On our walk last night after supper, Oliver and I noticed that David’s Tea on Great George Street was stripped of stock and fixtures, a victim of the company’s plan to close hundreds of stores.

On hot summer afternoons I would sometimes sit at the front counter over an iced tea, as much taking advantage of their air conditioning as anything. And Oliver and I would frequently stop in for tea on our evening walks.

Catherine was a more serious David’s Tea customer: our tea cupboard was often filled with half a dozen canisters; we own two iced tea flagons and a tea pot purchased there, and innumerable tea strainers.

While we certainly don’t lack other places for a good cup of tea in Charlottetown, David’s, with its friendly staff, colourful merchandising and long hours, it will be missed.

From 2014 to 2020 I used the free Tinyletter web app to manage a small mailing list that I used to update Catherine’s family and friends on the progress of her cancer. I made 121 posts in all, starting with this explanation:

Apologies for moving so quickly from handcrafted individual emails to a mailing list, but I was beginning to lose track of who I’d told what about Catherine and her progress, and this seems like a way of doing so that’s sustainable, but without the publicness of a blog, which would make Catherine uncomfortable. Catherine has, however, blessed this alternative.

I’m writing mostly because I need to write to process things – that’s what my blog is for, and with that off the table, I still need a way of processing things. So I apologize in advance if what and how I write sounds overly technocratic or emotionless; that’s how I’m used to writing, and I’m pretty sure if I just started crying I wouldn’t be able to get the details down as I want to.

While I didn’t intend the updates to be anything more than a way to prevent Catherine having to answer the “how are you?” question 100 times a week, together they are also a journal of twists and turns  and details long-since-forgotten of life with cancer.

Reading my friend Elmine writing about her migration away from Mailchimp today, I was inspired to go to export those 121 posts from Tinyletter for posterity.

It turns out that Tinyletter doesn’t have a way of doing that.

So here’s what I did as a hacky workaround:

First, for each of the 121 posts, I checked the “Show in Letter Archive” checkbox. There’s no way to do this en masse, so I had to edit 121 posts individually:

Next, I turned on the “Show sent messages on your archive page” setting for the Tinyletter account:

With these two done, I was able to see the first page of an archive of my posts at the archive URL, https://tinyletter.com/ruk/archive.

I figured out that I could see every post if I modified that URL with some parameters:

https://tinyletter.com/ruk/archive?page=1&recs=121

The “page=1” simply says “start on page 1.” The “recs=121” is how many posts I want to see per page: I wrote 121 posts, so that’s why I use 121 here.

Finally, from the command line on my Mac I used wget to scrape the entire archive, including any linked images:

wget \
     --span-hosts \
     --recursive \
     --no-clobber \
     --page-requisites \
     --html-extension \
     --convert-links \
     --execute robots=off \
	 --no-parent \
     --domains tinyletter.com,gallery.tinyletterapp.com \
         "https://tinyletter.com/ruk/archive?page=1&recs=121&sort=desc&q="

This took about 20 seconds to run, and when it was finished I had a local archive: two folders, gallery.tinnyletterapp.com holding the embedded images and tinyletter.com holding the HTML of the posts, 121 in all:

I’ll have to do some more text processing to extract these into a useful chronological archive, but I now have all of the component parts to do that.

Alec Baldwin talks to writers Kaitlyn Tiffany and Ashley Fetters about contemporary dating. 

Baldwin is his usual naturally curious self; Tiffany and Fetters rise to the challenge, and what follows is a compelling state of the union.

The German Netflix series Dark, which I’ve now watched through, and loved all three seasons of, returns to a parable several times:

A human lives three lives. The first ends with the loss of naiveté, the second with the loss of innocence, and the third with the loss of life itself. It is inevitable that we will go through all three stages.

I have now spent more of my life on Prince Edward Island than off, a milestone I reached mid-March when the clock ticked over 27 years. Because Catherine and I moved here only 18 months after meeting, “life on Prince Edward Island” overlaps to a great degree with “life with Catherine”: PEI is the stage upon which our lives together played out.

So my life now neatly divides into three (I’m choosing to be optimistic about having another 27 years in me):

It doesn’t take much to shoehorn this into the Dark construction, as moving to PEI did coincide with a certain loss of naiveté, and the death of my father and of Catherine involved a rather dramatic loss of innocence. 

