Fueled by a Black Milk Tea from the Formosa Tea House and a House Burger from Cedar’s, my other project for today was to take this website and teleport it into the present era of web standards. To be honest, I have all but ignored Cascading Style Sheets until now: I’m a content and applications guy, and while I appreciate and try to practise Good Design, I’ve never been one of those webheads to enter into protracted discussions of the minutae of browsers and browser technologies.

But you cannot stay mired in the past forever, and, in part inspired by Scoble’s recent efforts in this regard, today I renovated the site to conform with these modernistic standards. It remains a work in progress, but much of the site has turned over this new leaf.

One byproduct of all this is that the site may cause early web browsers to catch on fire, kill your dog, or cause your roof to leak. You have been warned. The solution? Upgrade your browser to one released in this century. It’s easy, quick, and your life will improve dramatically.

Along with the invisible changes behind the scenes, I used the opportunity to make some aesthetic changes to the site: the body text, by default, is bigger, and the stuff that used to live along the right side of the page has been either eliminated or moved down and to the left. My eyes are getting older (as are the eyes of my readers, presumably), so this is a welcome change.

Deep in the bowels of our Reinvented World Headquarters lies the Secret Data Centre, home of the server that drives this website and our other hosted sites.

As I recounted here earlier I’ve been using my iBook more and more as my main working machine. For the past month this has meant that my office desk has been covered by my IBM-PC pushed over to one side with my iBook teetering amongst the mess.

Gradually I’ve been weening myself from my PC applications, and I’ve pared my need for the PC down to two applications: Xara and Quicken; everything else I’m doing on my iBook.

My momentary bachelorhood afforded an opportunity to clean my office today, and as part of this process I decided I was ready to relegate the PC to the Secret Data Centre. And so there it sits, lonely and tired. It’s still on the network, so I can screen share with it (using VNC) when I need to. But it’s out of the way, and my desk is now a pristine expanse of pretend wood punctuated by the iBook, the telephone and a desk lamp.

There was an odd quality to the downtown mise en scene today. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was going on until I realized that it was Thanksgiving weekend, and the university students were home.

When we first moved to Prince Edward Island, in the spring of 1993, we though that perhaps there had been a strange plague that had killed all of the people between 20 and 30. There were young people — high school age and younger — and middle aged people, and senior citizens. But no hip young’nes.

I think much of our feeling comes from having moved from Peterborough, Ontario, a city where the life of the city and the life of the university are inseparably fused, to Charlottetown where the university is an isolated academic colossus that happens to live within the city limits.

In Peterborough you can’t help noticing, walking downtown, that you are in a University Town, whether from the people that you meet walking down the street, the plethora of student-focused businesses, or the colourful posters that grace every telephone pole.

In Charlottetown you notice that you’re in a town that happens to have a university only if you happen to be outside Myron’s at 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning or in the University Ave. Subway sandwich shop after dining hall closes for the night.

This is not to suggest that UPEI isn’t a vital and important school. It’s simply that it’s a vital and important school that doesn’t have much to do with the community that surrounds it on a day to day basis. This is partly due to its location at the edge of suburbia in a city with no public transit, partly due to the inordinate number of Islanders who attend while living at home, and partly, I think, due to a difference in the role of the university.

My sense is that, in large part, people go to UPEI to get an education and move on to the real stuff of life; many at Trent saw the education in itself as part of the real stuff, and revelled in it (and often hung around in it for a decade in the process).

In any case, the result is that when you’re sitting downtown drinking coffee in Charlottetown your table mate is far more likley to be a computer programmer from the Department of Veteran’s Affairs than it is a proto-anarchist animal rights activist.

But to my original point…

This weekend is the weekend that the teen Islander diaspora, freshly packed off to universities across the country, returns home for the first time.

And in the arc that is the life of the educated Canadian middle class, there is no more transforming an experience than the first taste of freedom that the first month of university affords.

You leave home a shy, dependent, cloistered teen waiting for your life to begin and, blamo, one month later you’re happily discussing the impact of Satre’s thinking on the neo-intellectualist peace movements of 1950s Berlin while drinking a double espresso with an absinthe chaser.

The radiation given off by this collection of teens with newfound freedom is palpable, and it’s this that I picked up on this morning during my short walk up University Avenue through the left bank of Charlottetown.

On Tuesday morning everything will return to normal.

I don’t recall Thanksgiving from my childhood. I’m sure it was there, and I’m sure we ate turkey, etc. But if it was a substantial and important holiday, it was mostly so because we got a day off school.

