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.

Jeremy got fined €300 for being in a park in Rome after closing time.

Reading this reminded me of a letter I got in the mail this spring from the Commune di Lucca, Italy notifying me that, a year earlier, I’d transgressed into a restricted traffic zone — a ZTL —  while there on a visit.

The infraction had made its way from Lucca to my car rental agency, Sixt, and then back to Lucca, and onward to me. The journey took a long time. 

I have to hand it to them: the completeness of the ZTL-violating bureaucracy was impressive, down to the availability, accessible by logging into a violation website, of a timestamped photo of my offending car snapped by the CCTV:

Paying the fine—which I did because I’d like to visit Lucca again someday, and don’t want to end up in the Italian slammer—cost me $156, complicated international wire transfer fees included.

“Do you have Dr. Pepper?”, the woman at the next table asked.

“Sure”, the server responded.

I caught her eye as she walked by: “Can I trade this ginger ale in for a Dr. Pepper?”

I was cleared to drive by my orthopædic surgeon yesterday. The last time I drove was July 17, to the gym. I didn’t drive home, because I broke my elbow during the workout, and I hadn’t driven since.

Yesterday I got called into service for an unexpected school run. It turns out that I am ready to drive: I’ve got all the flexibility and strength needed. I was happy to have the opportunity to find that out, without overthinking it.

Today, with L. and Lisa both out with friends, I took the opportunity to take my new abilities out for a drive.

First stop: The Blue Goose in Desable, where I hoped to score a Peter Pan Burger Basket, recently resurrected from the dead. 

I was not disappointed:

It was, dare I say, as good or better as the original.

And I washed it down with the aforementioned Dr. Pepper.

Next stop: Island Chocolates in Victoria. 

Long time readers will know that I am an inveterate fan of their Factory Coffee (2020, 2019, 2014, 2006), and having missed one on a Labour Day stop, when they were unexpectedly closed, I was determined to return before the end of the season. 

Again, I was not disappointed:

It was every bit as deliriously good as I remember.

As has been my long habit, I carried my sketchbook with me, and tentatively tried my hand at drawing the front window. It was my first sketch since July 13, and although I felt some twinges in my drawing hand, I was happy with what I was able to do.

Not being able to drive for two months was weird: it’s the longest I’ve ever not been behind the wheel since I was 16. I relied upon Lisa to drive me the places I needed to go by car, and my feet, otherwise.

For an afternoon of driving for the first time, I can’t imagine a better solo expedition.

Lisa’s show, Beautiful. As I am., opened at The Gallery in Charlottetown this week. It is, dare I say, spectacular, and best viewed in person.

The concept for the show is one that Lisa has been mulling over all summer long; she pulled the prints in a concentrated five day session at summer’s end. She held fast to the vision in her head, persevered through all manner of technical challenges, and what’s on the wall is something she’s justifiably proud of.

Here are some visual hints at what you’ll see:

The Gallery is open 8:00 a.m to 5:00 p.m., at 82 Great George Street, right in front of Province House.

All the prints are available for sale. The heart of exhibition is a varied edition of 34 relief prints ($150); there’s also an edition of 5 trial proofs ($75) that give insight into Lisa’s process. 

I had my second physiotherapy appointment yesterday at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. In the two weeks since the last appointment two weeks ago I’ve gained 7º of extension in my elbow, from -42º to -35º. I came away with a new program of movements, several of which focus on holding low weights for a long time.

This morning I was back at the QEH first thing for my 4-week followup with my surgeon, Dr. Wotherspoon. The appointment started with an X-ray of my elbow, which gave me a chance to get a good look at the titanium radial head replacement:

My arm is healing up well, I learned; no concerns. The road ahead, as it was at the 2-week appointment, is to just do the physio, regularly and relentlessly, to build range of motion and, eventually, to rebuild strength.

From Drinking with Skeletons, Ditching Spotify (emphasis mine):

For now, I decided to switch to Apple Music – mainly because they gave me three months for free and they finally added an auto library transfer from Spotify. 

Part of the reason that I’ve continued to pay for both an Apple Music and Spotify subscription is because I didn’t want to lose my music history in Spotify. This new feature solves that.

The easiest way I found to use this feature is to log into music.apple.com on the web, click on your avatar in the top-right, and select “Transfer Music”:

You’ll be prompted for the service you want to transfer music from—Amazon Music, Deezer, Spotify, TIDAL, YouTube—asked to authenticate, and then given the option to set what you want to transfer. The whole process then takes less than a minute.