June and July were therapeutic months for me: I did a round of one-on-one therapy with my psychologist, and, in parallel, attended an 8 week men’s grief group (which I dubbed “grief club” to my fellow bereaved).

The life lesson from both, boiled down to their essence, is “feel all the feelings.” Easier said than done, especially when you try to do it all by yourself, which is how I’d been attacking the problem from January to June. Indeed, when the instigator of grief club phoned me one Friday in late spring to invite me to join, my first reaction was “thanks, but I’m okay.”

On Monday I changed my mind, phoned back, and signed up. I booked my first appointment with my psychologist on the same day.

Truth be told, the most important part of both experiences happened that day: the simple act of saying, to myself, “no, I don’t got this” was the most important step of all.

Catherine died 200 days ago; I’ve spent much of that time dwelling on the years we spent together, on her illness and death, and trying to figure out the practicalities of how to live now, as a single father and a single man.

I’ve also spent a lot of that time running away from feeling (I uttered the phrase “I’m not sure if it’s okay to feel this” more than once during therapy), and trying desperately to attach some sort of blueprint to what happens next.

That lack of a blueprint is daunting: I’m so, so used to having a blueprint, most recently the sad and inevitable blueprint of Catherine’s illness and death, that not having one left me grasping every which way for one. It was my brother Mike who pulled me out of its whirligig, telling me, when I proclaimed frustration at not knowing what the coming months and years would hold, that it’s okay to not know, that, for that matter, it’s not possible to know. That was good to be reminded of.

So “now until death” lays out before me. The purple era. Twenty-seven years of?

I vacillate between seeing it as a free and open road and a frightening forest path, but I’m spending more time in the former these days. There is a power in the loss of naiveté and innocence, something I didn’t anticipate: I have been to the top of the mountain; it is dreadful and sad and terrifying, but it’s also beautiful and full of promise to look out from that vantage point, and empowering to have made that climb and survive.

A friend of mine, consoling me after the death of my father, said that he had never felt so intensely alive after the death of his; I know exactly what he was talking about.

What’s next?

It all started with a letter in the Eastern Graphic.

I subscribe to the Graphic again, after a year break: I love the new extended tab format, and I am happy that my friend Allan Rankin is back in its pages.

The letter in question, from Jean Selines, concerned St. Margaret’s Beach and damages done to its dunes by a recently-arrived cottager. Jean’s letter began

For as long as anyone in the St. Margaret’s area can remember locals, summer residents and annual visitors have been enjoying the beautiful and pristine St. Margaret’s Beach. This beach is located on the north side just past the St. Margaret’s Pioneer Cemetery.

My 93-year-old Dad has been coming here since he could ride his bike to it in the 1930s. I and my siblings and cousins have been spending time here since the 1950s. More recently our children and grandchildren have played in the river that runs across the sand, learned to swim in the surf and built sandcastles on the shore. It is the spot to reconnect with relatives and friends on a Sunday afternoon and enjoy a picnic lunch while catching up on the local news.

Jean’s description of the beach was compelling enough that I decided that we needed to go and see it for ourselves. And so we powered up the EV and headed east.

We made good time to Souris, heading out the 48 Road to Cardigan, and then northeast through Bridgetown and Dundas to Dingwells Mills and then east through Fortune Bridge and Rollo Bay.

Our first stop was The Poké Shack, where we’d been almost exactly a month earlier; we picked up two poké bowls to go, and put them on ice in the cooler in the car (because I’ve now become that kind of organized person who carries a cooler in the car for summer road trips).

We charged up the car at the Irving, and then continues east until we could continue east no more (did you know that East Point is closer to France than it is to Fredericton?), stopping to eat our supper at East Point Lighthouse:

Our first choice for a supper spot was a couple of red Adirondack chairs set up on a platform overlooking the ocean:

We unpacked our food, only to realize that we had entertained the attention of a curious fox, a fox that crept ever-more-gradually our way:

The fox came close enough that we decided it was better to relocate than to try to shoo it away every minute or two, so we decamped to a picnic table nearer the lighthouse.

It seemed we’d lost the attention of the fox. Until we hadn’t, and it crept ever-closer (it’s actually a little farther away at this point than the photo makes it appear):

At this point we decided to retire to the car to finish our meal; as we walked away, the fox leapt up on the vacated picnic table to smell around for leftovers.

We finished our stop at East Point with a visit to Cherry On Top Creamery in the lighthouse cottage and then continued along to the north side to find St. Margaret’s Beach.

