Matt Webb writes about seizing the remote work hill:

So an ice cream van that pulls up, jingling out the MIDI version of Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness at 11am, everyone on the street downing tools and heading out for a caffeine hit and to catch up with friends?

My workplace has not changed at all due the pandemic—it’s still just me and the machines in our underground church bunker—but I would welcome the chance to punctuate my day like this with all the other hidden toilers. As it stands, most days I don’t lay non-Zoom eyes on a single soul.

Postscript: Jeff Douglas (yes, That Jeff Douglas), once had a Piaggio Ape set up as a mobile espresso shop in Toronto; Machine Mobile gave up the ghost in 2018. That would have been perfect for this remit.

Oliver and I are on our last night of a week’s vacation on the eastern shore of Cape Breton Island; against traditon, I’ve maintained radio silence throughout, so as to perfect the art of doing absolutely nothing, which is a practice I do not come by honestly.

We have largely succeeded at carrying out a week of nothing but sleeping, eating, reading, sketching, watching TV, and going for walks on the beach, punctuated by a trip into Port Hawkesbury for supplies, and a run up to Judique for lunch.

Otherwise, save a lovely afternoon hosting my old friend George on Friday afternoon, we’ve been in pleasant isolation, enjoying good weather, fresh blackberries every morning, and the occasional game of Crazy 8s. 

The closest vacation I’ve ever had to this one was the week that Catherine and I spent on the shore of Lake Superior in 1992 at a remote cabin; there was more nudity on that trip, but otherwise it was similarly “let’s try to do nothing for a week.” There’s a lot to recommend it, especially when the hearty mélange that is daily life includes an awful lot of not doing nothing for both me and for Oliver.

As I write our car is up the road charging at the garage of the owner of the house where we’re staying, we’re just back from our last walk on the rocky shore, and I’m plotting how to turn the remaining food in the fridge into a last supper (what can you make from carrots, naan, heavy cream, blueberries, honey and barbecue sauce?). Tomorrow we’ll make our way to Antigonish for lunch and an EV top-up, and we’ll then catch the 4:00 p.m. ferry to Wood Islands and home.

Oliver starts a new course at the University of PEI on Tuesday–Susan Brown’s Cool Britannia–and I have my first committee meeting of the fall season on Wednesday. It’s been good to have a break.

Charlottetown’s annual outdoor art festival, Art in the Open, sputtered to life yesterday for its 10th anniversary. Between the pandemic and the threatening (and then actual) rain, people were much fewer and far between, and much of the joie de vivre was bleached out of the event, exposing more starkly what we’d known all along: it’s as much about experiencing art in community as it is about the art itself. Without the community, it was a lonely, damp evening.

Although the annual Crow Parade was covided out of the festival, participants were encouraged to continue to casually dress up as crows; Oliver was one of the few to step up, reprising his costume from 2019, and adding a bovine element (hence “coo” rather than “caw”) as an homage to Russell Louder:

Despite the scant crows, the damp, and the sparse participation, there were highlights.

Norma Jean Maclean’s Work, in the oval at Confederation Landing Park, “a performance about day-to-day physical acts, searching for meaning in the mundane, and ultimately the processes of doing and undoing” was inspired.

Detail from “Work” by Norma Jean Maclean, August 29, 2020

Nine Yards’s Alone Together was intended as an installation, but was just as interesting as a performance piece, as we ambled along as it was being last-minute assembled (we returned later in the night and were able to walk inside and feel it pulse and rumble):

Detail from “Alone Together” by Nine Yards, August 29, 2020

Detail from “Alone Together” by Nine Yards, August 29, 2020

Hannah Bridger’s Wind Farm, on the great lawn in Victoria Park, was an interesting rumination on the wind:

“Wind Farm” by Hannah Bridger, August 29, 2020

I have long-admired Sandi Hartling’s work, and her anything at all, in the windows at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery entrance, was playful, especially in that (reflective) setting:

Detail from “anything at all,” Sandi Hartling, Confederation Centre of the Arts

By 6:30 p.m. the rain had begun in earnest and we’d done the waterfront-downtown-park loop. We ordered a pizza, paid one more visit to Nine Yards, and headed toward home.

On the way there we passed evidence of Becka Viau’s Revolution, wherein she rolled a round hay bale about the city. It was perhaps the piece that best summed up the contemporary zeitgeist.

Detail from “Revolution” by Becka Viau, August 29, 2020

We picked up the pizza and sought shelter at home for our regular Saturday Movie Night; Oliver insisted we watch a movie with an artistic theme, so we settled on The Best Offer.

I’m used to returning home from Art in the Open with a feeling for the endless possibility of the human endeavour; that feeling escaped me yesterday, replaced with a more basic satisfaction that art can perservere even in fraught times.

Kudos to Art in the Open for seeking to become accessible to all.

It was a hard cycle to the this morning: Oliver was grumpy, the trail was crowded, and we were both out of shape and overdressed for the weather.

But we persevered, made it to Gallant’s for our smoked salmon bagel, and then back down to the farmers’ market; once we had food and drink in us, brighter times prevailed.

