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.

I’m forever looking for ways to make finding library books easier, and recently I found something that I use almost every day, a “shortcut” for iOS and macOS that let’s me easily search the PEI Public Library Service catalogue.

If you have a Mac or an iPhone, and some basic familiarity with “Shortcuts,” you can download the shortcut here.

In operation on the Mac, it looks like this:

I’m simply clicking “Search Library” in the dock, getting prompted for a book title, and the library catalogue opens in Safari with a search for that book.

In the Shortcuts app it looks like this:

Some cool things about this, part of the magic that Shortcuts brings:

• It works equally well on my iPhone as on my MacBook Air.
• It works with Siri: I can say “Hey Siri, Search Library” and I’ll get prompted for a book title, which I can speak, and the search will open in my browser.
• One my iPhone, it also works as a “Share Sheet” item meaning that I can highlight a book title, click “Share” and select “Search Library” and the library catalogue search will open, like this:

Shortcuts isn’t quite “HyperCard for the 2020s,” but it’s a pretty amazing piece of kit to have built into all the Apple things.

I was writing to my Dutch friend Frank this morning about his post Renewal.

Reflecting on my own move away from paid work 18 months ago, I realized that work, for decades, had been my all-powerful trump card.

If I was bored, or distracted, or annoyed; if I needed time to myself, or wanted to get out of doing something, “I’ve got some work to do” was the reason that could never be questioned.

It was a superpower that, along with income and colleagues, I gave up when I stopped working. A superpower I was never until now so conscious of.

What I need to learn to do instead is how to set boundaries, stake out time and space for myself.

I’m not good at that: I’ve never had to be.

I find myself taking perverse comfort in work-like activities—paying bills, maintaining this website, filing taxes—because they allow be a small measure of that trump card.

Realizing that I can allow myself the luxury of reading all day without needing a database memory issue to get me there is something I’m ever so slowly easing myself into. 

John Dale was right: once you start baking with sourdough, it’s hard to stop. This morning we celebrated Lisa for Stepmother’s Day with sourdough cinnamon rolls. 

I missed the COVID sourdough wave, but recent developments have welcomed me in, late to the party.

First, Dave Atkinson wrote, in his weekly email newsletter, about his sourdough revelation:

Modern bread is made with refined wheat. A good chunk of the grain has been discarded. And it’s made with instant yeast. That’s not how we made bread for the first 99.99% of its history. Before a hundred years ago, it you ate bread, it was the whole grain. More importantly, it was made through fermentation. It was made with sourdough.

It turns out, a lot of people with gluten insensitivity can eat sourdough bread. I had somehow not heard this. The act of slow fermenting changes the structure of gluten making it easier to digest.

Next, Jeremy Cherfas recalled the COVID sourdough wave, and linked to a helpful earlier post, with a lot of helpful comments, about sourdough starter.

Finally, as if the above was queuing me up for action, my sister-in-law Karen offered me some sourdough starter (née her chiropractor’s sourdough starter), which was enough to push me over the edge.

I started out slowly, making a couple of loaves of bread, graduated to pizza dough last week, and over the last 24 hours I made bagels. Bagels that, if I don’t say so myself, are rather amazing.

Here’s the process in photos.

I used this recipe, which called for 12 hours of letting the dough rise, so, after mixing everything together in a stand-up mixer with the dough hook, I left the dough in a metal bowl, covered, overnight. When I woke up this morning, it had doubled in size:

I divided the dough into eight pieces…

…and shaped the pieces into balls, and then poked a hole into each one, and shaped them into bagels:

I let the bagels rise, covered, for another hour:

After this second rise, I boiled the bagels, four at a time, two minutes per side:

After giving them a little time to cool down, I baked the bagels on parchment paper in a 425ºF oven for 25 minutes. The emerged golden brown:

Once the bagels had cooled, I sliced them up for lunch. They had a pleasantly chewy crust, and a pleasantly bagel-like interior:

Needless to say, we enjoyed sandwiches on bagels for lunch: