The ability to seamlessly copy-and-paste text directly from photos in iOS 15 is breathtaking. 

Standing a few steps from the Poll 53 table in the Murphy Community Centre this morning, just after 9:30 a.m., watching Olivia vote, I had tears in my eyes.

The tears had many tributaries.

Olivia finds choice-making really, really, really hard. It is her kryptonite. What is voting but big hairy choice-making, the choice-making of all choice-making. But she did it.

This is Olivia’s first post-transition election, and the voter identification card arrived with her old name on it, a source of great frustration for her in ways that non-trans people may find difficult to grasp the depth of. This was almost a deal-breaker, but thanks to a helpful advance team of supporters, excellent Elections Canada staff at the Murphy Centre, and helpful Elections Canada policies, we were able to right things: upon arrival she was able to fill out a name change form with her proper name, and vote as such; the data will also, in theory, flow upstream to the National Register of Electors, so this was a one-time thing.

This was the first election Olivia voted in since Catherine died. Catherine was there for the first time she voted; this time it was just the two of us.

And, democracy. It’s humbling. How can it not bring tears to your eyes to witness its mechanics in operation.

In the end, I am just so, so proud of my daughter.

I accidentally ended up being the “runner” for Darcie Lanthier’s Green campaign, responsible for picking up the “bingo sheets” that record the sequence number of people who’ve voted and entering them into the Green Party “get out the vote” system; it was in doing so that I realized that on my second visit to the poll I’d accidentally been handed duplicate sheets, ones intended to go to other parties. I quickly returned them to the polls, and arrived to find a (friendly) APB being put out on me. Once things were righted, I realized I never would have discovered that without Olivia having voted. 

At 8:30 p.m. I’ll go into the cone of silence to observe the count as Darcie’s representative: if you’ve never done that before, I highly encourage you to volunteer at your next opportunity. Observing the count is like mainlining democracy: there’s something about watching the ballot boxes get unsealed, and each vote counted, one by one, watched by invested eyes, that transports it from the mechanical to the magical.

Riding back from a paddle at Andrew’s Pond this afternoon, pulling my canoe behind my bicycle, I passed a family out in their front yard.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before!”, said the father, looking at my unusual roadshow.

“Daddy, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before!”, replied his daughter.

And in that moment I realized my reason for being: to create small moments like that, small moments where people can see things they’ve never seen before.

You can buy an official Blackwing Pencil Point Guard for around $14.00. They are lovely and well-fitting and appropriately beautiful. Alas that level of stationery nerdery is too much even for me.

But.

I have a Blackwing pencil, which I love, and carry around with me in my sketchbook satchel all the time, and its point is forever getting dulled, and peeking through the satchel, in the most annoying way.

The solution? This 3D model of a point guard, which loosely approximates the official model, just enough to serve my purposes. Thirty-three minutes on the 3D printer and a little bit of sanding.

I got in my Kia Soul EV this morning to head to Freetown (to ride Tye the Horse) only to find that I hadn’t plugged the charger plug into the car sufficiently snuggly for it to actually charge. So I had 74 km of range for a 92 km round trip.

There was no way I wasn’t going, so I threw caution to the wind and drove out anyway, confident that everything would work out.

Which is how I found myself, post-ride, with 19 km of range as I pulled up to the Sun Country Highway charger at the Kensington Train station.

Fortunately modern Kensington is well-outfitted for the Bohemian EV charging traveller: I just finished up a salmon bagel from the C+B, and I’m headed across to The Willow for coffee.

I’m up to 34 km of range now, for a 49 km trip, so if the electrons continue to flow freely, I’m on track to be able to make my 3:00 p.m appointment in town

It took about four hours of effort, but I cleaned the print shop this week, in preparation for a tour this afternoon. I touched things I hadn’t touched since I moved them in. The label maker was involved.

It feels good to have open tables again.

Island Waste Management, which handles compost and recycling pickup on Prince Edward Island, has an mobile app that, among other things, can send me alerts about which cart to put at the curb when.