One caveat: Spotify’s “Like Songs” playlist isn’t actually a “playlist,” so it won’t transfer when you do this. To work around this, create a new playlist in Spotify, and drag everything from Liked Songs into it. You can then, in Apple Music, mark everything in this imported playlist as a “Favourite.”

My interaction with my laptop and phone since I broke my elbow has been primarily by voice. I’ve done a lot of searches for the term “radial head replacement,” which is, most of the time, interpreted as “Radiohead replacement.” A worthy question, but not the one I’m asking.

When I last checked in, 5 days ago, I’d managed to tie my own shoes for the first time in more than a month. Since that time I’ve added some more skills:

• Wrote a legible sentence with a pen, with my right hand.
• Pulled up my jeans with two hands.
• Fed myself a couple of mouthfuls of food with my right hand.
• Typed an entire blog post two-handed.
• Made breakfast, lunch, and supper, every day.

That last one was necessitated by a household end-of-summer bonus: Lisa tested positive for COVID. We didn’t see that coming.

I tested negative immediately thereafter and have continued to test negative since. With L. away at camp for the week, Lisa and I were able to isolate from each other in the house; we slept apart, ate apart, read apart. It was hard being together-but-separated, given that we’re almost always together-and-together.

It was also hard because, since mid-July, Lisa had been doing everything for the household: driving, cleaning, cooking. To mitigate the infection vector, I took over the cooking for both of us, in an awkward ballet that involved opening jars with my knees, opening bags with my teeth, and cursing the food packaging industry for making products that surely must wreak havoc on the daily lives of millions of people.

Although it was hard, it was also helpful. In addition to my thrice daily 20 minute physio sessions, my kitchen physio has undoubtedly helped improve my range of motion. It also gave a boost of much-needed  confidence.

The one thing that hasn’t improved is my sleep: it’s been horrible for almost every night of the 29 days since my surgery. I’m not in pain, but I’m in discomfort, enough discomfort that it’s difficult to find a position to sleep in that’s comfortable for more than 30 minutes. 

This is, apparently, not uncommon after surgery, and most resources I’ve found suggest constructing some variation of a pillow kingdom, which I continue to iterate on.

Lisa, meanwhile, is now COVID-free, and so we’ve ended our isolation, and life is returning to less-abnormal abnormal.

I have my next appointment with my physiotherapist at the hospital on Thursday, and the next follow up with my orthopædic surgeon the day after. I am perversely looking forward to both of these: a good dose of “keep up the good work!” Is what I’m hoping for.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for virtual orthopædic fun, check out this interactive 3D model of the human skeleton. Here’s a screen shot:

I’ve isolated the radius bone on the right arm. That nobbly bit on top is what got replaced with a titanium upgrade in mine.

Our neighbour on Queens Square, the Charlottetown Boulder Park, in the backyard of the Coles Building, quietly sat there, mostly unnoticed, for more than 50 years.

I did my part, as the son of a geologist, and fan of eccentric memorials, to shine light on it: I created a Wikipedia page, and published a brochure. But, by and large, it was just there.

That is, until the spring, when, in weird-seeming charitable giving scheme, the City of Charlottetown bought the boulder park‬ from the Confederation Centre of the Arts, for $4.8 million.

As if that wasn’t weird enough, it seems the city, perhaps, wasn’t aware that it wasn’t allowed to do whatever it wanted with the parcel of land it had just purchased:

Some Charlottetown councillors are questioning the decision to spend $4.8 million to buy Boulder Park from the Confederation Centre of the Arts, in a move that was meant to help fund the centre’s renovation efforts, given the restrictions on how the city can use it.

“To discover that city council and city administration doesn’t have the final say as to what the future usage of this property is … we should have known that information from the onset,” said Coun. Mitchell Tweel.

“You can’t make a major investment and spend taxpayer dollars at that magnitude and not know what the parameters are.”

Suddenly, the 10 boulders are in the spotlight.

In today’s edition of The Guardian, Managing Editor Jocelyn Lloyd weighed in:

In her piece, Lloyd mentions this website, and my light-shining efforts:

If anyone was holding a gathering here of any kind, they used to refer to it as the park by the memorial fountain or near the cenotaph. I’m not sure when I first saw it referred to as Boulder Park, but I suspect it was in 2018 when Charlottetown blogger Peter Rukavina – who generously shares his enthusiasm for his surroundings on ruk.ca – sought to “revivicate” the space, putting together a brochure downloadable from his blog and printed and distributed at the park.

Rukavina wrote, “The brochure extends from my summertime project to elevate the Charlottetown Boulder Park, and it happens to have come just at the right time, as the park is enjoying a renaissance, partly due the closure of Province House, partly due the presence of two food trucks on its edges, and partly due the shade offered by its towering trees in this summer’s oppressive heat.”

