When my physiotherapist measured my elbow extension two weeks ago, it was at -20º. This morning’s measurement was -6º.

I’m really happy about that.

As Lisa will attest, I’ve been annoyingly religious about doing my physio three times a day.

With my eye on the 0° prize, this hasn’t been as difficult as I thought it would be. This means that, more often than not, if you were to pop into our house by surprise, you’d find me lying on the couch with a 5 pound weight hanging off the end of my right arm. 

My physio program got updated again today, and for the next two weeks, here’s what I’ll be doing:

• Forearm Pronation and Supination with Dumbbell
• Supine Elbow Extension with wrist in neutral
• Putty Squeezes
• Supine Elbow Flexion
• Elbow Extension Mobilization
• Seated Wrist Radial Deviation with Dumbbell
• Standing Single Arm Bicep Curls Supinated with Dumbbell
• Seated Wrist Flexion with Dumbbell
• Wrist Extension with Dumbbell
• Standing Alternating Triceps Extension with Dumbbells

To think that, just three months ago, I would’ve had no idea what pronation and supination were. Now I live and breathe them.

It’s been 10 weeks since I fell off the box and injured my elbow an 8½ weeks since my surgery. My arm is still uncomfortable, at least a little, most of the time. I can’t reach as far as I’m used to, and I certainly can’t lift what I used to. But doing the physiotherapy, and seeing it demonstrably pay off, helps bolster my faith that, eventually, this will all be a satisfying memory.

Those “putty squeezes” you see in the list of physio exercises are done with a ball of goo called “therapy putty” that looks and behaves a lot like the Silly Putty of my childhood. It comes in different colours, each denoting a different amount of resistance it offers. I started with yellow, and have levelled up to pink.

One of the interesting characteristics of therapy putty is that the harder you squeeze it, the more resistance it offers. 

This is because it’s what’s called a non-Newtonian fluid:

In physical chemistry and fluid mechanics, a non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that does not follow Newton’s law of viscosity, that is, it has variable viscosity dependent on stress. In particular, the viscosity of non-Newtonian fluids can change when subjected to force. Ketchup, for example, becomes runnier when shaken and is thus a non-Newtonian fluid.

I prefer to think of it is simply being kind of freaky, slightly outside nature.

Here’s a time-lapse video I shot showing it slumping slowly, over several minutes, from a ball into a lump:

Earlier in the month, in anticipation of mounting Lisa’s exhibition at The Gallery, we went in search of a way of creating removable vinyl letters for the show’s signage. We were happy to discover that, at the Charlottetown Library Makerspace, there is a Cricut machine that’s free to use. 

You can think of a Cricut machine as a kind of computer controlled X-Acto knife; at least that’s what we were using it for: you load a blank sheet of self-adhesive vinyl, use Cricut’s software to come up with a design, send the design to the machine, and the machine cuts the design into the vinyl. It’s really quite magical.

To start the process, I created the lettering for the design in Cricut Design Space,  on my laptop at home:

We picked up a roll of removable vinyl sheet at Michael’s in Charlottetown, and headed to the library.

The software  stores the designs “in the cloud,” so we were able to go to the library and sign in under our account once we were ready to “print.” The cutting process was remarkably fast: it took about two minutes.

Once the cutting was completed, came the fiddly process of “weeding” the vinyl to remove the parts that aren’t letters. Lisa  proved very good at doing this:

Once the weeding was done, we lay a piece of transfer paper over the letters, and then used that to transfer the letters to the wall of The  Gallery:

The weeding and transferring parts were a little fiddly, but, once we got the hang of it, it all worked pretty well. We are both very happy with the results on the wall.

The Cricut system, especially for those of us used to the openness of the 3D printing world and its tools, is regrettably closed and proprietary: it feels kind of like the Sodastream of digital tools. The only way to send designs to the machine is using Cricut Design Space, and while it’s quite capable, it’s also an advertising machine for all things Cricut: supplies, clipart, fonts, etc.

Of course what Cricut lacks in openness, it benefits from in ubiquity: a lot of people know how to use Cricut machines, the machines are widely available at hobby stores, as are the materials. 

Using the Cricut was our first real introduction to the library’s makerspace, a space that holds a bunch of really useful machines and tools. There’s a 3D printer, a machine to digitize VHS videotapes, a heat press for T-shirts, a bunch of sewing machines, a laminating machine, a drawing tablet, a button maker, and soldering stations.

