Sparrow writes about the death of his mother in The Sun:

How to describe what I’m going through? It’s like breaking up with your girlfriend, if your girlfriend had also given birth to you.

I made this Coconut Chickpea Rice for supper tonight (ingredients and recipe in the video description); it’s very good. It also makes it clearer why we once went to war over spices.

Every once in a while I get an email from Google letting me know that a photo that I took in 2017 of Clover in Burlington, MA, has been seen some awesome number of times — 1.5 million was the count today:

It turns out that this is because if you look up Clover in Burlington on Google Maps, it’s my photo that’s featured:

There are scores of photos attached to that Google Maps listing; I have no idea what makes my photo the one that’s deemed worthy of illustrating the location, but I’m happy to have it do so, as I’ve always had a good meal there, and I like the Clover concept.

I especially like the blog the company keeps that chronicles its mistakes.

It’s been two months since I launched Queen Square Press as both an imprint and an online shop for my creative goods.

It’s been a resounding success, both financially (in its own modest way) and spiritually (there’s nothing like the feeling of having things you dreamed up and made by hand wing their way around the world).

Here are the first two months of results:

• Orders: 44
• Revenue: $1,173.78
• Most Popular Products
  • You Are On Mute tag (sold out) - 20
  • MMXX! card (sold out) - 19
  • Clear Cloud Rain Snow - 10
  • Tidings of Comfort and Joy - 9
  • Remember Other Places - 8
  • Using Her Marbles - 8
  • Set a Goal - 7
  • Ask Questions - 5
  • I am a Canadian (sold out) - 4
  • Prince Edward Island Postcard (sold out) - 4
• Least Popular Product: Two Month Calendar (apparently I overestimated the modest-calendar market).
• Conversion Rate: 5.2%
• Shipping Country:
  • Canada - 34
  • USA - 4
  • Germany - 2
  • Denmark - 1
  • Netherlands - 1
  • Sweden - 1
• Shipping Province in Canada
  • Prince Edward Island - 19
  • Ontario - 10
  • Alberta - 2
  • British Columbia - 1
  • Nunavut - 1
  • Quebec - 1

As seems to be de rigueur these days, I may shutter the shop for a while, and launch a new “season” in the spring; for the time-being, however, it’s open for your shopping pleasure.

Oliver had a huge breakthrough in late 2020, overcoming his anxiety about crossing streets to the point where he can now happily retrieve the mail from our community mailbox, which requires crossing Grafton Street, every night. He parlayed this new superpower into a double-street-cross last week to meet our friend Sandy for coffee at Leonhard’s.

Oliver’s okay crossing at traffic lights, but not yet at intersections without lights; although this limits his terrain, it’s a terrain vastly expanded nonetheless, and a great boon to his independence.

In order to give him an idea of where he can reach within the traffic-signalled area of downtown, I used Overpass Turbo to plot the locations of the 10 traffic lights of downtown Charlottetown on a map:

When we bought our house in 2000, at 100 Prince Street, we purposefully relocated as close to the heart of the city as possible: Catherine didn’t drive, and, about to be a mother and coming off 5 years of expensive taxi rides from our house in Kingston, she was eager to be able to walk everywhere. Little did we know, at the time, that this would, 20 years later, prove to be a wise decision for the next generation as well.

Although there are 10 traffic lights downtown, the lack of lights on Fitzroy Street means it’s a hard firebreak for Oliver, so there are really only 6 lights that are relevant; even with that limitation, he can still reach most of the streets in the downtown core between the north side of Richmond and the south side of Fitzroy and the east side of Pownal and the west side of Hillsborough:

Included in this area are the downtown public transit hub, a couple of dozen restaurants, The Bookmark, two pharmacies, The Guild, the Confederation Centre of the Arts (with its theatre, art gallery and library), City Hall, the Legislative Assembly, at least two places where he can buy carrots and fresh-baked bread, and an ATM that works on the Credit Union network.

Go Oliver!

Jim Day’s piece on Using Her Marbles, Charlottetown man hopes his book helps people along difficult journey, ran in today’s Guardian.

I replenished my stock of the book over the holidays, and you can again get a copy directly from me or from The Bookmark.

It’s fitting that Jim wrote the article, as an earlier Guardian piece of his, about Catherine, is reprinted in the book; Jim retired this week and this may well have been his final story to appear in the paper.

If holidays 2020 have demonstrated anything, it’s that our current video-chatting gear, built for the desk not the living room, doesn’t scale to groups.

A comfortable couple can get by, huddled in front of a shared laptop, but otherwise, unless everyone has a web-camera device of their own, audio and video quality plummet into indecipherable fuzz (and even with a one-device-per-person setup there are bandwidth and audio feedback issues to contend with).

Oliver and I have tried a combination of a wide-angle external webcam and a screen projector, but ergonomics and site lines have proved challenging. That said, this setup has allowed for a more casual stance and freedom from having to maintain eye contact; it also provides others with more context for our setting, as they can place us in the room we’re in, as opposed to just the wall slice we’re in front of.

My ideal setup would combine individual close-up cameras for each person with a context-setting wide angle, plus smart enough audio processing to filter out feedback. A useful upsell accessory would be a downward-facing camera that could be used for object sharing, tabletop game play, and so on.

I wonder if this could be achieved with a single ceiling-mounted device that would use face-detection to carve out the individual person-streams, plus directional microphones to isolate voices.

I would be willing to engage in nightly beta testing, by way of Zoom-charades, if the opportunity presented.

“Oliver, what’s that tin on top of the brick in the corner hutch?”

“It’s a tin… Passionate Peach… tea…”

“Does it actually have tea in it?”

Oliver retrieved the tin.

It did not contain tea.

It did contain 34 British two pence coins, with dates ranging from 1971 to 1999, one “non redeemable” brass game token, one 2004 U.S. dime, and two Mexican pesos, one from 1992 and one from 1999.

We have no idea where the tin came from. It’s labeled Zhena’s Gypsy Tea, from Ojai, California, and is from 2007.

As last year, I suspect time travellers.

My year-end gift to myself was a Baronfig Bolt ballpoint pen. It writes like a dream, and feels like it’s from the future.

I found the crank for our vestigial pasta maker last week (I’d given it up for lost), and with an unusual surplus of Iris eggs in the house, I seized the opportunity to make fresh pasta for the first time.

It was not a perfect plan, as I only had Speerville “whole white flour” in the pantry, but as a beta test it worked out surprisingly well. And about as simple a recipe as can be: 2½ cups of flour, five eggs, salt and olive oil.