Tai Chi Gardens

Perhaps my favourite, and most-frequented restaurant ever, Tai Chi Gardens was on Pownal Street just south of Grafton, and was operated by my friends Kennie and Wennie. Menu from April 2011.

The Seatreat

A long-running and much-loved restaurant at the corner of Euston and University, since closed. Menu from July 2010.

Orange Lunchbox

It started off as an (orange) food truck, and moved into the space on Great George Street next to Cedar’s that’s now home to Crafters Burgers and Khoaw Son. Menu from June 2013.

Black & White

One of the last of the grandfathered-in downtown grills, Black & White is still in operation, albeit under new ownership. This is the menu from March 2011.

Terre Rouge

It keeps changing its name and its emphasis, but there’s been a restaurant in the old Carter’s Office Supplies for a long time now. This is the takeout menu from January 2013.

A few years ago a physiotherapist recommended that I join a breathing group. She might as well have recommended I join a motorcycle gang for all the understanding I had at the time for why one would join a group centred around breathing. I understand (a little) more about intentional breathing now, to the point where I might even consider seeking out a breathing group, if such groups were not so obviously a COVID vector at present.

Which leads me to Ashley Neese.

I found my way to Ashley Neese via a Google search for “relationship with grace,” as I was trying to understand what a relationship with grace might be after a friend recommended that I seek to “forge a deeper and wiser relationship with grace.” The meaning of grace in this context isn’t self-evident, and so it requires some puddling about.

This search led me to Letting Go with Grace, a post that Neese wrote in her blog in 2016 about ending a relationship:

Nobody knows how to end a relationship. Even if you read all of the self-help books and talk to your friends, family, teachers, and therapists, you still have to navigate the conversations and the separation on your own. It’s your work to do, it’s your path to carve out.

The reality is, we’re all just making up how we relate to each other as we go along. While it can seem overwhelming to breakup with someone you love, the truth is, you only have two paths to take. You can choose to let go with an open heart or you can shut yourself off from what is happening. To end a relationship with an open heart is to let go with grace. This is the path I chose because I had enough experience with unconscious breakups over the years and this time I had to do things differently for myself and for Jason. I owed us both that much.

While the post doesn’t come right out and say what she means by grace, reading it provides an uncommonly deep insight into it nonetheless. It might not be the grace I need to forge a deeper and wiser relationship with, but it’s a place to start.

Ashley Neese also happens to be a breathwork practitioner, and although it takes some skill to navigate the language rapids of her professional offerings (“sessions are led in a safe and co-regulated energy field”), I’ve found the simple breathing exercise she describes here to be a helpful starting place for understanding what this world is all about.

Updated November 11, 2020 to version 2.0.

The number of Vietnamese restaurants in Charlottetown was zero for so long that it seems a miracle that we now have nine.

This is so many that a map is required. So I created the map.

Download a PDF map, suitable for printing and pinning to your bulletin board.

The restaurants on the map are:

• Madame Vuong (review)
• Alambé Coffee
• Phở Vietnam
• Phở Queen
• The Son
• Saigon Cuisine
• PEI Viet Coffee
• May Deli
• Non La Vegetarian Cafe

This map is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License; please copy it far and wide. And eat lots of Vietnamese food: it will make you happy.

I’ve also ensured that up to date information about all of the restaurants is in OpenStreetMap, and you can see a digital map, or export as JSON, here.

It’s been 88 days since my last hair cut, at the end of May.

After lunch I got caught in the thunderstorm at Alambé Coffee on Kent, and, fortified by a hearty Alambé Phin Ice Milk Coffee, I made a run for Ray’s Place. I caught them on a good day: walked right in and I was first in line.

Since my May visit they’ve started to require masks for customers, so everyone, barbers and clients, were masked-up. Ray himself was working, and the luck of the draw put me in his chair.

We had a good mask-intermediated chat while he was cutting my hair, and I learned the gymnastics moves required to have him trim my sideburns (I hold the mask on, he manages the ear-loops).

For some reason I feel it’s important to mark events like haircuts in this digital commonplace book.

Can you make money buying “forever” stamps before a postage rate increase and then reselling then after? These reporters did the math.

I didn’t set off knowing what I was going to create last week, but it ended up as something of a visual expression of what grief feels like.

I started off with the words “I’m okay” in my head, evolving this into the all-caps I’M OK.

I set this in 120 point Akzidenz Grotesk, using a comma for an apostrophe:

I sliced up some letter-sized Staples house-brand 67 lb. card stock into cards 5½ by 4¼ inches in size to print on, just large enough, give or take, to qualify as a postcard for mailing.

Since seeing a printer mix inks with a palette knife the other day, I’d been eager to try this out for myself, and so I started with white and added just the faintest touch of yellow

Seeing that I’M OK hovering on the card, barely visible in some lights, I was struck suddenly with the feeling that a very tentative sense of “I’m okay” was something I’ve felt frequently over recent months. But it’s not always tentative: sometimes it’s very strong. And sometimes it’s halfway in the middle.

