, a series of autobiographical poems he wrote late in life, looking back and reflecting.

They made it clear that there was a consistency behind the bewildering variety of jobs he took and places he lived. He never once wavered in his youthful commitment to Dorothy Day’s Distributionism, even as he reflected that most all his companions had moved on to conspicuous consumption.

A few weeks later, Paul MacNeill published a column about Len, and about the rabbit hole that he fell into as a result of Len’s death and this blog. Paul began:

It started with sad news. Len Russo, who many long-time Graphic readers will remember for his 1990s slice of life column, Looking Around, had died in Halifax.

Len was one of those writers who saw the world in human terms. He’d stroll into a government office (back when the public was allowed to stroll into a government office) and chat with everyone from secretaries to deputy ministers. Those chats and observations became fodder for columns that put a human face on the public service.

As Paul continued, in a way I am certain would delight Len, the trail led to the late Andy Wells, whose daughter Krista had also contacted Paul about Len’s death:

I had heard of Andy Wells, but did not fully appreciate his contribution to this province. He was principal secretary to Alex Campbell, perhaps the most consequential premier in our history. His four terms brought the Development Plan, which took PEI kicking and screaming into the 20th century. Running water was delivered to rural homes. UPEI was created as our primary school of higher education with the merger of St Dunstan’s University and Prince of Wales College – a feat of political nerve and negotiation that rivals any. The public school system was reformed.

When I don’t know something – and this happens more often than I care to acknowledge – Google is sent to find me what I need to know. High in the list of Andy Wells hits was a link to a 2009 interview with Wells by Peter Rukavina. It is 16 minutes of Prince Edward Island gold. Wells died in 2012.

I loved doing that interview with Andy, and I’m proud that I play a small role in keeping memory of his contributions to the province alive.

While all of this was playing out, I got another email, this one from Peggy Smith in Saint John, New Brunswick. Peggy was great friends with the Cudmore family, late of Charlottetown’s Henderson & Cudmore, and had found a photo of Beth and Brian Cudmore I posted on the occasion of Beth’s death in 2011.

Peggy is a painter—she painted portraits of most of the Cudmore children and grandchildren, she told me—and, at 90, paints still. One of the Cudmores described her to me as someone with “a kind heart and a vivacious laugh,” and it’s never a bad day to hear from someone like that.

I have been writing here for 25 years—a good chunk of my adult life—and in the 10,000-odd posts I’ve written there has been obscure writing about technical niches, the entire life and times of my now-23-year-old daughter, a lot of petulant misdirected midlife anger, sadness, grief, love, hope. I’ve grown up here; writing these words has been, and remains, an integral part of my operating system.

It’s a web, a very personal one that’s part of a worldwide one: the posts I write are  breadcrumbs—public, searchable, hyperlinked—that connect me to you, and bits of my past to bits of your past. I love it when a bit of happenstance web magic happens, and connects me with a tenant of my grandfather’s, the friend of a late friend, or a painter with vivacious laugh.

Back in 2011, when I purchased the Golding Jobber № 8 from Bill and Gertie Campbell, I spent a morning with Bill, in their shop in Tryon, learning the ins and outs of it. It was, in essence, a very compressed course in running a job shop with a workhorse letterpress at the centre, taught by someone who'd forged a close relationship with the press.

One of the things Bill showed me--I suspect because it was one of the last jobs he'd printed on the press, and likely the sort of job he did quite often--was how to print envelopes.

Envelopes are tricky beasts: if you pick one up and pull it apart, you'll see that, depending where on the envelope you're looking, some areas have two layers of paper, some have three layers, and some have four. If you're hitting the envelope with type that's all at the same height, and the type hits different areas of the envelope, the printing is going to be inconsistent in relation to the "hills" and the "valleys" the type hits.

What Bill showed me was how to create a set of "shims" under the envelope to make up the difference; to fill in the valleys and flatten the hills, so to speak.

Today I had a chance to put that learning to use, as I set out to print 9x12 inch envelopes to hold This Box is for Good boxes. Here's what I ended up with:

This took some sorting out to arrive at; after some futile "winging it" attempts, I sat down and charted it all out:

My shims weren't perfect--there are still some hairline inconsistencies in the final printing--but the result was a lot better than if I'd had no shims at all. One thing that really improved things (and I think Bill showed me this, and I'd forgotten), is covering the shims with a top-sheet of paper. This makes things far less fragile, and smooths out some of the intersections of hills and valleys.

It was nice to be able to put my 13 year old learning to use today; I owe Bill and Gertie a great debt for letting me become the next caretaker of the Golding Jobber, and for setting me off with just enough knowledge to figure out the rest on my own. An endless, ongoing task.

