We took advantage of the warm and sunny winter afternoon to explore the northern part of the Wright’s Creek trail system.

We ran into my friend Chantal and her family on the trail and learned that if we return someday at dusk we are likely as not to see the beavers that have moved into the area.

This spring, when the passageway under St. Peters Road is completed, there will be a seamless trail from the creek’s headwaters by the airport all the way to its mouth.

We’ll be back.

Kudos to John Andrew, and those he’s rallied over the years, for making this happen.

Rivets, eyelets, and similar fasteners have always fascinated me, and seemed like the kind of thing you would need complicated pinching tools to install. It turns out that all you need is a tiny “anvil” (really just a metal disc with a depression in it) and a “punch” (a tiny metal rod with the yin to the anvil’s yang). It takes some practice to get a nice join; once you master it, though, it’s very, very pleasing.

I used my newfound skill to make a coptic-stitched book this afternoon, installing six eyelets in each of the covers:

I have a parasocial crush on Alison Roman. Here she is cooking pasta with shallots.

Parasocial is a word I learned listening to You’re Wrong About. I don’t have a crush on its hosts, but I’m a regular listener, more for the journey than the destination.

You should almost certainly not take alcohol advice from me: you’ve likely had more to drink in the last hour than I’ve had in the last year.

But let me put in a good word for little pig cider, made in Hazel Grove, Prince Edward Island with actual pig involvement (they eat the windfall around the orchard). Oliver and I have split a bottle with supper a few times, and I’ve really liked it.

Margaret Atwood guest-edited the BBC program Today:

Twice Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood guest edits Today, looking at the theme of change. She interviews climate activist (and 2019 Today guest editor) Greta Thunberg and speaks to The Prince of Wales about campaigning for the environment over several decades. Also, Margaret’s Booker Prize co-winner Bernardine Evaristo speaks to gal-dem founder Liv Little and birdwatcher extraordinaire Mya-Rose Craig, aka Birdgirl. Hosted by Margaret Atwood - including Martha Kearney and Mishal Husain.

The episode ends with a version of The Parting Glass by Karine Polwart.

From the New York Times, A Pandemic Is Hard Enough. For Some, Being Single Has Made It Harder:

“All of the self-sustaining energy needs to be self-generated,” he said. “There’s no one else there. There isn’t anyone in the physical area to rely on emotionally, physically or spiritually.”

A year into being single, after almost 30 years of not being single, this need for anything that happens being something that I alone purposefully make happen is equally liberating and confounding.

Dropping another round of Using Her Marbles off at The Bookmark this afternoon. Thank you to everyone who’s found their way to the book.

Our family trip to Bilbao, in 2003, started off warm and sunny:

So we have arrived in Bilbao. It is 36 degrees and sunny here — like we magically teleported ahead by 2 months into summer.

But it was all rain from there; the next day:

We set out on our snacking mission at about 7.30h. About 15 minutes in, it started to rain. Hard. Fast. Wet. We sought shelter under the canopies of shops. Somehow Oliver, by placing his fingers in the lowered shutters in front of a chi chi clothing store, caused an alarm to go off. We left that storefront quickly. Eventually, growing ever more tired and wet, we ambled into Cafe Iruna. This joint was jumping, apparently busy not only from the Sunday evening crowd, but also because of special events surrounding its 100th anniversary.

And the day after that:

When we emerged an hour later, the skies had opened. Fortunately we had purchased an umbrella earlier in the day. Unfortunately, our ‘one umbrella should be fine’ theory proved naive, and Catherine and I got drenched while Oliver hung onto the umbrella, for dear life, in his stroller. A thirty minute dash later, and we arrived soaked to the skin at out hotel.

And the day after that:

Today it rained, again, and our spirit was slightly diminished as a result. We made the best of it all, though, and took the wonderful Bilbao subway out to the edge of town where we rode across the river in a giant car carrying gondola, walked up the side of the opposite town in the pouring rain, walked back down along the ocean in the pouring rain, and returned, in the pouring rain, to Bilbao. Where it is pouring rain.

The trip wasn’t our first one as a family, but it was the first one where we set out to structure ourselves as a lean, mean, travelling machine. We had two suitcases, a car seat (with backpack straps on it), and a tiny umbrella stroller, with all its helpful rain-protecting accessories left at home to cut down on our travel weight.

This meant that when the skies opened and the rain started to fall in Bilbao, we were woefully unprepared, both for keeping the adults dry and for keeping Oliver dry. Our ultimate solution was to use an El Corte Inglés department store shopping bag as a makeshift set of rain pants, along with a tiny lightweight rain jacket:

Oliver absolutely hated wearing the bag on his feet, something that culminated in him crying out, at the top of his lungs, “NO BAGS ON FEET.”

If not perhaps his first words, certainly his first EXCLAMATION! in the form of a sentence.

I love receiving mail. It seems like magic, an envelope put in a box on the other side of the world shows up in a box up the street. All for a couple of dollars.

We received a comforting sizzle of holiday mail, with some truly lovely stamps. My two favourite were these, a bicycle stamp from The Netherlands and a colourful quartet of stamps from Ukraine.

My late friend and colleague John Pierce codified his mother-in-law’s macaroni and cheese recipe and it’s online at Almanac.com. I made it for supper tonight, and it’s as good as John described it. Just the thing for a cold, wet winter’s night.

The big revelation for me: macaroni and cheese is really macaroni and milk and cheese. Leave out the milk and you’re just making cheesy pasta.