In this brave new world we’re all jacked into Zoom (or, maybe, Jitsi) all day long. We’ve been at this for a month, and it’s remarkable how little most of us continue to pay attention to video and audio, as if living the Dick Tracy future is enough, and we don’t really need to be concerned with seeing and hearing other clearly.

Here in my office I mostly use the “Display Audio” microphone built into the front of my Apple Cinema Display. It’s always been good enough. But, I wondered, could I do better.

So I dug the old Live from the Formosa Tea House audio setup (Apex 435 microphone, Behringer 802 mixer) out of storage, bought myself a line-to-USB cable, and set everything up beside my computer to see if that would prove the audio quality.

If you listen to the same here, I think you’ll agree that it did.

I’m taking it out for a real ride in 15 minutes on my weekly conference call with my colleagues in New Hampshire.

I’m also using the opportunity to promote the brand (get your Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook by The Old Farmer’s Almanac today!):

Grief is a journey. And in parallel to that journey are the myriad practical acts of unbundling from another’s life, and of shutting down or attending to the practical tools they once used.

Figuring out what to do with Catherine’s mobile phone is this week’s task.

The phone itself, a Nokia 6.1, has a storied history: last September Catherine was rushed to hospital by ambulance, the result of dehydration and exhaustion. Here’s how I told the story of that day in the email newsletter that went out to friends and family:

I was away last week, and Catherine’s mother Marina, supported by generous friends, was here from Ontario to help out. Marina’s presence was a Godsend, and made my time away possible.

Her presence also allowed Catherine to be convinced today that it was again time to call in reinforcements, and with the help of her Palliative Home Care nurse, she was able to arrange to be admitted to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital today for rehydration and recuperation.

This all happened to coincide with the time that I was due to drive Marina over to Moncton to catch the train home, and this was how it came to pass that our house cleaner, two paramedics, a home care worker, me, and Marina were all packed into our house today.

As Marina and I were readying to depart, Catherine was on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance by the paramedics, and she neglected to notice that her cell phone was in her pocket: it fell out, crashed onto the sidewalk and, before anyone could notice, the stretcher ran over it. It did not survive.

Not a calamity, relatively speaking, but yet another thing to add to the pile.

Oliver and I did drive Marina across to the train, and we stopped at Staples in Moncton to pick up Catherine a new phone; it turned out that the Nokia 6.1, the phone that was run over by the stretcher and needed replacing, was on sale. So we simply bought a replacement, and delivered it to Catherine in hospital that night.

Catherine used this phone a lot. For Instagram. To send texts (for someone for whom reading and writing was a constant struggle, this wasn’t easy, but she plowed through). And as a phone.

Two things have prevented me from doing something with her phone over the last 90 days.

Three things, actually, if you count that it’s another act of closure.

First was her telephone number: all three of we 100 Prince Streeters ended up with telephone numbers ending in 9569. What to do with Catherine’s? Put it back into the pool for someone else? Keep it alive in case we need a third phone between the two of us? I solved, or at least delayed, this issue by downgrading the Public Mobile plan for the SIM to a basic $15/month plan. A small price to pay for renting a phone number for a while.

Second was the text messages on the phone. Despite that most of them were workaday “good morning!”, “how are you?”, “can you get eggs?” texts, or maybe especially because of that, the archivist in me didn’t want them to disappear into vapor when I repurposed the phone.

To solve this problem, I installed SMS Backup+ on the phone and configured it to backup Catherine’s text messages and call log, via IMAP, to her email account, which I’ve kept active, via IMAP.

It took all night to back the messages up–there were almost 9,000 of them–but now that’s done, when I login to Catherine’s Fastmail account I see two new folders, Call log and SMS. In the SMS folder is an archive of Catherine’s texts back to December 10, 2018:

It’s a small thing, an archive only of interest to me. And perhaps never to be consulted after today.

But it’s another small step.

The “X years ago today” feature of Google Photos almost makes entrusting care of my photos to Google worth it. Especially on days like today.

An interview with Chef Yuta Funaoka, who opened a new restaurant in Osaka weeks before the lockdown, and is now serving inexpensive ¥1200 takeout with local ingredients.

A couple of years ago I got interested in learning more about postal codes and, specifically, ours: C1A 4R4.

That C1A 4R4 applies to only 24 households stuck in my mind as a thing I could hang my hat on someday; someday arrived when we all went into lockdown: neighbours are now more than neighbhours more than ever before.

Hence C1A 4R4, the newsletter. The first edition was published today, and is now in the mailboxes of our hearty compatriots.

This first issue–which you need to live in C1A 4R4 to read, because otherwise what’s the point–has contributions from one end of the postal code to the other. And a call for submissionss for issue № 2.

Want to do the same thing for your postal code? Here’s what I did.

First, to find out what addresses are in my postal code I used the Canada Post search tool, but rather than entering an address to look up a postal code, I entered my postal code to look up all the addresses therein:

(This really only works if you live in the city, or in a rural area that’s had street-level postal codes assigned; in rural areas it all falls apart because hundreds of households share the same postal code, so you’ll need to find a different geo-conceit).

I identified some neighbours that I already knew, and sent them an email seeking submissions; here’s what I sent out last week:

As a little pandemic diversion, I have decided to start a newsletter, a real printed newsletter, for the 24 households in C1A 4R4—the east side of Prince Street from 96 to 124.

I am thus soliciting contributions. Anything up to 200 or 300 words, on any topic, C1A 4R4-related or not. Prose, poetry, coronavirus-related or completely not.

For the first edition I got three submissions from my neighbour Norman and one from my neighbour Karen; added to a little piece of my own, and an introduction, these fit nicely on a double-sided piece of letter-sized paper when I pasted them into a Pages document on my Mac:

I printed 24 copies, double sided, put each in an envelope, and hand-delivered them to front mailboxes, (recruiting Norman to deliver to his building at № 124). I washed and sanitized my hands before and after delivery, avoided any people along my short route, and was out and back home in under 3 minutes, so I think I’m good on the Dr. Heather Morrison front.

If you follow my lead, please leave a note in the comments.

Time to dust off the old CBC Prince Edward Island Headline Testing machine again, as I noticed they were running a showdown between “Islanders mobilizing to make masks for seniors’ caregivers ‘nothing short of amazing’ ” (currently running at 62%) and “Why these Islanders have mobilized to sew hundreds of cloth masks” (37%). Learn more about this in my 2017 post breaking it all down.

These two photos were taken in essentially the same place from the same perspective, off Water Street near the Marine Terminal on the Charlottetown waterfront. The first I took yesterday; the second in September 2016. 

A lot of stuff gets dumped here over the course of the year, and, depending on the season, and the stuff, it’s an ideal location for shooting your next film set in an exotic local during a time when the pandemic means you can’t get to, say, the Moon, or the tundra, or Oman.

When my friend Cynthia launched her podcast on belonging last month, something told me that I had something to contribute.

Find out whether I was right.

And then they ask “Hello, is Michelle there?” and it all falls apart.