St. Margaret’s Beach turned out to be everything Jean Selines promised it would be.

We arrived about 7:00 p.m. and found that we had the entire beach to ourselves:

The river that Jean wrote about–Bear River–does, indeed, run through the sand to the ocean, giving us an opportunity to do some freshwater swimming just steps away from the saltwater ocean: 

The water was the perfect temperature, and the river a perfect depth for sitting in and contemplating the view.

After about an hour of paddling about and then changing out of our wet swimsuits, the sun was starting to come down, and the 8:30 p.m. Friday Night Family Zoom was imminent, so I snapped a photo of the sunset:

And another of a fisher about to set up at the mouth of the river:

And we were off back to Souris.

The road back to Souris took us right by one of the least-traveled roads on the Island, the lovely-named Mickle Macum Road, and through the community of Bear River, the name of which has, as you might expect, an interesting backstory:

Captain Roderick MacDonald, grand uncle of Marjorie MacDonald, killed a bear at Norris Pond, which is east of Souris. He was walking out of the woods and wearing his greatcoat. Suddenly, he was attacked by a huge bear, and, having an axe in his hand, threw it at the bear. Unfortunately, the axe flew off the handle, and missed the bear. The bear managed to knock him to the ground, and started to maul him, but his heavy coat protected him from the bear’s claws. He quickly shoved his hand and arm down the bear’s throat as far as possible, and pulled with all his might. After a long struggle, the bear let go and rolled over.

Captain Roderick scrambled to his feet and fled as fast as he could expecting that the bear would be at his heels any minute. However, he managed to reach home safely, thankful that he had worn his greatcoat which defended him against the bear.

The next day, he was relating the story to some friends who were sceptical of the event. So, he decided to take them into the woods where the event occurred. There lay the big black bear, just where he had toppled over. The mighty captain had killed the great beast by dislodging some of its vital organs.

Captain Roderick was considered a hero by all who knew him.

There are bears no longer on Prince Edward Island, so the way to Souris was clear.

We set ourselves up for Family Zoom, using a strong LTE connection on my iPhone, from the parking lot at the beach, and enjoyed spending time with family from Ontario, sharing stories in the spirit of Catherine’s father, who turned 89 years old this weekend.

By the time our call was done, the sun had set completely and the almost-full-Moon had come out over the harbour:

We walked down to the water for a bit, and then, mindful of the late hour and the long drive ahead, piled back into the car, popped up to the Irving to top up the battery, and drove through the cool summer night, Taylor Swift blaring from the hifi, arriving home just before 11:00 p.m.

Thank you to Jean Selines for the inspiration.

(Our route, over OpenStreetMap, map tiles from Stamen Design)

What’s most remarkable about the extended Wainwright-McGarrigle musical family is not so much the talent that lives in each of them as individuals, but how well it works in harmony when they sing together: witness their rendition of Hard Times Come Again No More: can you imagine a better mixture of voices?

(See also the Stephen Fearing coalition singing the same song).

I watch a lot of YouTube: the “Screen Time” setting on my iPhone tells me 90 minutes this week, and that’s only on my phone; I watch as much or more YouTube on Apple TV.

This means that I “Skip Ad” hundreds of times a month, and get annoyed by a lot of advertising that is mis-directed at me. Ads for Ford F-150 trucks and for the Christian Heritage Party abound.

I’ve experimented with turning off what Google calls “ad personalization,” but that makes things ever worse, as, whether by design or happenstance, the torrent of ads I see then are loud, annoying and offensive.

In attempt to stanch the worst and most annoying, I set out to edit my “How your ads are personalised” settings for Google (and thus YouTube). 

Before starting, here’s how Google has me pegged:

• 45–54 years old
• Accounting & Financial Software
• Action & Adventure Films
• Apparel
• Autos & Vehicles
• Books & Literature
• Camera & Photo Equipment
• Canada
• Career Resources & Planning
• Coffee & Tea
• Collaboration & Conferencing Software
• Combat Sports
• Cycling
• Electronics & Electrical
• Food
• Football
• Gourmet & Specialty Foods
• Green Living & Environmental Issues
• Greetings Cards
• Hockey
• Home Appliances
• Home Automation
• Home Furnishings
• Home Improvement
• Household Income: Upper Middle
• Indie & Alternative Music
• Kia
• Kitchen & Dining
• Lexus
• Local News
• Luxury Vehicles
• Mazda
• Microwaves
• Mobile Phones
• Motorcycles
• Movies
• Music & Audio
• Music Streams & Downloads
• Network Monitoring & Management
• Networking
• Nintendo
• Office Supplies
• Online Video
• Performing Arts
• Pets
• Photographic & Digital Arts
• Product Reviews & Price Comparisons
• Refrigerators & Freezers
• Restaurants
• Rock Music
• Science Fiction & Fantasy Films
• Shopping Portals
• Skiing & Snowboarding
• Sports
• Travel & Transportation
• TV Documentary & Non-fiction
• TV Dramas
• TV Sci-Fi & Fantasy Shows
• Urban Public Transport
• Women’s Interests

