The current guidance here on PEI regarding masks is this:

The PEI Chief Public Health Officer recommends that individuals, who can wear a non-medical mask, should do so, especially indoors when physical distancing cannot always be maintained.

Picking up groceries at Sobeys this afternoon, an environment that clearly qualifies as one where “physical distancing cannot always be maintained,” only about a quarter of shoppers were wearing masks (and, additionally, any pretence of social distancing was abandoned by many).

I don’t understand this.

A month ago, sure, wearing a mask branded you a communist.

But today? It’s normal. It’s standard operating procedure. And the Chief Public Health Officer, much respected and not known for outlandish flights of fancy, has done everything but make it a rule.

Why isn’t everyone wearing a mask?

Several weeks ago my friend Elmine wrote about a notepad emblazoned with Brilliant Ideas, in part:

None of the ideas I wrote down were brilliant. That’s because the branding of this note pad is totally wrong. Ideas are never brilliant. It’s a thing I have to keep reminding myself of every single working day. The brilliance is in the execution.

I was struck by how right she was, and decided to commemorate this in letterpress, creating a “brilliance lies in execution” notepad for Elmine.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and my audacious decision to make this a two-colour job failed, with the colour registration all over the place, due a combination of floppy paper, high humidity, and my own inexperience:

After trying my best at this, I realized it was never going to work, and was left with a stack of notepad paper with only the black “brilliance lies in” imprinted.

And so I sent that to Elmine, reasoning, after the fact, it was far more appropriate to allow her to fill her own answer to that prompt, on a case by case basis.

With the type still at the ready, and red ink still on the press, I opted to execute, so to speak, with some lovely Clairefontaine Exacompta index cards (available at The Bookmark), all in red:

Perhaps brilliance lies in both execution and adaptability?

Inspired by Ton’s mention of an on this day page for his blog, I created a similar page for mine: it links to all the posts written on the current day of the current month, back to 1999.

I also created a companion RSS feed: subscribing to this will get you a flow of barrel-aged posts.

Having been at this for 21 years (long enough that I didn’t even think of mentioning it when the anniversary clock ticked over on May 31, 2020), there’s almost 40% of my life reflected in these pages, and thus lots I don’t remember writing, lots I’m vaguely uncomfortable having written (mostly on matter of style or naïvety). But there is also lots to remember.

Many of the posts from the early days suffer from formatting issues, broken images, and so on, and I’ve never come up with a sustainable method for editing them; I’m going to try doing this in 365 chunks, editing each day’s “on this day” posts as best I can to make them ship-shape. I’ll leave broken links that link elsewhere in place, for posterity, but where I can find missing images, or better versions of existing images, I’ll edit the posts and replace them.

Prepare to reminisce.

From our favourite bench in the Gardens of Hope, painted after raspberry pie and iced tea. The Preserve Company has pivoted to encourage picnics in the garden, which seems just about the best way to spend a socially distanced Sunday afternoon.

As I move, ever so slowly, toward full-service parenting, new hurdles arise: today’s was cooking meat.

I have been a vegetarian for as long as I can remember, and the last time I purchased meat was perhaps 35 years ago. But circumstances conspired today to require meat to be cooked: Californian niece A. is running the Family Zoom tonight, and we’ve been instructed to come bearing magical potions of our own design.

Oliver, sensing a way over the fence of my fascist vegetable regime, specified that he required burgers for his magic potion.

What was I to do?

I tried pulling the old “surely veggie burgers will do?” routine, but was immediately shut down. So meat it was to be.

Off to KJL we went.

“I’m looking for ground beef,” I announced on arrival.

“How much would you like?”, asked the jaunty young butcher.

Well played, meat boy.

“Two burgers worth, please” I squeaked out, certain he could smell the vegetarian all over me.

I was directed toward the case behind me, where I picked up the smallest possible amount of ground beef. $6.80 worth.

Once home, I had to figure out how not to kill myself or Oliver; visions of Jack Klugman’s Quincy danced in my head: “Looks like a classic case of naïve meat poisoning by a vegetarian, Sam.”

I proceeded to conduct what might be the most hygienic preparation of hamburgers ever: I washed my hands every couple of minutes; I made sure that no surfaces that had meat on them touched anything else, and went immediately into the dishwasher; I cooked the burgers to within an inch of their life, and used a meat thermometer to make sure they were at an appropriate “way more than well done” internal temperature.

Meanwhile, in the backup frying pan, I made myself a Beyond Meat burger.

At this hour, both Oliver and I are still alive, and Oliver reported that the burger was tasty and satisfying. The potion ingredient burger is in the fridge, standing by for later use.

As that might be all the meat cooking I have in me for 2020, if you are moved to take Oliver out for a steak sometime, please be my guest.

Ironically, given the worldwide “go into your houses and do not emerge until at least 2022” feeling in the air, this has been a more social summer than any summer since the early 1990s for me, something facilitated greatly by the installation of the patio umbrella on our back deck. The umbrella turns a previously sun-baked space into a shaded nook, aided greatly by the helpful shady landscaping grown by our northward neighbours.

Because my having-company-over social skills have been left fallow for so long, COVID-19 socializing is not a stretch for me: it just seems normal. 