If you’d told me a year ago that Oliver and I would successfully build a 12 km cycle into our Saturday morning routine I’d not have believed you. But I’m so glad we did: grumpiness notwithstanding, it’s the highlight of my week.

How does an overturned safe end up in the ditch beside the Confederation Trail? Oliver speculated it was a drunken burglary gone wrong. If you’re missing your safe, it’s between Joe Ghiz Park and the 1911 Jail.

The quality of the morning sun changed completely this morning as its position vs. Earth vs. 100 Prince Street saw sunlight streaming in the back windows in a most delightful way at breakfast time.

Earlier today I was on a conference call with someone in California, and, by way of making a (sarcastic) point, I made reference to Horse & Hound.

At the end of the call my Californian colleague, clearly not a Notting Hill fan to the degree I am, asked me for “the name of that magazine you mentioned” with promises to get to the bottom of things.

Fast forward 6 hours: after hearing some Gordon Lightfoot on Oliver’s playlist, I’m searching the web for the name of a cottage on Lake Superior where Catherine and I once stayed, a cottage owned by a man who was there the night the Edmund Fitzgerald went down.

I did not find what I was looking for, but I did find an Airbnb owned by someone named 철진 in Gusan, South Korea, the photos of which feature Notting Hill projected on the wall.

After Ton first mentioned Obsidian, I decided to try it out: like Ton I’m looking for a way out of Evernote, but I’m also looking to become better at making notes about projects and plans in a trusted repository so that I can refer back later as a resource (on the job we’ve used Trac for more than a decade now, and it’s proved invaluable to be able to refer to the copious notes my younger self took).

Obsidian has a simple plug-in called “Daily Notes” that makes it slightly easier to create a new note every day, and, on a lark, I started to do this, noting things under three headings: “Work,” “Projects,” and “Home & Family,” with an additional “Accounting” thrown in on money-handling days.

To my surprise, I’ve kept it up for the last 49 days:

My father kept a daily log from the mid-1960s until he died. He started off on paper, and moved to using a computer in 1990. It was that log we consulted when we wanted to known where we watched the walk on the Moon in 1969. I have 28 years worth of his digital log in a file on my computer: it’s a plain ASCII file with 301,543 lines in it. Reading it now, I realize that I use exactly the same style and voice as he did for all those years, and cover much of the same ground, freely mixing work, family and projects.

Here, for example, were his notes from August 27, 1993, 27 years ago today:

• hot weather continues
• called for rates of alternative long-distance service
• called William Dam Seeds and Hank at RBG re winter rye/wheat, when to turn under the buckwheat
• winter rye not available at Millgrove Feed till September 10
• to CCIW at 1215 to pickup Chris for goodbye lunch at La Trattoria
• Chris and I worked through documentation of cleanup of files, gave Harry Pulley the format for numeric data
• Chris back to university on Monday
• PM: entered all cash data in budget

Among my notes for today:

• Moved the explanatory Moon copy from results pages to the generic Moon Phase Calendar index page.
• DNS updates for gardenplanner.almanac.com.
• Got confirmation that I could transfer the AccountEdge license to Windows from Mac and did so: worked without problems.
• Lunch at Madame Vuong’s.
• Got Oliver’s prescription refilled at Parkdale Pharmacy.

When I cracked open Dad’s log after he died, I thought I might find deeper insight into my father, some undiscovered aspect of his personality that might explain him, and me, and fatherhood.

But I didn’t.

I found “tilled middle garden” and “DLed and tested some BBS files” and “ran memmaker on 386H.”

Where there are references to me they are things like “email from Peter, not interested in Honda after all,” and “call from Peter, their house offer has been accepted,” and “big breakfast of potato pancakes made by Peter with new food processor.” And I realized that he wasn’t writing for anyone other than himself. And I’m doing the same thing.

There is utility, I have found, in creating a running reference: I couldn’t remember when an intake worker had called me from the government in July, and then I remembered that I noted it. And I’ve got our new refrigerator’s serial number noted so that when it breaks in 20 years, I’ll know where to look. But more so than any practical reference, I think there’s value in noting the events of each day as a way of simply processing what happened, developing a sense of progress (or not), realizing that when it feels like nothing at all has been happening, there’s actually been a lot.

So I’ll keep at it.

Why my dentist needs to know that I’m “widowed” I do not know. But it’s the first time I’ve had to check that box.

I’ve been trapped in a Hogan’s Heroes vortex for several days now: the YouTube singularity thinks it’s on to something, and I keep confirming it.

This led me to Wikipedia, where I learned that, despite being shot in California, every single episode was set in winter:

Although it was never snowing on the film set and the weather was apparently sunny, there was snow on the ground and building roofs, and frost on the windows. The set designers created the illusion of snow two ways: the snow during the first several seasons was made out of salt. By the fourth season the show’s producers found a more permanent solution and lower cost, using white paint to give the illusion of snow. By the sixth and final season – with a smaller budget – most of the snow shown on the set was made out of paint.

And then there’s Bing Crosby.