I suggest you take a look at his blog post and map for some history behind the park and what the eponymous boulders represent (hint: 10 boulders for 10 provinces).

I’m fairly certain that my Boulder Park advocacy found its root in the writing of Mita Williams, librarian at the University of Windsor, and advocate for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons.

In this particular case, there was, essentially, no information gathered together online about the past and present of the Boulder Park, and I’m proud to have done the work to assemble it. 

Having done so, the page can now contribute to an understanding of the park, in the context of the current issue.

I encourage you, in this spirit, to look around your own neighbourhood, find something significant that’s under-represented online, and create a page in Wikipedia about it. You will learn something in the process, and perhaps, sometime in the future, people will suddenly become interested in your thing and want to know more about it.

(Thanks to Thelma Phillips, Foxley River’s friend of the blog, and diligent newspaper reader, for the lead)

Our neighbour KINLEY is out with a new track today, New Light.

It’s the song we all need, at the moment we all need it.

A lot of ruminations about quitting have come across my desk over the last few months. 

From When Quitting is the Boldest Move You Can Make:

Whatever shows up in your consciousness—that’s what wants to be known, understood, and tended to. Be it the desire to quit, fear of getting fired, or replaying an argument with your spouse—if the experience is alive within you, you can either handle it directly, or carry it around like heavy luggage. The more unaccepting or unconscious you are of what lives within you, the more it persists and leaks out in other ways.

Quitting isn’t inherently a problem. But letting it run silently in the background can be. It drains your energy and robs you of the joy of a day’s work well done.

From Quit Pleasing the Machine:

You can blame everything external for your imprisonment: the economy, the government, your parents, your circumstances. They’re all perfectly evident reasons. But the real prison is subtler than you’d like to believe. It’s the suitcase you carry everywhere — packed with stories about who you’re supposed to be, how to earn your place in the world, how to be acceptable, productive, and safe.

The suitcase is heavy because it contains every agreement you’ve made about what makes you valuable. Every story about what responsible adults do. Every script about how to earn love by becoming what others need you to be. You’ve been hauling this thing around so long you mistake its weight for your worth.

From Oliver Burkeman’s last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life:

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. (Relatedly, don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there’s only one direction to travel – forward into whatever choice you made.)

From Matt Haig, in The Life Impossible:

It seems to me that if you want truth, if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself. Your ever-moving self. You arrive in the act of leaving. Of staying open, always, to the possibility that the simple things we tell ourselves may all be wrong.

From Working Identity:

Transitions are iterative, experimental, wild, chaotic, opportunistic, joyful, and anxious periods, which, when observed in the midst of their unfolding, often seem like they are going nowhere; but that disorder has a point, in that it makes space for the trial and error necessary to learn where it is you want to go, and what it will mean for you when you get there.

From Pep Talk:

Our lives are all subject to change, no matter how solid they appear. You can lose—or choose to leave—your job or your relationship. I know that. But then she said something I’m still thinking about.

“Do you trust Maggie?”

Oof. Have you ever been having a conversation with someone—a therapist, a friend, a parent, a mentor—and they say something that makes you feel sucker punched in the best way? This was one of those moments. I’m responsible for my life; do I trust myself with it? 

Yes. I trust myself to show up consistently, to act with integrity in my relationships and in my work, and to keep my priorities straight. I don’t succeed at everything I try, but I’ve never quit on myself. I’ve got me.

I got good at quitting pretty early on in life: I quit university, I quit jobs, I quit provinces.

And then I forgot how. 

And I did the same thing, for a long, long time. 

I started working with The Old Farmers Almanac in 1996. It wasn’t quite the very beginning of the Internet, but it was pretty close, close enough that we were making stuff up as we did it. It was exciting. There were few rules. There was no revenue, and, at least at the beginning, no pressure to find any. I loved it. 

And I continued to love it: it was almost the ideal work situation for me, working with a quirky team of smart people, always remote, being able to visit them and share meals a few times a year. I owned the stack, didn’t need to rely on anyone.

The first time I consciously remember taking steps to consider doing something else was 12 years in, in 2008.

A position came available at Nokia in Helsinki:

Our Early Technology Validation team is part of the Technology Strategy and Architecture unit within Nokia’s Software & Services group. The mission of our new team is to develop, prototype and verify new software concepts aiming at later productization. 

I liked the sound of that, and I liked the idea of living in Helsinki.