I had a new neighbour over yesterday for tea to talk cycling and wind energy; here’s the setup:

An over-gifting of Sodastream bottles at Christmas has had the unexpected spin-off benefit of allowing me to give each visitor their own chilled bottle of water-with-gas. I got strawberries from Heartbeet Organics on Wednesday, and mindful of the “don’t serve food via buffet” public health rule, we each got our own bowl. I poured the tea; we each got our own milk pitcher. Just off to the right, out of view, was the monster bottle of hand sanitizer.

A good time was had by all.

Perhaps the most motivating call to action I’ve ever had was when a school board official told me and Catherine, in 2014, that “educational assistants are in schools to allow students to survive, not to thrive.” I appreciated their candour in saying this, as it’s this sort of thing that educators will rarely say out loud, even if it’s true. But it was a hard thing to hear, and a hard notion to consider given the number of students whose lives it described.

I used those words when I testified to the Legislative Assembly about the Autism Coordination Act in the fall of 2018, and I’ve referenced them many times when I’ve been advocating for how we need to change our attitude toward allowing our autistic brothers and sisters full citizenship.

The Autism Coordination Act requires that an annual report be tabled to the Legislative Assembly detailing the activities that have taken place under the its umbrella, and the first such report was tabled on July 7, 2020 by Hon. Brad Trivers.

In his introductory message in the report, Minister Trivers finished with this sentence (emphasis mine):

By continuing our collaboration, we can help ensure those with Autism Spectrum Disorder and their families thrive on Prince Edward Island.

Reading the report, it’s clear that there is much to be done: to date much of the work of the Autism Coordinating Committee has been taken up with formalizing itself and getting the lay of the land. 

While history gives us many reasons to be skeptical–we were at a similar juncture in 2009 when government’s Autism Action Group released a draft report with a set of recommendations that went largely unrealized–I remain hopeful that this is the start of a revolution of how we embrace autism in this province.

Thrive, not survive, is a good place to start.

Since we bought our Kia Soul EV in December, the Holy Grail of trips has been Charlottetown to Halifax, that being the far reaches of our need to travel by car. We don’t go to Halifax often–perhaps once or twice a year–but I was determined that if we were going to go we’d not leave our EV at home in favour of a gasoline-powered car.

This week was our chance to seek this Holy Grail, and it went flawlessly. 

We started with a 100% charge from our home-based level 2 charger on Monday morning at 8:15 a.m., driving east to Wood Islands where we caught the 9:30 a.m. ferry.

On the other side we drove to Stellarton to the level 3 “fast charger” at the Needs gas station, a Flo charger of the type similar to those recently installed on PEI. 

We started charging at 10:22 a.m. and got to 80% by 10:33 a.m. and then, feeling a little nervous about the distance for the next leg, plugged back in from 10:37 to 10:45 to get up to 90% (the rate of charge slows as you reach 100%). Total cost of the Stellarton stop was $4.35.

We continued onward through Truro to Stewiacke, where an Apple Maps routing incident left us looking for a charger in the middle of a forest; switching to Google Maps got us to the right location, a few kilometres up the road at the Petro-Can.

While the Flo charger required a Flo account to use, the Petro-Can charger didn’t: a credit card was all that was needed, with the receipt optionally sent to my mobile number.

We started charging at 1:00 p.m. and finished up at 1:16 p.m., at 81% charge, with a total cost of $3.79.

The charge cable and plug on the Petro-Can charges is hefty:

We pulled into our friend Yvonne’s house in Halifax at 2:15 p.m.; the door to door trip took us 6 hours, ferry and charging included, with the charging adding only 40 minutes to the trip.

We still had a range of 35 km once in Halifax, and that was more than enough for our mostly-rooted-in-place visit to the city.

On Tuesday morning we drove out early to the Petro-Can on Herring Cove Rd. to charge for the return trip. That charge took 15 minutes and cost us $3.82 to get us to 80% charge.

In the late afternoon we headed back, taking the same route in reverse, stopping in Stewiacke (15 minutes, $3.13) and Stellarton (20 minutes, $4.99). We arrived home with 50 km of range.

The total cost of the electricity for the trip breaks down like this:

The stops for charging weren’t onerous: a couple of 15 minute stops was just enough to use the washroom, check email, and have a quick rest; this was by far the least rushed and most civilized trip I’ve ever taken to Halifax.

In terms of “range anxiety,” the lowest the car’s range-estimator got was 19 km when we arrived in Stellarton on the trip home. That made me a little nervous, but not too much (we could have charged up to more than 80% in Stewiacke, and I could have driven a more reasonable 90 km/h, but chose instead to do 100 km/h). In theory we could have skipped Stellarton altogether and charged at the level 3 charger in Wood Islands, but I was reluctant to be in the wilds of late nite rural PEI with a charger I’d never used as my only ticket home; next time!

Our night and day in Halifax was an invaluable respite; even though the visit was short, I’m so glad we went.

Halifax is as ghost town-like as Charlottetown, perhaps even more so: we walked from Quinpool Road downtown to the harbour and back, stopping for tacos on the way, and didn’t see more than isolated pockets of people.

Otherwise we enjoyed spending time with Yvonne, eating quinoa salad and brownies and drinking strong coffee, with the occasional phone-in special guest family members.

Mask-wearing is much more prevalent in and around Halifax; not near total by any means, but a lot more than on the Island, where it remains rare. Everyone in the service industry was wearing a mask, save our taco server, who volunteered to put one on if we wanted.

As I write we’re about to board the Holiday Island ferry for the voyage home.

We drove off the ferry and into Nova Scotia. No checks. No ID. No forms. Pleasant and disquieting both.