So I added a little more yellow, and printed some more obviously-yellow cards. And then added some red to get some orange cards. And then even more red to get what amounts to a bold declaration, more an “I’m okay!” than an “I’m okay.”

Put together in a montage, these various shades of being okay ended up becoming something even more familiar, the ebb and flow of being okay, and not being okay, and being very okay, and then shudderingly not being okay at all. That is what grief feels like. And I accidentally found a way to express it typographically.

I first reported on the number of electric vehicles registered by the Province of PEI last year; I received updated numbers for 2020 late last week, and here’s a year-on-year comparison:

“Battery electric” vehicles are ones that run entirely on electricity; “hybrid” vehicles run on both gasoline and electricity but don’t plug in (the battery is charged by the gasoline engine), and ”plug-in hybrid” vehicles run on both gasoline and electricity (and the battery is charged both by the gasoline engine, and if plugged into the mains).

I suspect that the dramatic more-than-doubling in electric vehicles over the last year is due a combination of an actual increase and in better data quality control, spurred by the fact that electric vehicles are entitled to free motor vehicle registration. Nonetheless, the growth is good to see.

This past weekend was the 2020 edition of the Cloggeroo folk festival in Georgetown, an event that Oliver’s attended almost since it was founded; indeed, it was among his first nights away from home without us when he spent the Cloggeroo weekend camping with Derrick in 2015.

Except that this weekend wasn’t the 2020 edition of Cloggeroo, as, due COVID-19, Cloggeroo was cancelled this year.

This cancellation wasn’t enough to deflate Oliver, however: he insisted we carry on with the standard Cloggeroo operating template, without the folk music parts. He did this with his typical deft crafting of a series of suggestions that ultimately led me to arrange this without his coming right out and stating his case.

And so I booked us two nights at Deroma Waterfront Cottages in Georgetown Royalty, and our visit east coincided with the start and end of the non-Cloggeroo.

I’d been part of the Cloggeroo weekend myself before: in 2017, absent other support, I was Oliver’s assistant photographer, but we returned to town every night that year, and I’d never had the full-on nights-on-the-Brudenell experience.

Deroma turns out to be an entirely pleasant riverside cottage resort with the kinds of cottages that you might remember from childhood vacations in the 1970s: not architectural masterpieces, but solidly-built, spotlessly clean, well-equipped cottages generously spaced over a nicely treed lot. There was a badminton court, a volleyball court, a basketball court, kayaks for the borrowing, fire pits on the beach, and warm(ish) water to swim in.

Without The Rubber Boot Band to entertain us, we made our own fun.

On Friday night we grilled (veggie) burgers on the barbecue on the deck (which I managed to do without blowing the place up; fire-affairs was always Catherine’s department), went for a walk on the beach, and the went into Georgetown to do our regular Family Zoom from the beach in Georgetown (thus achieving a kind of Cloggeroo-simulacrum).

On Saturday we had smoked salmon bagels for breakfast (some habits cannot be broken, no matter the location), went in search of Poxy Island (yes, there is an island called Poxy Island, named because it was a place for smallpox quarantine; we failed in making our way there, but did have an angry owner of a highfalutin cottage shake his fist at us for trying), walked up the road to visit our friend Ray (and then walked back down to the cottage along the shore at low tide), made an attempt to participate in Pen Night despite the very shaky wifi, and enjoyed a spectacular sunset back at Ray’s afterwards.

Sunday morning we woke up, had (store-bought) waffles for breakfast, packed up our gear, and checked out, happy to have had a short break from town. We stopped to top-up the EV in Montague, had tacos at the newly-opened Totally Taco for lunch, and were home mid-afternoon.

Postscript: Oliver prepared four Spotify playlists to go with each of the days:

• August 21, Evening/Night
• August 22, Day/Evening
• August 22, Night
• August 23, Day

These playlists correspond to what would have been the four chunks of Cloggeroo, had it happened.

There is much to love about Mandy Patinkin’s YouTube channel, including considering the prospect of Mandy and his wife Kathryn Grody living in an RV for six weeks.

Many years ago, Catherine and I, and our friends Lisa and Stephen, set off from Charlottetown to drive Stephen to the train home to Ontario.

For reasons of whimsy, we opted to drop Stephen at a flag stop in northern Maine; for reasons of lateness we split the trip in two, camping just the other side of Moncton halfway.

These were the days when Catherine was a serious coffee drinker and I was not a coffee drinker at all, and so when we woke up the next morning it was vital for Catherine to get coffee in a way I didn’t understand at all. At my assholish insistence, we drove all the way to Saint John—about 90 minutes—before coffee was secured. It was almost the death of us.

Now that I am a serious coffee drinker myself, in retrospect I take Catherine’s side of that divide. And so I was sure to acquire coffee to take with us for our weekend cottage stay in Georgetown Royalty.

Starbucks “Via Instant” turns out to be significantly more than palatable instant coffee, leaps and bounds better than the instant of yore. Boil water, add packet of “microground” coffee, stir, drink.

If only such innovations existed in the mid-1990s.