My Kia Soul EV needed a software upgrade, a recall that automatically applies the parking brake when the car is shifted into “park.”

My last parking brake-related automobile repair was that time in the early 1990s when Catherine handcrafted a lovely silver “Y” bracket for our aging Nissan Sentra wagon at her jewellers bench.

My how things have changed.

This left me with an hour to kill uptown.

Killing hours is harder during COVID: after being laughed away from the burger truck across the street when I asked what they had for vegetarians (nothing), I convinced myself that it was okay to hang out in Tim Hortons, at least until a choir arrived. So I hunkered down for a grilled cheese sandwich. And was never less than 20 feet from anyone else.

The Soul was ready in 45 minutes and, as promised, there’s no longer a need for me to manually apply the parking brake (it’s going to take a while for my muscle memory to forget that action).

Discover Kia is about to open a brand new showroom and service department on the old Reliable Motors property on Allen Street, moving them into my neighbourhood, give or take, and an easy walk after a service drop-off.

The U.S. citizen part of my dual-nationality received email notification today that my ballot for the November 2020 U.S. elections was ready for download.

The process started with sending a ballot request form through the mail to the Monroe County Board of Elections; that triggered today’s email, which gets me a ZIP file with the ballot, instructions, and a printable envelope for returning it.

I vote, as I always have, at my last residential address in the USA, the apartment I lived in when I was born in Rochester, New York. Because I’m a non-resident elector I’m eligible to vote for President and for Representative in the New York 25th.

Never has voting-by-mail been such a topic of public conversation as this year; I’ll be sending my ballot off in the mail tonight to ensure it gets to Rochester in plenty of time. My envelope sports two stamps from the Canada Post Medical Groundbreakers series: the James Till and Ernest McCulloch stamp and the Julio Montaner stamp. Because, you know, science.

One of the pleasant side-effects of COVID was that meetings, of any sort, just stopped. Suddenly days were carefree and wide open. Productivity soared. Maybe we didn’t need meetings at all!

Then Zoom came to the fore, and meetings–virtual ones–popped up. Other than a sore neck from staring engagedly at the screen, I greeted the coming of Zoom with enthusiasm, for it solved some of the challenge of finding support for Oliver for evening meetings, as I could attend them from home, or from my office across the street. Less carefree, but at least I didn’t have to put on shoes.

For April through August all of my meetings, from the Stars for Life board to the Mayor’s Task Force on Active Transportation to the Green Party EDA to Pen Night were held online (with the exception of a lovely summer Pen Night gathering in our back yard).

With the arrival of the autumn meeting season, and the current state of COVID regulations allowing indoor face-to-face meetings within certain limits, the post-Zoom transition has begun.

While the Task Force and Pen Night are opting to stay virtual for now, both my Green Party EDA and Stars for Life board meetings today were held in person.

And, wow, that was weird. I couldn’t get over the background feeling of “you’re doing something very wrong here” throughout both. I noticed every cough. Every touch of the face. I tried to eyeball 6 feet of apartness, and got nervous when it seemed to be violated.

My personal approach to COVID has been to imagine that everyone else in the world, save Oliver, has just walked out of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and to treat them as radioactive for all intents and purposes. Sitting around a board room table with them, 6 feet apart or no, masked or not, didn’t do much to mitigate my fears that I would start to glow in the dark any minute now.

I’m not sure I’m ready for this yet.

Thanks to the good graces of Bob Gray, Oliver will participate in a standalone, socially-distanced, COVID-compliant Terry Fox run this weekend, marking an unbroken line of participation that extends back to his days in elementary school.

If you’d like to pledge to sponsor him, you can do so here on his page on the Terry Fox website (so far Oliver is outpacing Bob by a factor of 2 to 1 for fundraising for their team BOPSA).

Back in April I dipped into Catherine’s button jar and sewed some colourful buttons on my cardigan.

I’ve been wearing this selfsame cardigan around town for the last week, now that the days have turned chilly, and two or three times a day someone says “I like your buttons!”

I couldn’t figure out why I was getting compliments on my buttons now, but not in the spring, and I realized it was because in the spring I wasn’t leaving my house at all, so nobody actually ever saw the buttons until now.

The wonderful thing about being complimented about the colourful buttons on my cardigan is that it’s a compliment for me being me.

I’ve been patiently waiting for the four tomatoes on Jackson to ripen; until earlier this week, they showed no signs of doing so. And then, suddenly, yesterday morning one turned red, after a transition through yellow that started on the weekend.

That makes it 103 days from transplanting Brenda Whiteway’s gift of a seedling into our back garden to ripening.

Now I just need to figure out how to best make use of four vaunted tomatoes.

Prince Edward Island’s Healthy School Lunch Program launches today, something Oliver and I saw evidence of out at Gallant’s on Saturday morning picking up our salmon bagels: the kitchen was filled with tomato sauce, ready to serve as part of lunch in four schools this morning.

As I related here, the kernel of the seed of this program hatched on a fall day seven years ago at Montague Consolidated. From that first meeting, to a home and school policy resolution in 2015, to lobbying and plotting by parents, guardians, teachers and staff, officials in government and the school board, farmers, fishers and those in food service, a plan began to emerge, and after a pilot project this winter, which evolved into a COVID-adapted meal plan over the spring and summer, the program rolls out today to all Island schools.

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that the program as it launches today retains most of the key points of that original home and school resolution: it’s a “pay what you can” model, it emphasizes healthy, locally-sourced and locally-produced food.

In other words, it’s kind of a miracle.

For all those who poured their hearts into making this a reality, thank you; not only is it a wonderful thing, in and of itself, but it demonstrates how a good idea, with patience and nurturing and community-building, can come to fruition. That gives me an even larger sense of hope for what’s next.

Catherine liked to accumulate kitchen tools–I’ve found three crock pots, at least, squirrelled away in various places–and much of my curation over recent months has been figuring out what to keep and what to pass on; the likelihood of needing to serve tea to 30 people seems remote, so a great mug-purge is in the offing.

But there’s also gold in them thar hills, including this invaluable tool for making apple sauce:

It’s ungainly and takes up lots of room in the cupboard, but I cannot imagine how people without one make apple sauce.

Which is what I did yesterday:

We had some for breakfast; pleasantly tart.

A late summer gift from Catherine, who planted apple trees in our back yard many years ago. It’s a great year for apples.

After a an hour or so of round-peg-in-round-hole work, the painted IVAR chairs are assembled and in place.

To take this photo required I attend to a long-accumulating pile of things-to-go-elsewhere, so we also get a clean dining room out of the deal.