The makerspace is open seven days a week, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Use of the tools and machines is free; you just pay for the materials. What a great resource for our city this is.

My friend Nick was just in Berlin for the first time. From afar, I made some connections with Berlin friends for him, and was happy to receive a set of selfies, over the following two weeks, of Nick and friends.

This got me thinking about how long it’s been since I was in Berlin. I didn’t know, so I looked it up: it was 7 years ago, which seems like an eternity relative to my love for the city.

This got me thinking: how long has it been since I was in… So I made a list:

• Amsterdam: September 2018
• Barcelona: May 2003
• Berlin: August 2018
• Copenhagen: May 2024
• Helsinki: December 2024
• Ljubljana: December 2010
• London: December 2024
• Munich: November 2010
• Oslo: October 2015
• Paris: April 2023
• Tallinn: December 2024
• Vienna: March 2009

I’ll add to this list as remember places I’ve been (and places I want to return to).

I learned the other day that the home game for Definition, the TV game show that ran in Canada in the 1970s and 80s, used the same game pieces as the Milton Bradley home game for Wheel of Fortune.

The idiomatic power of the “home game” sits in such a small demographic niche— those of us born in the 1960s, who spent our formative years watching TV game shows with our aunts— that it’s a turn of phrase I should stop using. But I won’t.

So, for those of you playing Radial Head Fracture: The Home Game,  you’ll be excited to learn that yesterday, at my third physiotherapy appointment, I found that my elbow extension has increased from -42° on the first appointment, to -35° on the second appointment, to this week’s -20°.

That’s not 0°—the perhaps-unattainable dream—but it’s progress.

To risk introducing another perhaps-obscure idiom, it feels like I’m now in the deepest depths of the uncanny valley of right arm function: my arm looks like a regular everyday arm, and it can do many of the things that regular everyday arms do. There are, however, cracks and edges and exceptions, the existence of which is eerie.

I can drive a car, turn a door handle, put on a shirt, carry my laptop, drink coffee, shake hands with a friend, and hold a hamburger. But I cannot use nail clippers, nor press in that button on the kitchen faucet to switch to “spray” mode, nor open a stuck jar lid.

This too shall pass: the next phase of my rehab, started tentatively this week, is “progressive strength building.” I’m starting with wrist strength, the building of which should help with all of the above limitations.

Meanwhile, in list of movements for my gym workout this past Tuesday I spotted:

Glute Dominent Step Ups 3x8-10/8-10

That meant working with a box for the first time in the two months since I fell off a box (which is how we got here in the first place). 

The daunt was lower: I was set up with a lower, softer box than the killer attack box of yore, and “step ups” are a much gentler exercise than “box jumps.”  I did okay, experienced no discernible triggers, and so I feel like I’ve levelled up in the mental game of the recovery-in-the-gym.

Lisa’s coach Matt, who has some experience with fractures, messaged me last week that “studies show a surprising amount of carry over when doing all-unilateral work while injured.” Which is to say: even if I’m just working out one side of my upper body in the gym, the other side benefits somewhat too. I was chuffed to learn that.

The most helpful effect of going back to the gym has not, in fact, been in the physical part of it, it’s the feeling of capability that comes from realizing that my body still, fundamentally, works really well. Being reminded of that twice a week, at some intensity, has been a great boon to my mood.

The next checkpoints in my recovery will come in another two weeks, for my next physiotherapy appointment, and, the week after that, a follow up with my orthopædic surgeon. I’m hoping that, by that point, I will have hiked a fair distance out of the uncanny valley.

Lauren Collins, in an essay about Uniqlo in The New Yorker:

Uniqlo is the universal donor of fashion, intended to go with any life style or aesthetic. 

A perfect sentence.

I love Collins writing, and especially enjoy her Lettre Recommendeé blog.

I know Mita because she came, from Windsor, along with Art and Lisa, to Zap Your PRAM in 2003. 

I met Art at the Access conference in St. John’s in 1994.

I was at the Access conference in 1994 talking about the nascent Internet, and my part in contributing to it at the PEI Crafts Council.

I was working at the PEI Crafts Council because I came across a job ad in a copy of The Guardian I found in the Metro Reference Library in Toronto in 1993.

I was at the Metro Reference Library at the behest of my friend Karen. 

I met Karen through Stephen. 

I met Stephen at Trent Radio. 