Our pickup day has been Tuesday since time immemorial, but last night I got an alert that waste had switched to Thursday, with compost remaining on Tuesday.

I called IWMC, confused, only to learn “the app is being worked on,” and Tuesday remains the day for both.

So if the app is telling you something different than you expect, double check to make sure — 1-888-280-8111.

Professional Musicians React dives deep into two versions of Taylor Swift’s Love Story, the original and Taylor’s Version.

The day didn’t start off unusually: I got up, had a shower, made breakfast, made lunch for Olivia, had a cup of coffee.

I was about to head out the door when I got a text from Darcie Lanthier, Green candidate for Charlottetown:

“Can I call you?”, she asked.

“I’ll call you in five!”, I replied.

I called back. Darcie wanted to know if I could drive Green Party leader Annamie Paul around the Island today in my electric car, supporting a visit that came together only in the previous 24 hours.

I told her I’d call her back in 15.

I quickly rescheduled my dentist appointment, and checked in with a friend who had an electric car with considerably more range than mine to see about borrowing it; he agreed without hesitation. I texted work colleagues to let them know I’d be out for the day.

I was in!

I called Darcie back.

“Meet Annamie at Charlottetown Airport at noon,” she instructed.

Which is how I came to be driving Annamie Paul from Charlottetown to Victoria to Albany to Freetown and back today. It was a delightful and unexpected opportunity to contribute to the Green campaign, and a chance to sit inside the eye of the national campaign hurricane for the day.

Beyond that, it was a chance to get to know Annamie, to watch her campaign up close, to hear her give interviews from the back seat of the car, to see how she relates to people, to understand her grasp of the issues and their nuances, and witness her prodigious communication skills and equally prodigious intelligence.

The last few months have not been, I imagine, an easy time to be the leader of the Green Party of Canada: the party appeared to be eating itself alive, with a federal council—the secular arm of the party, so to speak—seemingly at war with the leader, for reasons unknown and opaque even to we members.

And so it hasn’t been an easy time to be a member either: who wants to be a member of an apparently deeply-dysfunctional party, incapable of even governing its own affairs. I felt my own enthusiasm waning over the summer, and wasn’t certain I’d participate in the next campaign, or even vote Green.

But yet here I am, doing both.

Why?

First, as I’ve written before, I strongly believe that Darcie, my local Green candidate, is the candidate most qualified for the job.

Second, I read the Green Platform, and found myself saying an emphatic yes to the plans it lays out—canceling oil pipelines, ending fossil fuel extraction, getting to net zero ASAP, investing in coop housing, introducing a guaranteed livable income, concrete action on reconciliation—seeing my priorities reflected in them; a systematic, bold, integrated approach to tackling the issues of the day.

Third, I realized that the party’s internal struggles don’t, for all immediate electoral intents and purposes, matter: we’re in the business of getting capable private members elected, in support of a strong platform backed by a bedrock of solid values, not running a railroad, nor, for the time-being at least, forming a government. Participatory democracy is a Green core value, and participatory democracy is, by times, messy and chaotic and fractious and capable of pulling people away from their better natures. This messy chaotic fractious internal season shall pass, I am convinced; the essential nature of the party remains true, and it will endure, renewed. And perhaps falter and renew again in the future. It’s a feature, not a bug.

And finally, today, seeing Annamie in action, and realizing that the collaborative style of politics she espouses, the intelligence she brings to bear, the humility and awareness of her own limitations she demonstrates, they are the kind of leadership we need for these polarized times.

Toward the end of our day on the road, Annamie was having trouble getting the window in the back of the car to stay up: every time she’d press the button to make the window go up, it would, indeed, go up. And then go right back down again. I tried from the front seat: same thing. She tried again: same thing. Finally, I pulled the car over, we all took a breath, and she tried it one more time: the window went up and stayed up.

No better a metaphor, I would like to think, for Annamie Paul’s political life, and for the fortunes of the party she leads.