Early last week I had a request from Abby Hyndman, daughter of my friends Nicky and Dave: she’s a student in the Holland College videography program, and wondered if I’d entertain being the subject of a short documentary about letterpress printing, her final course assignment. I happily agreed, and met Abby and her trusty assistant in the letterpress shop last Thursday afternoon for a few hours.

I needed something to print.

I’d been thinking a lot about the word “nuzzle” of late, and so it became my subject: I wanted to see if I could represent, in cold hard type, a sense of “nuzzlieness.”

I started off on the bench with various ink colours and improvised: red-over-yellow, yellow-over-red, upside down over rightsize up, backward and forward. Midway through my improv I tweaked things to dip the U below the baseline, thinking, perhaps, it could act as a sort of nuzzled-nose.

Once Abby was in the shop, the improvisation continued, and where I ended up was rather magical in the way that sometimes happens when you don’t plan and just let the type dance:

Abby documented the process, and so you can watch a slice of the making of the Nuzzle in the video she sent along today, kindly giving me permission to share:

If you’d like to hire Abby for her video or graphic design talents, you can find her here.

You might want to take the afternoon off to read These Precious Days, by Ann Patchett.

One of the fun new aspects that being a single parent has revealed is that my birthday celebration falls to me to help facilitate.

So while propriety would normally prevent me from calling attention to it, in this case I’m both the ringmaster and the elephant, so drop over to Oliver’s blog and check out what he’s up to.

From the SPACE10 newsletter:

Last yeast has made us painfully aware of the limitations of systems that underpin our everyday life: from supply chains and healthcare, to the design of our schools, offices, and neighbourhoods. Now is the time to start overhauling these systems.

While last yeast was, I presume, a typo, it’s a cracking one, as it brought my mind to the notion of a yeastless dystopian future, the run up to which, in the spirit of peak oil, might be nicknamed just that.

“Have you thought much about how you’re going to mark last yeast?”, Niamh asked Jamali.

“Probably with pizza,I reckon,” he replied with moribund resignation, “or perhaps a hot cross bun.”

Contemplating an unleavened future is almost inconceivable. But with bees under threat, the coffee supply threatened by a shipping container shortage and, well, climate change, it is safe to assume that in my lifetime many things that I have taken for granted all my life will simply disappear forever. Probably not yeast. Probably something we least expect, like hyacinths or red paint or merino wool or robins.

In the meantime, enjoy your toast while you can.

I cycled out to the almost-middle of the Hillsborough Bridge using the new not-quite-open-yet-and-strewn-with-large-gravel active transportation pathway. My arrival happened to coincide with the sun setting directly over downtown Charlottetown, so I set my iPhone up on a wooden post, set the camera in time lapse mode, and waited an increasingly-chilling 20 or 30 minutes for the sun to set. The time lapse allows you to see it all in 37 seconds.

Opposition Social Development and Housing critic Hannah Bell has tabled Motion 30 – Social assistance vision care in the Legislative Assembly of PEI, and it bears paying attention to, as it addresses both a specific deficiency in the Island’s Social Assistance policies, and the larger issue of why they are so seldom updated.

The specific issue: Social Assistance will provide $54 for an eye exam and $115 for eyeglass frames and lenses, rates that have not been updated since 2007.

As anyone who’s ever gone for an eye exam knows, eye exams don’t actually cost $54 (the last one I had cost $125).

And as anyone who’s ever gone shopping for eyeglasses knows, eyeglasses don’t actually cost $115.

This makes no sense.

High-quality, properly corrected vision, reviewed regularly, is a necessary precondition for employment and education, to say nothing of simply being able to exist day to day with confidence and comfort.

My eyeglasses–progressive bifocals with prisms that cost several multiples of $115–are basic to my ability to exist; without them I could not work, drive, read a book, watch television, or make out the ingredients on a pill bottle. All Islanders deserve the right to these things.

Motion 30 is a modest, targeted motion with three asks:

• Urge government to review this policy and increase the fee paid for visual assessment to align with the current average fee.
• Urge government to increase the coverage for basic frames and lenses or contact lenses to reflect current average cost.
• That these increases be done in consultation with the PEI College of Optometrists. 

I encourage you to contact your MLA to encourage them to understand this issue, and to support Motion 30.

While I remain steadfast in my belief that books are meant to be made of paper, I also know now, firsthand, how much energy it takes to schlep printed books around when they’re ordered. 

As such, I have, at long last, created an ebook version of Using Her Marbles, the book that I published in print in the fall that chronicles the five years that our family spent living with Catherine’s incurable cancer.

If you need a quick way to share that, UsingHerMarbles.com will get you there. Delivered as a PDF.

I took my bicycle off the road for winter 101 days ago, on December 12, 2020.

Today, with the roads dry, the temperature 11ºC, the weather sunny and windless, and the prospect of bánh mì to be had out the Avenue, I grappled the bike out of the basement, topped up the tires, donned my helmet and safety vest, and started cycling season earlier than I ever have, 26 days earlier than I did last year.

Oh how I missed it.

Credit due to Brother Steve in Montreal for the inspiration: he was out for his first cycle on the weekend, and jealousy and competitiveness were all the extra push I needed.

Who among us has not found themselves in a remote cottage with no playing cards and a hankering for gin rummy, and set out to create a deck from found objects.

This morning’s Everyday Book is a variation on that theme: come into the shop, make a book out of the first thing my eyes land on. A shipping tag.

John Matthias‘ tale in The New Yorker of Parkinson’s, visions, COVID, psychiatric commitment, and death is an overwhelming read.