I applied, had a couple of phone interviews, and then a face-to-face interview at a Nokia office in New England. My interest grew: I was attracted to the idea of making stuff up again, of there being fewer rules, of the emphasis being on prototyping rather than production. The people were interesting, smart. 

Alas, toward the end of the hiring process, they moved the position from Helsinki to Burlington, Massachusetts, and all of a sudden the position lost a lot of what had made it interesting.

I put my wandering dreams on the shelf for a while, never intending to set them aside forever. My work with the Almanac continued to be interesting, the team I was working with only got better, and I was well-compensated.

Six years later, my late partner Catherine was diagnosed with incurable cancer, and any sense that pursuing itchy feet was conceivable got cast right to the side: we needed stability, a regular income, and were in no position to entertain flights of fancy.

As much as I might want to claim that didn’t bother me, to take the altruistic high ground,  leaving aside the possibility of an escape hatch was hard, and required shutting down parts of me.

The stability and flexibility I had gave me the opportunity to be a good caregiver, to Catherine, and to Olivia through her teenage years. When Catherine died, in January 2020, I was afforded even more stability and flexibility, by extremely compassionate colleagues; I owe them so much for helping me make it through. 

It wasn’t until the spring of 2022 when those dormant wandering parts started to reignite. 

At Lisa’s suggestion, I listened to an interview with Diana Chapman, Trusting Your Instincts, where she talked about the difference between things that are good, and things that are exquisite:

Well, I love the word exquisite. And it’s something that I’m putting a lot of attention on is how could I have it be exquisite? And what I find for myself and others is I can make a lot of things good.

I’m, you know, give me some lemons, I’ll make you lemonade. It’s good. But I may never taste champagne if I’m just tolerating good.

And so I’m really learning how to be discerning to say, but what if you could have exquisite? I’m learning to say no to a lot of things. And it’s very heartbreaking, honestly, because those things are good.

And they’re wonderful. And it doesn’t mean I let go of all of them. But I’ve been letting go of a lot lately.

I got me thinking, and it gave me a framework of thinking about my work: it didn’t have to be horrible, it didn’t have to be something I needed a desperate escape from. It could be good. But what if I wanted exquisite?

To explore this, I had a series of what I came to call “curious conversations,” some with people I’ve known for a long time, some with people I only just met.

Here’s how I put the idea forward to prospects:

At the dawn of the project it was true “making up the Internet as it was forming in front of us,” but in the years since I’ve settled into the role of an “operations man,” and while I could quite sustainably and somewhat-happily continue this work forever, circumstances in my life have prompted me to take a hard look at whether there might be other things I might do.

To this end, I’m setting aside time this month to take a step back and look at my working life and where I want to head.

I need help reflecting on how to use my peculiar set of skills and sensibilities to make the most helpful impact on the world, and on myself; I would value your thoughts, and appreciate pointers to others I might talk to along the way. 

The conversations were universally helpful: I learned a lot about other people’s working lives, about things they had stayed with, and things they had quit. I learned about how they pursued their dreams, about the regrets they carried for not.

It took me a whole other year to decide that I was ready to quit, and then another eight months to work myself out of my role. My colleagues at the Almanac were enormously gracious in accepting my resignation, and in creating a smooth runway.

In the summer of 2023, Lisa accompanied me to the Almanac campus in New Hampshire for the annual company meeting, my final one. 

I was given a very nice send-off:

And, as a final act, I stood in front of the Almanac Webcam and had it take one final snapshot of me waving goodbye:

From my initial stirring that I might want to look for something else, until my last day at the keyboard, took me 15 years. 

I don’t regret those 15 years: I remember them as being filled with laughter, puzzles to solve, disasters to recover from, friendship.

But they were also filled with a background of wondering whether there might be something else. As I quoted above, “[t]he more unaccepting or unconscious you are of what lives within you, the more it persists and leaks out in other ways.” Those leaks took their toll. 

So I do wonder what different turns my life may have taken have I sought exquisite over good earlier, had I, as Matt Haig wrote headed “towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change.”

It’s been 18 months since I shut the door to the server room, and put down tools.

What have I been doing? Has it been exquisite?

Sometimes, definitely, yes. 

But it’s also been a lot of decompression, finding my feet, becoming comfortable with being idle. 

More often than I would like, I’ve thrown myself into work-like technical tasks because I’ve felt the need for the thrill of the hunt, the escape from every day. Without puzzles to solve, who am I?

Being forced to be sedentary for the last six weeks has given me a lot of time for a reflection. I’ve been forced to become comfortable with being idle. My usual distractions have not been available to me. 

It has been uncomfortable. 

But discomfort is, I am convinced, the doorway through which I need to walk toward exquisite.