I got involved with Trent Radio because I was a student at Trent University, and saw an ad in Arthur, the Trent student newspaper.

I was at Trent because I’d been a camp counsellor when I was a teenager at nearby Lakefield College School, and had ridden a borrowed bicycle through the campus on my day off, and fell in love with it.

This morning I read, in an issue of Mita’s (remember Mita?) fortnightly email newsletter:

Good morning. I am in the study, writing from the sofa with a coffee beside me. Thanks to the magic of a newly acquired subscription to a VPN service, I am catching up on episodes of Night Tracks from BBC 3.

This got me wondering what I could listen to on the BBC if I routed my traffic through a VPN to the UK.

So I  went looking for the BBC Listen app in Kagi, and, in the search results, I found a link to Listen to the oldest known recording of a human voice.

From there I found First Sounds, a project that “strives to make humanity’s earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time.” 

That’s a fascinating website.

I hate the algorithm. 

Like James A. Reeves wrote, and I memorialized in print:

The algorithm in YouTube serves me up a study diet of tiny home videos, Taskmaster clips, and Elizabeth Gilbert interviews.

The algorithm in Facebook serves me up a study diet of ads for airlines, shoes, and hotels.

The algorithm in Spotify serves me up a study diet of  ballads by Nordic singer songwriters.

The algorithm is designed to prevent me from discovering anything novel, under the guise of doing the opposite (cf. “Discover” Weekly).

In 2013, I pointed to Study suggests reliance on GPS may reduce hippocampus function as we age, and quoted:

There are two major ways of navigating: by spatial navigation or by stimulus-response methods. The spatial method uses landmarks and visual cues to develop cognitive maps that enable us to know where we are and how to get where we want to go. The second method relies on repeatedly traveling by the most efficient route, as though on auto-pilot. The second method will be familiar to those using GPS.

I believe the same thing is true about how we navigate the networks of people, information, creativity, and what’s interesting.

I ended up listening to the oldest known recording of the human voice this afternoon because of my algorithm: pay attention, find interesting people, watch what they’re interested in, risk wading into new waters, repeat.

I don’t need a machine to help me do that.

Indeed, machines interfere with me doing that.

You can sign up for Mita’s newsletter here.

I got three envelopes in the mail today, all from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Two were dated August 18, one was dated August 25:

The first notice says that I’m owed a refund of $1660.11.

The second notice says that I owe them $6713.

The third notice says that I owe them $48.68.

All three notices relate to the 2017 tax year, the year I became subject to the IRS 965 “GILTI” tax, by virtue of being an American citizen owner of an overseas (Canadian) corporation. This was an artefact of the first Trump administration.

It took me 20 minutes on hold with the IRS international desk to learn that the third notice, the one that tells me I owe them $48.68, is the real one. Actually, they are all “real,”; that’s the one that’s the most up-to-date.

It turns out that the notice telling me I owed them $6713 was a notice telling me that, in 2017, I had originally owed them $6713. Nowhere on the notice does it actually say that.

Left unexplained is how I ended up, for a few short days, in a position where they owed me money.

I thanked the agent for their help, especially because they were able to tell me that I didn’t owe them $6713. They were happy about that too. We wished each other a good day.

I stopped being a US citizen on June 13, 2025. I still have to file a tax return for this year, which will be my last official act. 

I will not be sad to see this bureaucratic relationship in the review mirror. 

Next time you’re in Queen Elizabeth Hospital, I encourage you to go and find the original architectural model of the building (right now it’s tucked in under the stairs that lead down from the main entrance to the cafeteria and paediatrics).

The model, of course, is of the hospital as it existed in the planning stages, leading up to its opening in 1982. Since construction, it has  evolved significantly, with the addition of an expanded emergency department, cancer treatment centre, and ambulatory care area.

My favourite element of its design are the bright yellow flourishes that punctuate the cladding. Here’s a photo I shot just last week, showing the Physical Medicine department from the outside:

Unfortunately the additions to the hospital since its original construction have not included these yellow elements, leading to a lack of architectural continuity. Perhaps each new architect has needed to put their own stamp on things? I miss the yellow on the new parts: they seem unadorned, naked.

Over the last 33 years I’ve been through myriad experiences in the hospital, both my own and with those I love. 

I’ve had my gallbladder replaced, my elbow replaced, four colonoscopies, an earphone tip removed from my ear. 

