Yesterday we took our new screen projector out for a ride, sacrificing a white bed sheet for the screen, and setting the projector on a step ladder.

I plugged our Apple TV into the projector, and set the sound to beam to our Airport Express, and from there into our hifi, so the sound was amazing.

We reoriented the comfortable living room chairs, popped up some popcorn, and watched Yesterday—rented for $4.99—as if at the movies.

The screen projector is turning out to be the deal of the summer: it’s a VANKYO Leisure 3 Mini, and was $129 from Amazon.

Since I first had bánh mì in Berlin in 2011 I have been hooked, and these Vietnamese sandwiches have become one of my favourite foods, on a ”if you had to choose one thing to eat every day for the rest of your life” level.

Here in the hinterlands, bánh mì are not easy to come by: Casa Mia made a college try, but otherwise a trip to Halifax is the closest way to get a fix.

Until today.

When, driving back home from the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, I spotted a sign for Madam Vuong Coffee, Viet Sub & Street Food on the signpost on the front of the old Needs store across from the CBC on University Avenue. My bánh mì sense started to tingle.

Taking out my map mid-afternoon, I realized that we could cycle there from home by going up the Confederation Trail and down the Research Station access road, which would place us directly across, and thus only a take-your-life-into-your-own-hands dash across University Avenue. So that’s what we did:

Madam Vuong is a little hard to find the first time: you need to go around the right side of the old Needs building (currently a fruit and vegetable store), behind the food trailer, and into the door marked “Unit C.” There’s a sign for Madam Vuong to the right of the door you enter through:

Inside is a spotless white-painted space with an order counter and an open kitchen. It’s takeaway only, and because everything is scratch-made, if you’re in a hurry you might want to phone your order in or order online.

For round one we ordered cold beverages: Oliver had the Virgin Lychee Mojito and I had the Iced Brown Coffee (strong Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk, over ice). The coffee takes 5 minutes to drip-drip-drip before your eyes:

The coffee was very good, and appropriately high test (I may not sleep tonight). Oliver reports his mojito was very refreshing.

We decided dash back across University Avenue for a second round, the prospect of sandwiches being too good to pass up (and having learned they serve a vegetarian bánh mì not advertised on the online menu).

It took about 15 minutes for our sandwiches to be prepared, but it was worth the wait, as they were fantastic, and everything you’d ever want in a Vietnamese sandwich: the perfect bread (you cannot make bánh mì with any old bread), crunchy, spicy, unmistakable. I had the vegetarian, Oliver had the chicken.

If you are used to monster footlongs from Subway, you will find the “Viet sub” diminutive, but they are exactly the right size to fit in the hand, and exactly the right size for a satisfying lunch.

A few things to note:

• The online ordering system, the menu on the website, the menu board in the restaurant, and the printed menu in the restaurant are not completely in sync, so it helps to ask if there’s something you’re looking for and don’t see on one or the other.
• As I mentioned above, it’s really easy to cycle almost-there on the Confederation Trail and the Research Station access road. There’s a nice shady tree on the Research Station side of the road under which coffee and sandwiches can be enjoyed.
• Service was really, really friendly. 

I am so happy.

With the dead kangaroo properly handled, it was time to turn to the accumulation of hazardous chemicals that had built up in the household, chemicals that had been left unattended to given the exigencies.

There was 10 year old paint, dried-up tubes of caulking, half-filled canisters of things like Brasso and Raid that I will never use.

And a large collection of partially used red hair colouring. Which was, well, not easy to dispose of.

But even if there was a market for free half-used multi-faceted shimmering red hair colouring, I wasn’t eager to populate the city with people wearing Catherine’s shade.

I toyed with the idea of colouring my hair, but realized that clearly fell under the “don’t do anything rash” lesson we learned in grieving class this week.

So off it went.

After many years of maintaining the same old website, the Island Waste Management Corporation has a smart new mobile-friendly site that includes an updated sorting guide tool. I’ve been trying to get better at my compost-recycle-waste game, so this is a tool I consult regularly (I had to search “big bag of cannabis” earlier this year, but that’s another story).