After (using Google’s obviously-purposefully-hard-to-use) altering my settings, I ended up with:

• 45–54 years old
• Books & Literature
• Canada
• Coffee & Tea
• Cycling
• Electronics & Electrical
• Food
• Gourmet & Specialty Foods
• Green Living & Environmental Issues
• Indie & Alternative Music
• Office Supplies
• Performing Arts
• TV Documentary & Non-fiction
• TV Dramas
• Urban Public Transport

Let’s see if this works.

I started a new sketchbook on May 26, 2020, on the 3rd day of the “pandemic reopening” at The Bookmark; it’s a paper-oh Circulo Orange on Grey A6, an old favourite.

I try to carry the sketchbook with me everywhere I go–you can’t sketch sketches without a sketchbook–and to fill the time I would otherwise spend mindless on my phone with making a sketch of whatever is handy while I’m eating lunch, or waiting for someone, or just taking a break.

Province House Hoarding

July 10, 2020. This is a corner of the hoarding around the Province House restoration site, colourfully emblazoned with Parks Canada messaging. The tiny window on the right is where you can see Eckhart.

Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row

July 13, 2020. While sitting on the patio drinking coffee at Receiver on a still-cool summer morning. A helpful reminder of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter both.

From Victoria Provincial Park

July 19, 2020. Oliver and I got takeout lunch at Casa Mia by the Sea and took it to Victoria Provincial Park to eat; I made this sketch of the Westmoreland River and the hills beyond sitting in back of our car in the shade of its hatchback.

Phở Queen

July 20, 2020. Another sketch from the patio of Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row, this time facing the opposite direction, looking at The Guild (right) and Phở Queen, the new Vietnamese restaurant next door to it.

Victoria Row Flower Box

July 29, 2020. Another Receiver patio sketch: the flower box at the downstairs entrance to Happy Glass.

Rob MacDonald at Work

July 29, 2020. Rob MacDonald and I often share Receiver Coffee in the morning, and Rob, who’s “at the office” when he’s there, is almost always wearing headphones. Yesterday I was sitting right behind him, and couldn’t pass up the chance to capture the moment.

Cherry Valley School

July 30, 2020. Several years ago the daughter of a good friend landed on PEI with a group of friends intending to stay at a cottage in Earnscliffe. Their ambitious plan to cycle there from town was aborted when they realized how far it was, and so I volunteered to drive them out, catching a glimpse of the old Cherry Valley School on my way. I returned there this morning to make this sketch. It’s a lovely building.

Christ Church Cherry Valley

July 30, 2020. Christ Church Cherry Valley is a church in the least likely of places, down a one-lane road where only a tiny sign at the highway telegraphs its location. I set myself under a tree and made this sketch this morning.

Point Prim Lighthouse

July 30, 2020. The Point Prim Chowderhouse was my ultimate destination this morning; after placing an online order and having 20 minutes before picking it up, I drove down the lane to the parking lot by the lighthouse and made this sketch.

While I’ve been in the habit of simply taking photos of my sketches before posting them online, this time I used a Konica Bizhub C554e photocopier to scan them as 400 dpi JPEGs, full-colour. It’s a less forgiving method, but I like the results.

I used to push my sketches to a Google Photos shared album, back when I was an Android user, but I’ve since gone all-in on Apple’s ecosystem, and there’s no obvious analogue. Which is probably good, as The Dark Ages of Share on OVI taught me. So I’ll post them here from time to time.

Four of Canada’s preeminent folk musicians—Stephen Fearing, Connie Kaldor, James Keelaghan and Shari Ulrich—sing Hard Times Come Again No More in support of Unison Benevolent Fund.

Brilliant.

The similarity between Puritan signage and COVID signage has never been as obvious as at Canadian Tire.