Olivia was born there, she had a button removed from her nose there, and we rushed her there when she had the croup. She went to appointments with her paediatrician, the same paediatrician who was in the delivery room when she was born, every six months until she was 16.

Catherine had several surgeries over the years, and then received six years of cancer treatment there; she died in the Palliative Care Centre next-door. 

My mother had a stroke, and received quick and miraculous treatment in the hospital.

I’ve had a lot of coffees from the coffee shop, a lot of cinnamon rolls from the hospital auxiliary. I’ve never ceased to be enlivened by the fantastic art collection. 

Despite all the ups and downs, the anxiety, the spending time at the intersection of life and death, I love the place dearly, and a lot of why I love it is because it has such a strong and welcoming sense of place.

The hospital was designed by the partners—in life and architecture—A.W. Cluff and P.J. Cluff.

When P.J.—Pamela—died in 2023, her obituary showed evidence of how it came to be that we ended up with a delightful building, as she was clearly a delightful person:

In 1956, Pamela started both a family and an architecture firm, which became A.W. Cluff and P.J. Cluff architects after Bill joined her — their first office was at Belsize and Yonge. With seemingly endless energy, she’d design buildings and attend client meetings by day, then race home to change diapers, tell stories, cook dinner, hand out crayons and books, arrange playdates and parties and teach us to play chess, make pies, or jitterbug. When you came to our house on Manor Road – kids, dog, cats, parakeet, hamster, rabbit, visitors — you never knew what to expect.

Pamela spent the majority of her career designing and renovating hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, special care units and group homes for the sick, elderly and disabled, believing that good design (and the artful use of color) improved everything. On her initiative, she became involved in accessibility design and fought to remove physical barriers – helping the City of Toronto establish wheelchair accessibility standards, the curb cut program and Wheeltrans service. International recognition of her work and research brought invitations to lecture in the U.S., Israel, South Africa, Egypt, and Korea.

A fellow of the Royal British Association of Architects and Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Pamela published many articles and received many awards, including the Premiers Award and OAA DaVinci Award in 1985 for her contributions to the field. She was interested in the role architects could play in shaping policy, building codes and the built environment, using her creativity and talent to develop solutions for those who would otherwise be shut out or were unable to speak for themselves.

Pamela was a skilled mentor and teacher who enthusiastically shared her skills and ideas with many people over the years, some of whom kept in touch with her for decades. She also loved to share her many interests with friends and family. She was a talented painter, diver and swimmer, an avid reader, and life-long patron of the arts, her music collection spanned every genre. She loved to travel and spent many happy times in Northern California and Bermuda. She was always up for a lunch out, a trip to the theater or symphony, or an interesting chat over a properly-made cup of English tea.

There is is: “the artful use of color.” 

This is how we ended up with our yellow. 

How lucky we were.

Fifty-three days ago, during my workout, I fell off a box and broke my elbow. Since then I’ve had surgery, and started physiotherapy.

Today I went back to the gym for the first time since my accident and worked out.

Coach Cayla adapted the workout, so that I didn’t need to use my affected arm: one-armed deadlifts, one-armed kettle bell swings, and the like.

I was nervous about going, “returning to the scene of the crime,” so to speak.

Partly this was about fear of returning to the space where I’d suffered a trauma; partly this was because I was afraid of confronting myself with diminished physical capabilities.

But, I was happy to find, I do still have physical capabilities.

I have a long road back to two-armed fitness, but I’m happy to have started walking down it.

By the way: Cayla has reconstituted a 9:00 a.m. Tuesday and Thursday morning small group workout. If you’re looking to get a friendly, no-machismo twice-weekly workout, I cannot think of a better opportunity. There are a few places left: see Cayla’s website for details.

We are lucky to have one of the city’s designated food truck parking spots just a block from our house.

The original tenant was the late Street Eats, which was so great that it transitioned to a bricks and mortar restaurant, the great Salt & Sol, at the Charlottetown Yacht Club.

A few weeks ago, the spot got taken over by Curry Up & Eat, serving Indian food.

The menu—posted on the outside of the truck—is simple: three mains, two poutines, two burgers.

My favorite, by far and away, is the Aloo Tikki wrap: it’s hot, spicy, gooey. 

We’ve also had the curry bowl a couple of times, and the butter chicken is delicious.

The couple that runs the place are friendly and welcoming. You will not go wrong to make it a part of your regular routine.