Watching Sylvan Esso at work makes me want to chuck it all and become part of an electropop duo. Or at least to cultivate a better fashion sense and a more delicate quotidian choreography.

In the summer of 2017, Catherine started a round of Docetaxel, a chemotherapy drug, with the goal of reducing the size of the tumours in her back, shoulder and skull. Because Docetaxel is known to cause an allergic reaction. she was given the steroid Dexamethasone beforehand to counteract this.

The effect of the Dexamethasone was dramatic; as I related in my newsletter to friends and family:

Catherine tolerated her third treatment of the chemotherapy drug Docetaxel well on Monday, and her plan to more gradually come down off the high of the Dexamethasone (steroids she takes to help control allergic reactions) seems to be bearing fruit. She’s still reaching a point where she crashes into fatigue, but the crash is gentler (and is happening today).

While she’s in thrall of the Dexamethasone the effect is not unlike what one might imagine it must be like to take large amounts of cocaine: everything’s sped up, she has lots of superhuman energy, and she talks faster than you’ve ever heard her talk.

Fortunately she’s learned that the superhuman energy doesn’t correlate to superhuman abilities, so has taken to locking herself in the care of our friend Carol to prevent herself from taking on large renovation projects by mistake.

It’s Dexamethasone that President Trump has been taking as part of his COVID-19 treatment. Having a President who thinks he’s superhuman (when he already thought he was superhuman) seems like a recipe for (even more) disaster.

It’s taken me almost 9 months and one pandemic, but I’ve got Catherine’s fabric, yarn, fleece and various and sundry tools boxed and ready for pickup by volunteers from the G’ma Circle of Charlottetown. They’ll be part of the Fabric and Yarn Sale, in support of the Stephen Lewis Foundation’s Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign (the sale will, touch wood, happen sometime in 2021, pandemic-willing).

Getting to this point has been bracing: Catherine’s collection was vast, collected over decades, and the clearest representation of her and her sensibilities; wading through that has not been without its emotional challenges, and I got here only be rationing the work into small chunks, a little every day.

Grandmothers to Grandmothers is a project that Catherine would have loved, and knowing that her materials and tools will be in the hands of people who will make them into things takes away some of the sting of imagining all the things that went unrealized by her hand.

This is not to suggest that her studio is empty yet: I’m hopeful that Habitat for Humanity will come and pick up the furniture and shelving, which will leave me only with the task of finding an appropriate way of documenting and preserving the archive of work she left in her wake.

New from Ani DiFranco, Do or Die.

There are problems that are gnarly and hard and take years or millions or both to solve.

Then there are problems that, relatively speaking, are easy to solve.

Like getting books into the hands of Prince Edward Island children, something the PEI Literacy Alliance has undertaken to do with its simply-named Free Books for Kids project:

Each month, enrolled children receive a high quality, age-appropriate book in the mail, free of charge. Children receive books from birth up to their fifth birthday.

This project, launched last week, was almost instantly fully subscribed, the CBC reported:

“We thought we would spend a year encouraging people to register and promoting it and all that sort of stuff, so we were very shocked,” said P.E.I. Literacy Alliance executive director Jinny Greaves.

“Within 24 hours we had exceeded our goal for year one, and we’re really going to try … within the next weeks or months or a little bit more to be able to serve another additional 1,000 children or maybe even more.”

Last week my mother told me that a Lorraine Eastwood, librarian at the Waterdown Public Library, a short walk from my high school and a refuge therefrom, died this summer. In her memory, upon reading that a project to give free books to kids was too popular, I made a $100 donation to the PEI Literacy Alliance.

You’re probably saying to yourself right about now, “can I do that too?!” 

And you can: just go here to donate. It takes about 58 seconds.

I was telling my friend Martin about this on the weekend, and he said “that could be a contribution to making PEI Canada’s first Heaven on Earth province.”

Martin has, with uncommon patience and candour, been wearing down my natural cynical resistance to his Project Heaven on Earth, which he introduces with:

There is a desire, a longing, in each of us for a world that works.