As such, I was unprepared for the Important Role that Thanksgiving plays in the life of Catherine’s family and, indeed, in the life of Islanders. (As an aside: people like Catherine, from the Ottawa Valley, are in some very deep and profound ways, exactly like Islanders).

So while my family is strung out along almost the entire length of the Trans-Canada Highway this Thanksgiving weekend — literally from coast to prarie to interior to coast — a good part of Catherine’s extended family is gathering tomorrow at Aunt Ioma’a house in Godfrey, Ontario (halfway between Kingston and Kaladar) for Thanksgiving dinner.

Here on the Island, I have been overwhelmed by the concern shown by my friends and neighbours, both physical and virtual, for my Thanksgiving well-being.

I am happy to report that I will be spending Thanksgiving Sunday in the company of my friend Ann, her consort, the much lauded God in Aubergine Jacket, her daughter, the Babysitter from Heaven, and a random scatterling of other interesting people. Apparently Ann is basting the walnuts as we speak.

To Kevin, who I’ve known almost since setting foot on the Island, and to Alan, who I’ve never met face to face but to whom I am distantly related, thank you for your invitations, veiled and otherwise.

And, in the immortal words of Les Nesman, Happy…. Thanks…. Giving!

It cost me $15 to get my flu shot this morning. I suspect that it costs the health system much more than $15 per capita to deal with people who have the flu. Shouldn’t flu shots be free. And if they were, wouldn’t things net out to a savings for the province (and the Province)?

Catherine and Oliver are off to Ontario for a long, long 20 days. It already seems like forever, and it’s been less than 24 hours. A friend told me about taking his daughter to summer camp for the first time, and coming very close to turning the car around several times on the drive home to go back and get her; now I Understand what he was talking about.

The absence of Catherine and Oliver means a temporary return to the drive thru for me. Not for 3 meals a day, 7 days a week, of course (I hope!), but sometimes when it’s 3:00 p.m. and I look up to realize that I’ve forgotten to eat lunch, there’s no choice but to head out in the car, lest low blood sugar result in total paralysis.

If you read QSR magazine — and I do, faithfully, every month — you know that the drive thru has become the heart of the quick service (aka “fast food”) restaurant industry. A good portion of the ads in QSR are for better speaker systems, better timing system, better window systems, and so on.

And in the world of the drive thru, the minute is king. The more customers you can shovel through in a given amount of time, the better you’re doing, both because you’re increasing your revenue per minute, and because customers will gravitate to the drive thru with the fastest service.

It amazes me how much variation in drive thru quality there is here in Charlottetown in this regard.

The undisputed kings of the drive thru universe here on the Island are the D.P. Murphy-controlled TIm Horton’s and Wendy’s restaurants. And the undisputed king of this bunch is the Wendy’s on Grafton Street.

The drive thru at that location is so good it’s scary: it’s very rare that, by the short time it takes to drive from the speaker to the pickup window, your server isn’t waiting, hanging half way out the window, with your order in one hand and the proper change (in various predictive combinations) waiting in the other. And this applies both at 2:00 a.m. and in the middle of the lunch rush.

Contrast this with service at other restaurants — Harvey’s comes to mind — and it’s like Wendy’s is in some other service universe. It’s not unusual to wait for 10 or 15 minutes at other drive thrus, and it’s obvious from the behaviour of the staff that they don’t really give a damn about, well, much of anything, let alone how quickly they get you your food.

I have no idea how Danny Murphy and his staff make this happen. I imagine it’s a combination of good management, good training and good hiring. And the systems to back all that up. I know from talking to people who’ve worked in the industry that even getting one of those three right is difficult, so getting the magical combination of the three honed enough to result in drive thru times of less than a minute is tantamount to a miracle.

In the weeks to come, I know I’ll be experiencing too many of those minute-long waits for my own good.

My late grandmother Nettie worked here. She was not Finnish. Neither am I. Nonetheless.

Talking to my mother this morning, I was reminded that Nettie once told me that to be allowed to become an employee there, she had to join the Finnish Communist Party. I’m fairly confident that this would be considered illegal today. Mom also was pretty sure that it’s in the Hoito where Nettie met my late grandfather Daniel Rukavina.

Which, in turn, reminded me of a song I wrote once, during those days when I sat on the back porch and wrote songs.

