Similar But Different : A Christmas Poem.

Noting for posterity that (a) we are expecting our first significant snowfall tonight and (b) my appointment to have my winter tires installed is tomorrow morning.

I might not know much, but I do know there are 1,440 minutes in a day. 86,400 seconds. Such are the things one commits to memory over a half a life in service to North America’s preeminent periodical concerned with matters of time and dates and the heavens.

If I ask a computer the time(), it will tell me the number of seconds that have passed since January 1, 1970 (don’t ask). As I write this number is 1638967256.

If I want to know what this number will be tomorrow morning at the same time I simply add 86,400 to it: 1639053656.

I can double check that by asking my computer to turn that into a human-readable date:

print strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M", 1639053656);

To which it dutifully replies:

2021-12-09 08:40

But this isn’t a post about coding, it’s a post about how Beau Miles set out to plant 1,440 trees in a day.

In an unfortunate but understandable echo of last year, New Years levees have been advised against for Prince Edward Island.

I sent out this note to the unofficial list of levee organizers that I unofficially maintain to compile the unofficial list:

Hello Past New Year’s Levee Organizers,

With the announcement from Hon. Antoinette Perry that there will be no New Year’s Levee held at Government House on January 1, 2022, and advice against holding levees from the Chief Public Health Office this afternoon, I wanted to let you all know that I will not be maintaining a list of levees for New Year’s Day 2022.

Best wishes for 2022 regardless, and I hope to see you all back on the levee circuit in 2023.

Peter Rukavina
Keeper of the Unofficial List of Levees

There’s a new shop offering Japanese products in the Shops of St. Avards in Charlottetown, Sumikko Market.

I read a CBC News story about it back in October, but driving by St. Avards in the time since I could never seem to find it. On Saturday I decided to double down, and found it is, indeed, there, right beside “Everything IT.”

While the shop sells all manner of Japanese sundries, from candy to iced coffee, the standout for me is that from Monday to Friday, over the lunch hour, they serve onigiri–Japanese rice balls–something that heretofore there’s not been a source for in Charlottetown. They have two types, tuna and grilled salmon. And they are lovely: just the thing for a quick lunch or snack.

It’s only nine days until the Halcyon Days begin!

It’s a longer story but let’s just say that it ends tragically with Ceyx drowning at sea. Grieving Alcyone was about to throw herself into the sea to join her beloved husband. But the gods took pity on the pair, transforming them into halcyons, with the power to still the stormy seas for 14 days near the time of the winter solstice while they hatched their young.

I start with a list of the months, in a text file, months.txt:

JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER

Using my text editor–Sublime in my case, but you can use anything that supports find-and-replace with regular expressions, I replace:

(.)

with:

$1\n

In other words, I replace every letter with that letter followed by a carriage newline.

Which results in:

J
A
N
U
A
R
Y

F
E
B
R
U
A
R
Y

M
A
R
C
H

A
P
R
I
L

M
A
Y

J
U
N
E

J
U
L
Y

A
U
G
U
S
T

S
E
P
T
E
M
B
E
R

O
C
T
O
B
E
R

N
O
V
E
M
B
E
R

D
E
C
E
M
B
E
R

Finally I use some sort and uniq magic to product a frequency count:

# sort months.txt | uniq -c
  11 
   7 A
   5 B
   3 C
   1 D
  11 E
   1 F
   1 G
   1 H
   1 I
   3 J
   2 L
   5 M
   3 N
   3 O
   2 P
   9 R
   2 S
   3 T
   6 U
   1 V
   4 Y

I’m now set to set type, knowing I need a font with at least 11 Es, 9 Rs, and so on.

And here’s the result:

Driven to a rectangle (where, as it turns out, the real shortages–of space material–emerged):

And a proof pulled:

Between the annual flu shot, and the COVID regime, it’s needle season. And with the approval of COVID for younger kids, it is, I can say from experience, a time of great anxiety for families of needle averse kids.

What makes needle season, if not joyous, at least palatable in our family is using EMLA creme to numb the injection site. You can buy this at any pharmacy, and the kit includes creme and a patch to cover it; it gets applied an hour before the shot.

The positive effects are twofold: it injects a dose of agency and control into a situation that otherwise seems overwhelming and lacking both, and it numbs the feeling of the needle (which, to be honest, is secondary).

Using EMLA hasn’t made needle days stress-free for Olivia, but it’s lowered the anxiety volume enough to make them possible and safe for all involved.

(EMLA, by the way, stands for Eutectic Mixture of Local Anæsthetics, something that, in an age of pharmaceutical names like Refluxatrix and Volupustonate, is refreshing simple.)

The other thing I recommend if you’re the caregiver of the needled is to talk to the pharmacist, nurse, or doctor in advance to give them a heads up. This will help prepare them, and you, for what’s to come.

And from Olivia this advice: look away, perhaps into the eyes of the person supporting you, instead of looking at the needle. It helps, she says.

Olivia has just had her COVID booster—they opened the floodgates to everyone 18+ yesterday and I jumped on an appointment for this morning, around the corner at Lawtons, minutes later—and it was quick and injury-free.