Years ago, when I was equipping my first print shop, Alan Preston, then personable owner of Hearts & Flowers, gifted me a used paper cutter, of the type you might remember from public school. I’ve been using it ever since, and it’s served me well: I’ve made tens of thousands of cuts with it  

In recent months, though, it's been clear that the blade was getting dull, and the paper "cutter" was becoming more a paper "slasher," with unsatisfying results. Intervention was needed.

I have been a neighbour of Langille Sharpening Service, two blocks away at 111 Hillsborough Street, for almost 25 years. I'd never been inside, and I'd always been curious, if a little afraid of what I might find. A few weeks ago I decided to throw caution to the wind and I called them up, explained my need, and their hearty reply was "bring the whole thing in, board and all, and we'll sharpen both the blade and the part it cuts against."

I dropped it off on a Friday, got my claim ticket, and picked it up as scheduled the following Monday.

It's like a brand new paper cutter! The best $40 I've spent in a long time.

I highly recommend Langille's for all your industrial sharpening needs.

Twelve years ago in this space I wrote about Vance Bridges, in a post about being a member of the Central Farmer's Co-op:

I had an up and down relationship with the coop after that: I went to every Annual General meeting and was dismayed by fellow members referring to the coop in the third person (“when are you guys going to get better peas?” instead of “how can we get better peas?”). Dismayed enough that, after a rousing speech by Vance Bridges I stood up and committed to shopping only at the Coop for the next year (an announcement I made without consulting Catherine, primary buyer-of-groceries in our family; that didn’t go over well).

Vance was a co-op force to be reckoned with: he was a true believer, a passionate advocate, a clear explainer. 

At that same meeting I recall him predicting that, once Loblaw's established itself in the PEI grocery market (this was the days before the Superstore had arrived), they, along with Sobeys, would enter a dog-eat-dog war that would eventually force the co-op out of the market. 

This was his rallying cry to convince co-op members to stay loyal. 

It wasn't enough, alas, and Vance's prediction came true: there are co-ops still hanging on in rural PEI, but Co-op Atlantic sold its grocery distribution arm to Sobeys, and the urban grocery market is essentially a Sobeys-Superstore duopoly now, and we are all the worse for it.

Vance Bridges died last week, and we are all the worse for that as well.

Not only was Vance a dedicated member of the co-op movement, he was, as his obituary related, an "ultimate community activist," volunteering in activities and organization wide and various.

I will remember Vance for his energy, his wit, his commitment.

He will be missed.

A year ago last week I started working out at Kinetic Fitness with coach Cayla Jardine-Hunter. As I wrote back in December, after I’d been at it for just three months:

Do I love it?

Not completely. I keep going, week after week. I haven’t faltered. Some mornings I wake up and think “fuck, it’s Tuesday.” Some mornings, though, I think, honestly, “I get to work out today!”

And nothing beats the feeling of just having worked out, no matter how exhausting it is.

That’s much the same place I find myself a year in, with an increase in the “I get to work out today!” and a decrease in the “fuck, it’s Tuesday.”

Nine months in I wrote again:

I’m here to write about a brief moment, in the middle of an up-down (oddly, the most taxing of the three movements for me), where I realized that the only way to finish 15 rounds was going to be to treat each and every movement as an accomplishment unto itself. I wasn’t going to get to the end by focusing on what I’d done, or how much was to come; all I could do is one up-down. Or one thruster. Or one chest to bar.

I don’t reach that level of presence every time, but I get there more every week. 

Last week, part of temporarily switching my workout from 9:15 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. for a few weeks, I found myself in the gym at the end of a long day as opposed to at the beginning. There was a lot of skipping — single unders in gym parlance — and if I’ve learned anything about skipping it’s that the devil is found in overthinking it. It turns out that being tired after a long day is a great way to not overthink, and I killed the single unders, because I didn’t have the energy to think about skipping, I just “did it.”

Over 52 weeks I’ve worked out about 85 times; I missed some workouts due to travel, or illness, or holidays. But when I’ve been able to workout, I’ve gone, consistently. And somewhere in there it became a habit; that’s a big deal for me, after a very long time as a largely-sedentary person.

I have a huge sense of accomplishment about keeping this up, one that extends beyond the bounds of physical fitness, and into simply realizing that personal change, new habits, a new sense of agency, is possible at any time in life.

I’ll be back in the gym tomorrow.

PS: Cayla has space in the 9:15 a.m. Tuesday and Thursday “micro-group” classes. You don’t need any experience to join, you don’t need to be a “gym person,” or really any particular kind of person. I can vouch for her skills as a coach, and I can vouch for the power of working out with others, which only serves to amplify, through collegiality, the entire experience. You can learn more on her website.

December 2019 was a strange time for us to buy a car. Catherine had been in and out of hospital, and was not doing well (she would die just over a month later), but she was enthusiastic about the idea nonetheless. Perhaps she took some comfort from offering me agency to scratch my electric vehicle itch. Perhaps she needed a distraction as much as I did. Perhaps she was simply as intrigued by the idea as I was.

