The best way to understand something is to try to explain it to someone else.

Which journalist is asking the most useful questions during the daily public health briefing from Dr. Heather Morrison?

Hands down it’s Kerri Wynne MacLeod from Ocean 100, a radio station I was heretofore unaware even had news.

While other journos focus on the statistical and the procedural, Kerri Wynne’s questions come closest to the questions that I would ask myself.

For more than a year I’ve been caught up in the day-to-day drama of a bunch of loosely-affiliated YouTube couples driving their customized camper vans through Central and South America. Given the seasons and travel patterns related to them, many of them reached Patagonia just as the pandemic hit, and they’ve all been documenting the process of getting stuck or getting home. As a collection, they’re an interesting slice through onc particular type of experience of social distancing and quarantine:

Trent & Allie are an American couple who made it all the way to Ushuaia, where the road ends at the tip of South America, and then back north to Buenos Aires before they could travel no farther. They made it back to family in Washington, DC in the nick of time, and documented their flight from Argentina over three videos: Trying to Escape the Pandemic, We Had to Abandon Our Van and Is it Too Late to Fly Home?

Kaylee and Jordan, who go by The Nomadic Movement, traveled with Trent and Allie through Mexico and Central America, but they parted company in Panama when Kaylee and Jordan decided to stay an homestead. They have chosen to remain there, and talk about being quarantined in their Forced Into Quarantine In Our School Bus.

Sara and Luca, who call their channel Leave Everything and Wander, are an Italian couple who drove all the way from Alaska to Ushuaia. They document their struggle to find a way to quarantine there in Stranded Abroad.

Christian and Aubry Matney also made it to the end of the road in South America, and they’ve chosen to ride out the pandemic in El Calafate, Argentina, which they document in Van Life in a Pandemic: Quarantine Day 1 and Van Life in a Pandemic: Trapped in South America.

Elsewhere in the world–because the YouTube algorithm does not only prod me to watch drives to Ushuaia:

Eamon & Bec, and Canadian couple who shipped their van to Europe and drove south into Morocco, opted to leave their van in there and fly home while it was still possible, which they vlogged in Abandoning Our Van in Africa.

Jason and Nikki Wynn, who call their channel Gone with the Wynns, are former #Vanlifers who moved on to sailing. They’d previously left their catamaran in Tonga for a holiday break in the U.S., and made a mad dash back to Tonga hoping to ride out the pandemic at sea. They almost made it, but they got quarantined in Fiji, which they describe in We’re Stranded.

For five glorious Tuesdays in the summer of 2011 I walked from our apartment on Graefestrasse and walked through Kreuzberg to Druckwerkstatt where I would design, set, and print something.

I would arrive in the print shop with an empty mind and a blank canvas, and emerge, 6 or 7 hours later, with a thing. It the annals of my creativity it was a summer to bookmark.

I woke up this morning to an email from a friend that was so full of light that some of it spilled over into me. And it is Tuesday. So I rousted myself up earlier than has been my pandemic habit, and got to the print shop by 9:30 a.m. With a blank canvas.

As I stood in front of the type cabinet, wondering what to do, I looked over at a collection of bits and bobs yet to be sorted and saw T, Y, and R, three wood letters that were a gift last summer from my friend Martin.

T Y R.

T R Y.

Go!

I squirted a squirt of yellow ink onto the platen, such a pleasure, as it’s an intense yellow, the kind of yellow that you could live inside if you had to:

I flipped the motor on the letterpress on and let the rollers quietly do their work turning the squirt into a sheen:

While this was happening, I took some letter-sized card stock and cut down each sheet into four to make postcard-sized cards:

And when that was done, I set the type; not hard to do with just three letters:

I mounted the chase in the press, put in a piece of scrap paper, and made my first TRY:

This is always the most uncomfortable time of the printing process for me: imperfection. The T and R are too close together. The T and the Y are heavier than the R. And there’s not enough ink. This purgatory makes me nervous, and I set quickly to work to get closer to heaven through the makeready.

First, I buttressed the R with a rectangle of tissue paper taped underneath:

I added a shim between the T and the R to add some air, added a squidge more yellow ink, and added some additional packing to get a more satisfying print. The evolution was more satisfying:

Even more so on a postcard:

It’s hard to shoot video and to print at the same time while also staying safe, but here’s a glimpse at what printing a TRY looks like:

I was ready to print in earnest!

