Gianfranco Chicco, editor of The Craftsman, speaks with Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino about ”craftsmanship, repairability and design for longevity” on the Catastrophic Candour video series (via Peter Bihr).

The restaurant in Thunder Bay where my grandparents met in the 1930s has declared bankruptcy and may (re)reorganize as a cooperative.

Next week the “Atlantic Bubble” will allow the influx of hordes from away, with their COVID-19 and their strange modern ideas; as such, this was the weekend for Islanders to get out and take one last breath of COVID-free summer air before locking ourselves back inside our houses until the snow flies.

For Oliver and I this meant our usual start-of-season trip west. We started with Factory Coffee and hot chocolate at Island Chocolates:

With the late great Landmark Café no longer with us, we went to the brand new Casa Mia By the Sea at the end of the wharf for bao buns, enjoyed under the shade of a tree in front of Englewood School. 

From Victoria we drove north to New Glasgow for the usual second stop on the loop, an iced tea at the PEI Preserve Company and a walk in the Gardens of Hope, with the added bonus this year of a top-up of the charge to our Kia Soul using the EV charger hosted there. 

In the Gardens of Hope we found a bench in a shady grove we hadn’t seen before, and enjoyed some time out of the sun, looking out over the lily pond and the ponies beyond:

Our souls fed and our EV charged, we headed back to town for some late-Sunday shopping for socks, shirts and pyjamas, Oliver’s haberdashery-replenishment now falling under my watch and left fallow too long.

As we drove in on Route 2 there was a sprinkle of rain, just enough to take the edge off the heat.

We’ll see you at Thanksgiving.

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!