Jim Day’s piece on Using Her Marbles, Charlottetown man hopes his book helps people along difficult journey, ran in today’s Guardian.

I replenished my stock of the book over the holidays, and you can again get a copy directly from me or from The Bookmark.

It’s fitting that Jim wrote the article, as an earlier Guardian piece of his, about Catherine, is reprinted in the book; Jim retired this week and this may well have been his final story to appear in the paper.

If holidays 2020 have demonstrated anything, it’s that our current video-chatting gear, built for the desk not the living room, doesn’t scale to groups.

A comfortable couple can get by, huddled in front of a shared laptop, but otherwise, unless everyone has a web-camera device of their own, audio and video quality plummet into indecipherable fuzz (and even with a one-device-per-person setup there are bandwidth and audio feedback issues to contend with).

Oliver and I have tried a combination of a wide-angle external webcam and a screen projector, but ergonomics and site lines have proved challenging. That said, this setup has allowed for a more casual stance and freedom from having to maintain eye contact; it also provides others with more context for our setting, as they can place us in the room we’re in, as opposed to just the wall slice we’re in front of.

My ideal setup would combine individual close-up cameras for each person with a context-setting wide angle, plus smart enough audio processing to filter out feedback. A useful upsell accessory would be a downward-facing camera that could be used for object sharing, tabletop game play, and so on.

I wonder if this could be achieved with a single ceiling-mounted device that would use face-detection to carve out the individual person-streams, plus directional microphones to isolate voices.

I would be willing to engage in nightly beta testing, by way of Zoom-charades, if the opportunity presented.

“Oliver, what’s that tin on top of the brick in the corner hutch?”

“It’s a tin… Passionate Peach… tea…”

“Does it actually have tea in it?”

Oliver retrieved the tin.

It did not contain tea.

It did contain 34 British two pence coins, with dates ranging from 1971 to 1999, one “non redeemable” brass game token, one 2004 U.S. dime, and two Mexican pesos, one from 1992 and one from 1999.

We have no idea where the tin came from. It’s labeled Zhena’s Gypsy Tea, from Ojai, California, and is from 2007.

As last year, I suspect time travellers.

My year-end gift to myself was a Baronfig Bolt ballpoint pen. It writes like a dream, and feels like it’s from the future.

I found the crank for our vestigial pasta maker last week (I’d given it up for lost), and with an unusual surplus of Iris eggs in the house, I seized the opportunity to make fresh pasta for the first time.

It was not a perfect plan, as I only had Speerville “whole white flour” in the pantry, but as a beta test it worked out surprisingly well. And about as simple a recipe as can be: 2½ cups of flour, five eggs, salt and olive oil.

On our way over the Hillsborough Bridge on Boxing Day, I took this photo of the side of a semi-trailer parked on the trail construction site.

Following up later in the day, I fell down a fascinating rabbit hole, learning about the “king pin to rear axle distance,” and why this is important.

The “king pin” is the place where the trailer attaches to the truck pulling it. The 40 foot distance is important (and thus labelled) because in California there’s a regulation, known colloquially as the “Bridge Law,” that on a typical 53 foot trailer, the maximum distance from the king pin to the rear axle is 40 feet, and the weight over the axles cannot be more than 34,000 pounds.

The 40 foot distance varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; California’s in the shortest limit, and thus a kind of effective baseline.

In June of 2013, Catherine, Oliver and I attended a site-specific theatre production, Manna-Hata, in the James Farley Post Office in New York City. In the intervening years, this post office, which was largely decommissioned when we were there, has been transformed into the Moynihan Train Hall, an extension of Penn Station across the street. It’s set to open on Friday.

I’ve been on a Would I lie to you? tear for the last month; if you need to laugh out loud, it’s a good catalyst. This episode has it all.

Tonight I feel like a master of the culinary universe: butterhorns were a gateway drug to the yeasty arts. Pizza dough, it turns out, is within the grasp of mortals.

Killer toppings: pickled romanesco from Terra Rossa and cherry tomatoes from Trudy White. 

Following Nature Conservancy advice that local birds will appreciate a novel winter hangout, I placed our retired Christmas tree in the back yard.