This afternoon I found a headless pigeon in our back yard, cause of death unknown. Dead stock removal was something clearly in Catherine’s sphere of operations, but without her I must get comfortable with dead pigeon handling (bereavement is a gift that just keeps giving). So I searched “dead pigeon” and was led to the “Dead Animals” page, which tells me:

NEVER place in your Compost Bin. Place in a securely tied biomedical bag or transparent clear plastic bag and place into Waste. Animals that weight more than 50 lbs, a permit is required.

Curiously, the instructions are illustrated with photos of a dead bird, a dead rodent, and a dead kangaroo, the latter perhaps to illustrate that in the world of Island waste management, anything is possible. 

At this week’s meeting of the Mayor’s Task Force on Active Transportation we heard from local resident and active cyclist David Sims about his ideas for active transportation in the city (you can watch the recording of David’s presentation here).

One of the items David touched on was the possibility of enhancing the cycling opportunities in Victoria Park, and he invited Mayor Brown, who attended the meeting, to join him for a cycle through the park this afternoon, and the Mayor extended the invitation to anyone else who wanted to join.

Which is how I found myself on my bicycle with Mayor Brown, David Sims, Mitch Underhay (from Bike Friendly Charlottetown) and Ramona Doyle (Manager of Environment and Sustainability), riding through Victoria Park:

We stopped at several junctures and had good conversations about the park, and about cycling in the city in general. It turns out there’s no better way to talk about the possibilities of cycling than while cycling. Beyond having the evidence in front of us, there’s a certain collegiality it affords.

More than that, though, I got to experience what it was like to cycle as part of a group: it turns out to be lots of fun, and something I think I’d like to do more of. Not “let’s ride to North Cape and have a glass of water” cycling, but “let’s ride out the trail to Royalty Junction and have a picnic” cycling. Now I just need to find other lackadaisical cyclists.

Eight years ago I bought a pair of Bose AE2i headphones, for $169. At $169 they weren’t cheap disposable headphones, but they also weren’t high-end the higher-end $400 Bose QuietComfort either. 

They have been in daily office use ever since, both for listening to music and for use on video conference calls (as they have a built-in mic, not an amazing mic, but enough).

Over the years the ear pads have gradually disintegrated, until what I was wearing for this morning’s weekly call with Yankee colleagues looked like this:

While the ear pads were wasting away to nothing, everything else was working fine, so I went looking for replacement ear pads, eventually opting to spend $17 on this aftermarket pair on Amazon. They arrived yesterday and I installed them today: kudos to Bose for making headphones that are easily repairable, as the old ear pads popped out and the new ones popped in very easily.

The new ear pads have the added bonus of coming with big “R” and “L” prints to stick on the inside, making it really easy to know which way to put the phones on.

In case you were wondering, the correct answer to the question “that’s a nice mask, did you wife make it for you?”, when posed by your plasma donation nurse, is not “she died back in January, after living with cancer for five years, and, technically, we weren’t married,” but rather “my mother-in-law made it, actually.”

I’m proud to say I answered the latter not the former. I’m learning how to do this.

Surely this era will be remembered as the high point of “signage made out of masking tape,” no? The “exit box” is where you stand as you’re leaving Canadian Blood Services after donating; it’s a way station designed to prevent non-socially-distant interaction between those coming and those leaving. I didn’t know that, and I stood there for a lonely few minutes until a kindly nurse saw my plight and gave me the all-clear to leave.

Today was my first trip back to donate plasma since I was “deferred” (their polite way of saying “rejected”) while awaiting confirmation that I did not have skin cancer (fortunately, I did not have skin cancer).

Canadian Blood Services has been operating at full power through the pandemic; my nurse told me, in fact, that a sudden outpouring of “we need to do something!” blood donors caused them not only to be full through the heart of the darkest times, but to be full with nobody missing their appointments. So really full. 

Blood plasma can keep in the freezer for up to a year, I learned, while whole blood and its products have a shorter shelf-life, so they temporarily turned off the plasma taps in the early days of the lockdown; things are back to normal now.

“Normal” in the sense that everyone’s wearing a mask, there’s a new temperature check and quiz at the front door, no blood pressure check as part of the pre-screening, and no raisin toast at the end (although snacks for outside consumption are helpfully provided). 