Middle of the 30s, 1936
He was mining gold way up in the sticks
She was waiting tables at the Hoito
25 cents for a meal, dontcha know

Nettie and Dan, Nettie and Dan
Oh they loved each other as much as anyone can…

The Hoito is in the same building as the Finnish Labour Temple. You don’t hear a lot about Labour Temples these days, but the way Nettie characterized them was a place where you went on Sundays if you were left of centre and irreligious. She used to talk about sitting on Sunday mornings at the front window of her house with her sister snickering at the Orthodox Catholics carrying their bread to church. Later they would go to the Labour Temple and play the mandolin.

We come by our iconoclasm honestly, in other words.

Mom and Dad and brother Steve are going to stop at the Hoito for lunch on their way from Saskatoon to Carlisle in early November. They’re moving Steve’s Life Stuff cross-country so he can start a new life as a Montrealer.

They’re also going to stop in Cochrane, which is Mom’s birthplace, and, I discover almost every day, home to most of the North Americans of consequence born during the twentieth century.

Oliver and I are in Halifax this weekend, having some important Father and Son Bonding Time before he and Catherine head off to Ontario for almost a month for some much needed grandparent, great-grandparent, aunt and uncle visiting.

On our way to the ferry we were listening to CBC Radio and heard Bill Richardson invite listeners to come down to the special CBC Train at the station in Halifax. The train, a joint project of VIA Rail and the CBC, is a celebration of CBC television’s 50th anniversary.

So, at ten o’clock this morning we headed to downtown Halifax to visit the train. Except when we arrived, there was a sign at the door that said Private Function. Given that we had a personal invitation from Bill Richardson, we were not daunted by this.

And so we opened the door and walked in.

“Are you a CBC employee?,” the friendly gatekeeper asked.

“No,” Oliver and I replied.

“Are you a former CBC employee?,” she asked.

“Ahhh,” I thought quickly, “yes!”

“Go right in,” she replied, handing us CBC-branded brown paper bags as she did.

The secret employees-only inner sanctum turned out to be the morning preview of the attraction open to civilians in the afternoon. Besides free pastries and juice, it appeared as though the public and the employees (I mean “we employees”) got the same fun.

Inside the train was a neat, if abbreviated, collection of CBC artifacts, including Mr. Dressup’s tickle trunk, The Friendly Giant’s castle and set of small chairs, and, oddly enough, Fred Roger’s first “Land of Make Believe Trolley,” which I didn’t get the whole story on (although my guess is that we traded Fred Rogers to PBS for Ernie Coombs and a first round draft pick).

It was as odd being in a train station full of CBC people as it was being in a hotel full of librarians at the APLA conference a couple of years ago: CBC people are certainly of a type, and it was odd to have all that CBC energy concentrated in one place.

Fortunately Oliver and I didn’t win the door prize, so we didn’t have to claim that I was the weekend anchor on Compass or a key grip on Land and Sea.

Later in the day we ate Japanese for lunch, Indian for dinner, and Oliver and Yolanda (the daughter of our friends Bob and Yvonne) held hands.

As I type this by LCDlight in our room in the Holiday Inn, with Air Force One on the television and Oliver asleep in his pen, I’m prone to think, for the 1000th time, how strong Catherine must be to look after Oliver day in, day out, day after day: I’m exhausted.

The down side of our trip: Catherine and I celebrate our 12th anniversary today, she in one province and me in another. We’ll be home tomorrow.

Can someone who understands the law better than I explain why, if the following sentence (from this CBC story) is true:

Under an agreement between the oil companies, Irving Oil will become the the distributor for all of P.E.I. and New Brunswick, while Imperial Oil will be the distributor in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

Conspiracy

45. (1) Every one who conspires, combines, agrees or arranges with another person

(a) to limit unduly the facilities for transporting, producing, manufacturing, supplying, storing or dealing in any product,

…

is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or to a fine not exceeding ten million dollars or to both.

Several years ago, both Leone Bagnall and I were on the board of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust. I needed to get in touch with Leone about something, and I phoned her repeatedly over the course of several days and never reached her. “Where is she?” I asked myself in frustration.

The next night on Compass there was video of her receiving the Order of Canada in Ottawa. That explained that.

Yesterday I had business with the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut (never let it be said that my job is boring), and sent off an email requesting a reply as quickly as possible.

Today I received a reply with an apology that the matter couldn’t be attended to until next week because, well, the Queen was arriving today and everyone was preoccupied.

Queen and Country — always slowing me down.