I zeroed the counter:

And I printed. When I was done I had 50 TRYs to dry:

Would you like a TRY? Email me your name and postal address and I’ll put one in the mail as soon as they’re dry.

Tomorrow, by Miner.

A song for the times.

There will be better days.

Given the current perils of grocery shopping, every leftover becomes all the more precious. Indeed, never have I been more aware of what is, and what is not, in the fridge and the pantry.

This has led me to considerable kitchen innovation.

For example, this morning I found that I had some leftover garbanzo beans, and the dregs of a jar of tahini, so I thought I’d make some hummus. But I lacked lemon juice. So I improvised, and used pineapple juice. And made pineapple hummus. We had some for both breakfast and lunch, and there’s some more left over for tomorrow.

My greatest innovation, however, is dessert waffles.

I make waffles every Sunday morning for breakfast, and, especially now that there’s just the two of us, three or four are generally left over and get put into the fridge for consumption later on in the week.

With Oliver home for lunch every day, and expecting an occasional dessert at least, I have taken to making Improv Dessert Waffles, as follows:

1. Toast one or two waffles in the toaster.
2. Take some random chocolate, from some dark corner of the cupboard—we have a lot of leftover Christmas chocolate here—and melt it in a small pot on the stove. Add a splash of milk if it’s helpful.
3. If there’s a spare apple, orange, or strawberry hanging about, chop it into bite-sized chunks and add it to the melted chocolate.
4. Pour the resulting fruit-chocolate mix over the toasted waffles.
5. Enjoy.

I’ve done this enough over the last three weeks that it will emerge, I am sure, as the seminal dessert of the social distancing era.

Sarah Millican reads a little bit of her book How To Be Champion every day.

Champion the adjective.

Brilliant.

Oliver has been auditing Philosophy 1010 (Introduction to Philosophy) at the University of Prince Edward Island this semester. When the university closed for COVID-19, classes paused for a week and then, in theory, resumed after academics came up a plan for “transitioning to alternative course delivery.”

In the case of Philosophy 1010, alternative course delivery consisted of “here are my notes for the lectures I would have otherwise have given you.” You know, like when Broadway closed, and they handed out the scripts to the patrons so they could perform the shows themselves.

This left Oliver, who appreciates the performative aspects of the university lecture more than anything else, feeling substantially under-served, and left me in the position of having to rush to fill the void.

Unfortunately I took the other philosophy course during my brief tenure as an undergraduate, the “logic course,” where we spent our days in Venn diagrams rather than reading Plato. Leaving me ill-prepared for the task ahead. But I rallied.

Last week’s topic: Personal Identity.

Using the text as our guide, I sketched the four notions of identity, and then we fleshed them out together, using real world examples from our friends and familiars. When someone loses their leg in a war, for example, do they become a different person? What about someone who transitions to a different gender? Does someone who wasn’t diagnosed autistic become a different person if they receive an autism diagnosis? Do Buddhists really have no personal identity? This is where we ended up:

Today’s topic: Does God Exist?

This is the concern of the first chapter of the text, but the last to be considered in the course. Oliver was particularly engaged in this topic, and I was woefully ill-equipped to provide anything but the barest details, having spent approximately 5 minutes over 53 years on my own considerations of whether or not God exists. But it was fun nonetheless.

Oliver emailed our sketch of Does God Exist? to his professor and got some helpful commentary, so all was not lost on the formal front.

For typical students, all that’s left now is the final exam, the alternative delivery of which will be by email as a take-home project, with a pleasant degree of humour:

What I will do, instead, is post the exam here on moodle on Tuesday,  April 14, thus giving you FOUR DAYS to complete it.

Please note: the test is not geared to take four days. The test is still geared to take 3 hours. The added time is merely to offset any viruses — computer or covid-19. 

There was, in theory, one more lecture left, for this Wednesday, although it appears as though the class proper will not consider it. Oliver and I, regardless, will meet on Wednesday to ponder Paley’s Design Argument and Pascal’s Wager.

Recorded eight days ago (8 months in quarantine years) on the Charlottetown waterfront at the end of a drive in the countryside on a sunny Sunday.