My pre-screening questionnaire was a little different this time too, although not for COVID-related reasons: because of my “deferment” last month I was upgraded to the long-form question set, which includes bonus questions like “Was your mother or maternal grandmother born in Mexico, Central America or South America?” in addition to the usual “Have you, in your past or present job, taken care of or handled monkeys or their body fluids?” (no to both).

The donation process itself was much unchanged, masks notwithstanding. Although in my case my blood opted not to flow freely, and so I ended up donating only half the allotted amount. But at least I got to half.

When all that was to be harvested was harvested, I waited in the holding room, not eating raisin toast, grabbed some chips on the way out, and, after my interlude in the Exit Box, headed out for coffee.

I’m booked to go back again in a month.

Earlier this week, with a mid-COVID reopening in the offing, City Cinema launched a new website.

With the flip of that switch ends a 25 year partnership between the cinema’s founder Derek Martin and I, where, under various corporate banners, I coded, managed and hosted the website. This effort, in turn, had its roots in some early website hosting I did for Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Cinema in Halifax at the very dawn of the public Internet, so there are bits of code here and there that I wrote in 1994 that just kept on working. So, like, old.

If you are eagle-eyed, you can see an early version of the City Cinema website in this Compass clip from 1995:

There are versions of the website in the Internet Archive as far back as 1998, back in the days when the site was hosted on the Island Services Network server (days when I didn’t know how to spell Charlottetown, apparently):

The site’s design evolved over the years, settling into a front-page calendar view of the current month’s schedule around 2001, a design that remained largely unchanged for the following 20 years:

From 2002, when I made the last substantial changes to the code, until this week, when the site went offline, 1,792 films appeared on that calendar–from A Bag of Marbles to Zorba the Greek–and thousands and thousands of online tickets were sold, using much the same PayPal-based payment system throughout, with a few tweaks here and there.

On the back end of all of this was an editor that Derek used to maintain the schedule that got rendered on the website, a simple PHP application that shared a lot in common with applications I built for The Old Farmer’s Almanac and the Province of PEI.

There was a place to enter information about films:

And a place to schedule films, in this case a special showing of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in January:

Although the website stayed much the same, I often used City Cinema as a testbed for experimenting with new web technologies. There was an RSS feed, an iCal subscription, a connection to Plazes, a mobile-friendly website, Alexa and Google Home skills, a Twitter bot. It was a fun way to learn about new things, especially things involving dates and schedules.

I’m enormously grateful to Derek for the opportunity: he was as flexible and creative and understanding a client as one could ever hope for.

Over all those years, no money changed hands, making the partnership the longest-standing example of my commitment to working for free.

The Charlottetown Film Society has taken over ownership of City Cinema, and Derek is moving on to new projects, and so our long partnership comes to an end.

Best wishes to City Cinema with its new management and in its new web clothing.

It’s only been a few days that I’ve been feeding myself a diet of “on this day” blog posts, but I’ve already found it enormously helpful.

Not for insight or research or resurfacing old ideas (although there are small touches of that), but simply for stitching together the arc of my last 20 years.

Every night for weeks now I have been watching an episode of the German TV series Dark on Netflix. Dark plays with time and relationships more than any other work of fiction I’ve encountered, and trying to keep track of it all pushes my brain to its limits (while I’m certain Catherine would never abide watching it, as she had no taste for the post-apocalyptic, it sure would help to have her around for that, as that was something she was really good at).

The dramatic fulcrum of Dark is movement back and forth through time on the same day of the year, and that is what my On This Day page (and RSS feed) provide me.

July 15 has a very particular feel to it. So do July 12 and July 13 and, I’m certain, September 17 and November 22.

Being able to wake up on July 15 and smell July 15’s smells and experience July 15’s feel, and then to read myself writing about things I was thinking and feeling on July 15s-past, draws the years closer together, and helps me understand, in a new and visceral way, how my life is proceeding.

I did not expect that, but I welcome it.

Eleven years later I am still delighted by Oliver’s stream of comments on this blog post. That summer we spent in Berlin was magical.