Riverview Country Market has a new line of Italian sodas, made fresh in store from real ingredients.

On our cycle ride today we stopped in for groceries and then enjoyed sodas on their porch: I had a Blood Orange Assam and Oliver had a Sencha Cherry Lime.

Riverview is on the multi-use trail that runs along Riverside Drive out to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and beyond, making a mid-cycle soda a nice new aspect to an afternoon ride.

When you walk into Shoppers Drug Mart pharmacies you are immediately confronted by the cosmetics counter, where the staff are obviously instructed to greet you warmly. I always say hello, and then make my way into the heart of the store for whatever I’m looking for, never having had cause to stop.

Last week, though, I did stop, to ask the clerk where the sunscreen was.

“Well, the high-end sunscreen is over here,” she said, pointing to a posh looking display nearby, “and everything else is on the other side of the store.”

High-end sunscreen? I had no idea there was such a thing.

More often than not, I am ashamed to say, I am a sunscreen aspirant rather than a sunscreen wearer. I’ve always found applying sunscreen to be akin to spreading a heady mashup of motor oil, molasses, and printers ink to my body, and walking around thus-protected has always proved rather uncomfortable.

Perhaps I’ve been shopping in the wrong aisle, I wondered.

So I walked over to the high-end sunscreen display, where I found suitably high-end brands with names like La Roche and Darphin and Shiseido. 

I settled on a tube of High Protection Spray SPF 50+ from Avène. At $33 for 200 ml, it was roughly 5x more than I’d ever paid for sunscreen.

I’m only a week—several applications—into using it, but I must say that the motor-oil-molasses factor is, indeed, significantly less than what I’ve experienced in “low-end” commodity sunscreen. 

Whether it will be $33 better, I’ll have to hold on to determine. But I am becoming a regular sunscreen user, so signs are good.

(“That’s right, all the fanciest Dijon Ketchup” is a line from If I Had a $1,000,000 from Barenaked Ladies’ 1992 album Gordon).

Early in the pandemic times, I noticed a small growth on my temple that, given the general sense of entropy in the air, was cause for concern. I made an appointment at my family doctor last week, and while he was pretty sure it was nothing to worry about, he offered to refer me to a dermatologist, cautioning that it might take some time to get an appointment, as we have only one dermatologist serving the entire Island. As it turned out, it took less than a week: my appointment was for this morning.

In the meantime, I went yesterday to donate plasma at Canadian Blood Services, and learned that waiting to see a specialist about a possible cancer is reason enough to be temporarily disqualified from donating. This was my first ejection from the plasma suite, and I was appropriately chastened, but did emerge with a smart red face mask as a lovely consolation gift.

Wanting to imbue my dermatologist visit with as much positive karma as possible, I opted to ride my bicycle out to Parkdale, and once I’d made that decision, I opted to make a morning of it, and gang together all of my midtown tasks together in a grand loop. A muggy loop, as it turned out, with 85% humidity.

Here’s a map showing where my bicycle took me (geolocations sent to PhoneTrack, in my Nextcloud, via Overland; map tiles by Stamen Design):

From home I rode north on Prince and Upper Prince to Gerald, making a brief stop at Outer Limit Sports to pick up some replacement handlebar grips for my bicycle, the old ones having turned into a sticky gelatinous mess in the summer heat. 

From there I cycled up to Allen Street, and east along Allen Street to Parkdale Pharmacy for my appointment.

My appointment, with Dr. Rodriguez, the aforementioned Island’s-only-dermatologist, took approximately 35 seconds. She looked at my temple with her microscope and declared me simply a victim of age, rather than cancer. That was a relief.

Back on the bike, I headed west on Allen Street to Sobeys for groceries. Mindful of Allan Rankin’s sage counsel, I opted to wear the aforementioned smart red face mask I’d picked up at Canadian Blood Services, something that made me particularly conscious that there was, in a sea of shoppers, only one other person wearing a mask (along with a complete abandonment of even lip service being paid to the one-way aisles and social distancing).

I filled up the bicycle trailer with groceries and headed home, stopping at VanKampen’s for fresh tomatoes, and then cycling down the Confederation Trail to Kent Street to pick up milk and yogurt at Purity Dairy.

By the time I got home the bicycle trailer was filled to the gills:

Spending the morning on my bicycle reminded me, yet again, how much I love getting around that way, and despite the mugginess, it was a thoroughly enjoyable morning, made all the better by, you know, not having skin cancer.

Bonus pro tip: if you need to get bicycle handlebar grips on easily, spritz some hand sanitizer inside them first. Worked like a charm.

My friend Allan Rankin is back in the Eastern Graphic after a long hiatus. This week he writes about the devil-may-care attitude of many Islanders toward masks and distancing, echoing feelings I’ve had.

I’ve identified a condition, perhaps unique to we over 50, I call “non-compliance rage syndrome,” characterized by irrationally strong reactions to violations of the social contract: ignoring the hand sanitizer at the entrance, heading the wrong way down the grocery store aisle, riding bicycles on sidewalks, without a helmet, and so on.

The reactions are genuine and rational; the rage, inasmuch as there’s nothing we can do about it, is irrational.

The films of Anna Kendrick, reshot with Anna McGoldrick.

That’s either a Popalopalots sketch or a Steven Garitty blog post, I can’t decide which.

Fiero, our hot pepper plant, has sprouted an actual pepper!

From Indie Magonomics, written by Kai Brach, just arrived in the post from Heftwerk in Berlin, a reminder that printing in colour isn’t expensive because ink is expensive, it’s expensive because of everything else.

I’ve printed thousands of pieces from the same can of black ink that I’ve been using for a decade; I rarely use more than a dollop per job. The setting of the type, the makeready, the setting of the type for a second colour, the cleanup: those are the things that take time and thus add expense.

I look forward to the arrival of the Dense Discovery email newsletter each week.

I am particularly fond of the subject line of this week’s issue:

Unrecognisable casualties of the growth cult

Although it was a reference to a notion in the editor’s letter about software, it’s a notion that has general application, and harkens back to a public meeting I was at many years ago, where the architect of a prominent Charlottetown megalomaniac developer stood up and, in support of his client’s development, exhorted that the city must “develop or die.” That is the mission statement for the growth cult, and it’s something we’re all wrapped up in, at our peril.

We are all of us unrecognisable casualties of the growth cult,

We hosted the monthly Pen Night in our back yard tonight, our first non-Zoom meeting since February.

I wanted to make sure we did it right, so I got out the measuring tape and ensured that there was 6 feet between each chair.

It turns out that 6 feet apart is a lot more apart than I thought; if I hadn’t measured, I likely would have placed the chairs 3 or 4 feet apart, in error.

Makes me realize the people in the grocery store are a lot closer than 6 feet apart a lot of the time.