A statement that’s hard to argue with. 

And so this is, indeed, a small contribution to that.

With an important coda: once you make your generous donation to providing free books for kids, please ask someone else to do the same thing.

This is easy to do, in my experience, as getting behind the idea providing free books for kids is roughly equivalent to getting behind the idea of providing free oxygen to kids.

The word will spread.

The program will re-open its floodgates.

All kids who request them will receive books in the mail every month.

And there will, indeed, be a world that, at least a little bit, works.

I have, slowly but surely, been cleaning up the room on our first floor variously known, over the years, as “the office,” “the situation room,” and ”the library.”

Catherine designed the mantlepiece and the shelving, which included a liquor cabinet complete with its own light. Last fall, around this time, when she could no longer navigate the stairs to the second floor, she moved her bedroom here, and so it was, for a time, “Catherine’s room.”

Some weeks ago Oliver and I somehow managed to wrangle the couch, from Catherine’s studio, across the street and into the house; it fits the room well, and arrived just in time to serve as a makeshift bed for our friend Yvonne, who visited this weekend from Halifax. Her visit was all I needed to make the last push toward cleaning the room up: I loaded up a Kia Soul’s worth of various and sundry and dropped it at the thrift shop, dusted and vacuumed, and generally got things ship-shape.

Which allowed me to open the curtains for the first time in a long time.

And to discover that the room gets wonderful sun in the afternoon.

On this night, around this time, 29 years ago, this woman asked if she could kiss me. The rest is history.

It’s not Architecture Week on Prince Edward Island this week, although, according to the celestial calendar, it should be (2011, 2012, 2013).

But it is World Architecture Day, and the architects of the Island are marking the day with a virtual seminar, Exploring the World of Tiny Houses Through Design-build Research, tonight, October 5, 2020, starting at 7:00 p.m. Atlantic Time, presented by architect and championship kayaker Ben Hayward:

Tiny Houses have presented an alternative to a cookie cutter model by offering design flexibility; and have yet to be proven as either fad, niche, or viable housing. Join Ben Hayward as he discusses how to get the best of all worlds-low cost, high quality, and mass market desirability when it comes to Tiny Homes. The Solar Thermal Tiny House aims to be a testing bed for four key areas of research: Energy, Art, Craft, and Place.

Because it’s virtual, anyone, anywhere, can attend.

How long have I been blogging?

Long enough to see public library fines introduced, in 2004, and eliminated, today, 16 years later.

The bookending CBC stories: 2004 and 2020.

This is a great move.

It is de rigueur of late for phones and operating systems and apps to provide analytics on usage time, and YouTube is no exception. I was somewhat surprised to learn just how much time I spend on YouTube: for the last week it’s been an average of 1 hour and 20 minutes a day, for a total of 9 hours and 22 minutes over seven days:

Not only is that a lot of video watched, but it’s a lot of advertising consumed, especially as YouTube has been on a tear recently to run at least two unskippable pre-roll ads and an increasing number of embedded in-video ads (that simply appear, seemingly at random, during watching) per video.

If YouTube’s goal was to push me to become a YouTube Premium customer, it worked, as I signed on for a $17.99/month family plan yesterday.

(Pro tip: if you subscribe to YouTube Premium through the YouTube app for iOS, you’ll be charged, by Apple, $22.99/month, but if you subscribe through a web browser you’ll pay only $17.99/month, and thus save $60/year, and you still get the benefits of YouTube Premium in the iOS app).

So I’ve bought my way out of advertising jail.

Beyond the aversion to advertising, the aspect of YouTube Premium that pushed me over the edge to purchase was that there’s a revenue share with creators:

Currently, new revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, most of the revenue will go to creators.

Knowing that my viewing habits support the creation of that which I’m viewing is a lot more palatable than knowing that my viewing-of-annoying-advertising millstone supports creators. I’m pretty sure creators appreciate it too.