Item one on today’s list of 8 critical things was to make one of the sauces from this New York Times article. I chose this roasted tomato dressing and then immediately realized that I was lacking sufficient tomatoes.

I’ve lately been grappling with the moral indefensibility of car travel, electric or otherwise, for trips that can be reasonably executed by bicycle, and this led me to hop on my bicycle and ride up to Riverview Country Market for said tomatoes (pro tip: a straight shot down Kent Street to the Confederation Trail, and then out the Riverside Drive trail, is my new favourite route there).

Cycling back home I decided that I’d use the dressing as a salad dressing, being well-equipped with greens from yesterday’s market pickup. What better to go with a summer salad, I thought, then some good bread. So on the cycle home I detoured to Red Island Cider, a Pendergast bread outlet, and braved the cidery crowds to pick up a loaf. Lacking sufficient cargo space on my bike, I took advantage of the bread’s substantial heft to simply strap it to the rack.

The dressing is chilling now, and item one on my list is duly crossed off.

Starting on July 12, 2020, I began reading my blog from the beginning, one day of the year’s worth of posts at a time. As of this week I’ve read the entire corpus. 

Since my first one on May 31, 1999, I’ve made 10,124 posts here, writing 2,315,925 words in the process.

I used the opportunity to do a little bit of maintenance: I repatriated video and audio that was originally embedded from sites like YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud to be stored locally (for the video I used a scheme I conjured up in 2018 to automate all the steps). There were 200 videos in all, and 295 sounds. 

I also worked to finish the repatriation of images, started in 2018 with my decamping from Flickr. There were a bunch of images I’d embedded on the ill-fated Share on Ovi platform still in place; some of these I was able to recover from my local backups, others are lost to history (the Internet Archive, alas, did not archive Share on Ovi).

Beyond the technical upkeep, though, the meat of the exercise was revisiting 22 years of my life.

Reading posts from the same day all at once turned out to be an interesting way to cross-cut through posts that were written in chronological order. So, for example, I’ve just finished a month or so of reading posts made from Copenhagen and Sweden on the many early-summer trips I took there over the years; back in March it was the trips I took during the school break with Olivia; in December it was 22 years worth of Christmas Days, and in June it was a year by year trip through Catherine’s birthdays.

In the winter of 2003 I attended an event hosted by ur-blogger Dave Winer in Cambridge, a gathering of the bloggers to talk about blogging. During the Q&A I made a comment that, as much as anything, I was writing for Olivia, writing the story of my life as she was growing up. What I’ve realized since is that I was, in truth, writing for myself: messages in a digital bottle that, here in the future, remind me of who I was, where I’ve been, what I did (and didn’t) do.

It’s a daunting prospect to read your 35 year old self (or to listen to your 25 year old self), and I must admit that I breezed over much of the mid-to-late aughts angry-at-Island-Tel-and-CADC-and-the-world post archive. But in addition to my angry young man self, I was reminded of some beautiful moments too, many of them. And to read myself grow up.

This blog will be, I think, the grand project of my life. I’ve been doing it for so long that writing here falls into the same category as eating and sleeping: it’s just simply how I live, and I cannot imagine not doing it.

Now that I’ve read the entire thing, I’m going to try and tamp down my predilection for nostalgia and focus forward. There’s lots more to see and do and be. And to write about.

How many ID numbers and “no parking” rules (with different dates) can Charlottetown pack onto a single parking meter?

As part of the run-up to Pride Week, The Lucky Bean in Stratford hosted a “make your own tie dye t-shirt workshop” tonight, and Olivia and I signed up.

Tie dye, aesthetically or big-messily, has never been my jam; this totally would have been Catherine’s department. But the script supervisor decided to expand my role, and it turned out to be maximum fun.

Our shirts are in the wash for their final rinse as I write.

After a scaled back 2020, Island Fringe is back for 2021, celebrating its 10th anniversary (!) in fine form, running July 28 to August 1.

Given the situation, they’re departing from the traditional “buy a pin, get into everything” format and switching to all-ticketed shows this year, so now is the time to think ahead and get tickets.

I’m happy to return as a sponsor this year (my 8th): I think of the Fringe as “theatre for people who love theatre but don’t enjoy the theatre,” and it brings me great joy to support it.

I can think of no better way to spend the August not-actually-a-holiday-on-PEI weekend.

On the first episode of the new Fastmail podcast, behavioural scientist BJ Fogg talks about “tiny habits” (emphasis mine):

The Fogg Behavior model is the core of behavior design. A behavior happens when three things come together at the same moment. The motivation to do the behavior, the ability to do the behavior, and the prompt. If any one of those are missing, the habit won’t happen.

That’s helpful guidance.

My friend Cheryl has a podcast called Pigeonhole, and the latest episode, AAC Voices and Talking About Audio Description, is an interview with endever*. I learned a lot about a lot of things.

From NASA Science Mission Directorate Oral History Project, David D. Morrison interviewed by Sandra Johnson

Johnson: In ’96 you became the Director of Space at Ames.

Morrison: Director of Space was a wonderful title. I still have a few business cards with that on it. I joked that it was a terrible responsibility: if I didn’t do my job every day the planets would fall out of their orbits, the galaxies would explode. But then NASA Headquarters did a reorganization and created a division called the universe, and so they had Director of the Universe at Headquarters.

(via The Guardian)

Dr. Michael Gardam, the new CEO of the Island’s health system, spoke to the CBC about the challenges of overcoming our 18,000-person waiting list for a family doctor.

Impenetrable bureaucracy has beaten down more than one Island health system revolutionary over the years; Dr. Gardam appears refreshingly frank in his assessments of the problems and the possible solutions, and I hope he sticks with it.

His take on one reason the solutions are taking so long:

“If we want to buy new computers, we go through a different branch of government. If we want to find space, we go through a different branch of government. If we want to spend more than $100,000 of money that’s in our budget, we have to go to the Treasury Board. These are rules. These are things that were identified a long time ago.”

The Achilles heel of all re-engineers is a desire to keep re-engineering until they fix everything, down to the roots.

Several years ago I attended a seminar by a senior Ontario government bureaucrat, a high level rumination on the work of the public service. Rather than rail against “silos,” the usual target of almost anyone making a case for what’s wrong with government, he suggested that compartmentalization was and always will be a part of public administration, and that we need to get over that, move on, and become better at navigating the complexity.

Although I’ve fallen victim to the silos many times, I tend to agree with that assessment. As much as Dr. Gardham might wish that the bureaucratic waters would part to accommodate his revolutionary plans, that is not going to happen, and the sooner he accepts that and embraces the confounding thicket on its own terms, the sooner his plans will bear fruit.