Regardless of the reasoning, after an extended test drive in early November, we traded our 20 year old VW Jetta in for a 2016 Kia Soul EV in early December. I’ve been driving it ever since, and have become a happy convert to life with an electric vehicle.

On the day we first test drove the Soul, the estimated range was 155 km, as shown here on the range estimator on the dashboard:

On the day we picked up the car, a month later, the range was down to 146 km, but that wasn’t unexpected, as it was a month closer to winter by that point, and the range in all EVs goes down as the temperature falls.

In the five years since, I’ve seen both that seasonal rise and fall of range, and a gradual decrease in overall range (also not unexpected with EV batteries in general). Last summer I was down to about 110 km in warm-weather range, and last winter, during really cold times, it could sink as low as 70 km.

This summer, though, things took a more precipitous dive, and I was getting a report of 75 km of range at the best of times. 

We use the Soul primary for local trips, so 75 km of range was generally more than enough, but it did mean that a trip from the camper on the north shore back into town — about 45 km — required an in-town charge before returning, and that was annoying. And it meant charging more frequently.

As the weather started to turn cooler this fall, I suddenly remembered that the battery in the 2016 Kia Soul EV comes with an 8 year warranty:

High Voltage Battery Capacity Coverage
The Lithium-Ion Polymer Battery (EV Battery) Capacity warranty coverage period is 8 years or 160,000 kilometres from the Date of First Service, whichever comes first, for capacity loss below 70% of the original battery capacity. This warranty covers repairs needed to return battery capacity to 70% of original battery capacity. If possible, the EV battery components will be repaired or replaced, and the original EV Battery will be returned to the vehicle. If necessary, the EV Battery will be replaced with either a new or remanufactured Lithium-Ion Polymer Battery.

On realizing this, I logged into the Kia website to look up the “Date of First Service” for the car and found it was October 31, 2016. Meaning my battery warranty was set to expire at the end of next month.

Reading various online forums about the actual practice of obtaining a new warranty I read a lot of stories about how that “capacity loss below 70%” was calculated, including suggestions that even if actual range was falling below 70%—and it clearly was in my case—it was the “state of health” of the battery that was calculated, and that might not relate directly to the range. The general sense I got was that Kia was recalcitrant about battery replacement, and I’d have to fight my way through their counter arguments.

Nonetheless, I thought it was worth a shot, so I booked an appointment with Discover Kia here in Charlottetown for a diagnosis, and I dropped it off for the day on September 4. Later that afternoon, I received an SMS with a link to a video (I really like this aspect of Kia service):

Needless to say, I was very pleasantly surprised by this diagnosis:

Good afternoon, Peter. This is [REDACTED] from Discover Kia, updating you on your 2016 KIA Soul EV, regarding the health of a high voltage battery. With the low range that you are experiencing. Our technician checked the state of health of the high voltage battery, and yes, it is low. It is at around less than 45 %. So we have ordered a battery for you. As soon as it comes, we will schedule for the replacement. Thank you very much for choosing Discover Kia. 

When I picked up the car I was told I’d be contacted when the replacement battery arrived; a few weeks later I got that call, and, after leaving the car overnight for the service, the following morning I got another video:

The video was an update on progress of the battery replacement:

Good morning, this is [REDACTED] from Discover Kia, giving you an update on your 2016 Kia Soul, here for high voltage battery, uh, 28. 8 kilowatt hour battery replacement. The work is underway, as you can see here, that’s the battery pack. Goes underneath here. Uh, we will let you know as soon as it is complete. Thank you very much for choosing Discover Kia.

If you’re eagle-eyed, you can see what I believe are both the new battery and the old battery in that video; these were a lot smaller than I imagined them to be.

Later that day I picked up the Soul. The service advisors told me the warranty cost to Kia was in the range of about $6,000, so I count myself lucky to have acted.

When I got back in the car, I was pleasantly surprised to find the estimated range reported at 189 km:

This was 34 km more range than when I bought the car, and 39 km more range than Kia’s originally-reported estimated range of 150 km for the vehicle when it was brand new.

In other words, it’s like getting a brand new Kia Soul, 8 years into its life.

Of course the Soul, in respects other than its propulsion, is still a Kia Soul, and while it lacks the oil and fuel and related maintenance, it still needs regular brake work, its air conditioning failed this summer, and there’s a little rust starting to show on the hatchback. So it’s not quite like getting a brand new car.

But 189 km of range upgrades the possible roles of the car in our daily lives: we can now easily get to the camper and back (twice, if we drive economically); we can easily get to Summerside and back; and even driving to Halifax is well within the realm of possibility (when the range was less, there was too far between charging stations between Aulac and Stewiacke to make it possible).