I got an email, tailor-made for procrastination, this morning from a correspondent in Prince County:

Do you know if there is an online map of the boroughs, neighbourhoods, districts of Charlottetown? There is a Wikipedia page for “Neighbourhoods of Charlottetown”, but I’ve never seen a map that shows these areas.

I couldn’t find one either, so I set out to fill that hole in the digital landscape.

The constituent parts of the modern-day City of Charlottetown are as follows:

• Spring Park, originally a village, Spring Park was amalgamated into Charlottetown in April 1958 (source).
• Parkdale, a Village as of 1958, Parkdale became a Town in 1973, and was amalgamated into Charlottetown in April 1995 (source).
• Sherwood, a Village as of 1969, Sherwood became a Community in 1983, and was amalgamated into Charlottetown in April 1995 (source).
• West Royalty, originally a post office, then a Settlement, became the Community of West Royalty in 1980, and was amalgamated into Charlottetown in April 1995 (source).
• East Royalty, a Settlement as of 1939, became a Locality in 1960, a Community in 1976, and was amalgamated into Charlottetown in April 1995 (source).
• Hillsborough Park, a Village as of 1976, became a Community in 1983 and was amalgamated into Charlottetown in April 1995 (source).
• Winsloe, a Settlement in 1939, became the Community of Winsloe in 1971 and was amalgamated into Charlottetown in April 1995 (source).

Just before amalgamation in 1995, the map of these parts looked like this (boundaries from this provincial GIS layer):

After the 1995 municipal amalgamation, the constituent communities were downgraded to “neighbourhoods,” and, together with the land on which the Queen Elizabeth Hospital sits, and a small area north of Charlottetown Airport where there’s an industrial park today, became modern Charlottetown, with the boundary shown in red on this map:

Before Spring Park and Charlottetown were amalgamated in 1958, their boundaries looked like this (Spring Park boundary from this helpful map):

If you’re, say, from Prince County, and want to do a familiarization tour of Charlottetown’s constituent communities, here are directions:

• Driving into the city across the North River Causeway, you’ll enter West Royalty.
• Continue along Capital Drive to the Charlottetown Mall, turn right down University Avenue, and as you pass the UPEI field on your left you’ll be entering Spring Park.
• Continue south on University Avenue and as you pass the Dairy Queen on your right you’ll be entering original Charlottetown.
• Take a left on Euston Street and continue to the confusing intersection–Ken’s Corner to locals–of Longworth Avenue, where you’ll confusingly turn left. Continue on Longworth until you pass the 1911 Jail on your left near Belmont Street; you’re now entering Parkdale.
• Longworth turns into St. Peter’s Road; at the confusing intersection–Ellis Brothers to locals–with Brackley Point Road you’ll be entering Sherwood.
• Continue on St. Peter’s Road, through the confusing intersection with the bypass; on the other side of the bypass you’ll be in East Royalty.
• As you go through the roundabout on the other side of the bypass, take an immediate right onto Northridge Parkway, and continue along until it ends at Hunter Lane; you’re now in Hillsborough Park.
• Continue on Hunter Lane to Patterson Drive, where you’ll take a right and continue to Southgate, turn left and then right onto the bypass; take the bypass all the way to Route 2, where you’ll see Leons and Kent, and take a right onto Route 2. As you pass the Sherwood Road you’ll be entering Winsloe.

The tour should take you about 45 minutes if you don’t stop at the Dairy Queen.

If you’d like to explore this geography in more detail, and make your own maps, here are the data layers I used to make mine:

• pre-amalgamation-charlottetown.geojson – derived from this provincial GIS layer, with Cornwall, Stratford and Summerside removed, a few bodies of water removed, and labels added to the communities. Credit for the original layer to L.R.I.S., 20050725, Prince Edward Island Pre-Amalgamation Boundaries: Prince Edward Island Finance and Municipal Affairs, Taxation and Property Records, Geomatic Services, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada.
• springpark.geojson – derived from this Google My Maps map, with various subdivisions and other features removed leaving only the boundary. There’s no identifying information on the map as to its original source.
• charlottetown.geojson – derived from this provincial GIS layer, with municipalities other than Charlottetown removed. Credit for the original layer to L.R.I.S., 20050725, Prince Edward Island Municipal Boundaries: Prince Edward Island Finance and Municipal Affairs, Taxation and Property Records, Geomatic Services, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Other resources you might find useful in learning more about Charlottetown and its parts:

• Charlottetown Area Municipalities Act, which describes the amalgamation (it’s since been repealed and replaced by the Municipal Government Act).
• The Geography of Governance: An Overview of Boundaries Powers and Responsibilities on Prince Edward Island, by J.A. Cousins.
• The PlaceFinder, one of the few remaining parts of provincial data infrastructure remaining in operation that I created, and one of my proudest creations at that; for each geographic name in the province you can get the official history of the name from the Canadian Geographic Names Database.

While my Prince County correspondent was, I suspect, asking “hey, if you ever come across a map, let me know,” answering their query in the form of a blog post was, indeed, an excellent way to procrastinate on a Friday afternoon.

I liked the sound the book of Ma vie à Paris and requested a copy by interlibrary loan from the Provincial Library Service. For the first time ever in my long history of interlibrary loan requests, they’ve come up dry: there’s not a single Canadian library that has the book in its collection.

Tubular Bells: The Mike Oldfield Story is an interesting BBC documentary about Oldfield and his seminal album.

Without Tubular Bells, you never would have heard of Sir Richard Branson or Virgin Records.

Evidence of the corona times on the plaza at Confederation Centre of the Arts.

I maintain a small mailing list of those responsible for organizing New Year’s Levees each year, and around about this time I generally get in touch with them to start gathering information for the new year. Today, though, I sent out this notice:

With the announcement this morning from Hon. Antoinette Perry that there will be no New Year’s Levee held at Government House on January 1, 2021, I wanted to let you all know that I will not be maintaining a list of levees for New Year’s Day 2021, as I expect most if not all will be cancelled in the same fashion.

Best wishes for 2021 regardless, and I hope to see you all back on the levee circuit in 2021.

As much as I will miss the annual tradition, levees seem tailor-made for COVID-spreading, and the Lieutenant Governor deserves our thanks for leading the way this year.

Shortcuts are a delightfully powerful set of digital Lego blocks for iOS, a modern day HyperCard, in a way. This guide from Apple to creating Siri Shortcuts using web APIs prompted me to try creating one for myself, a Shortcut to retrieve the percentage of PEI’s electricity load generated from the wind.

As a starting place, I used this wind energy API endpoint, the same endpoint that my PEI Electricity web app uses. It returns real time data about wind energy load and generation on Prince Edward Island, like this:

{
  "current": {
    "updatetime": "2020-11-05 12:59:00",
    "uptimetimehuman": "Thursday at 12:59 PM",
    "on-island-load": "202.86",
    "on-island-wind": "163.86",
    "on-island-fossil": "0.00",
    "wind-local": "77.98",
    "wind-export": "85.88",
    "percentage-wind": "80.77"
  },
  "previous": {
    "updatetime": "2020-11-05 12:44:00",
    "uptimetimehuman": "Thursday at 12:44 PM",
    "on-island-load": "202.80",
    "on-island-wind": "164.65",
    "on-island-fossil": "0.00",
    "wind-local": "77.36",
    "wind-export": "87.29",
    "percentage-wind": "81.19"
  },
  "peak": {
    "peak": "213",
    "hightime": "10:14 AM"
  },
  "peakwind": {
    "peak": "179",
    "hightime": "8:29 AM"
  }
}

That’s got everything I need in an endpoint to make a Shortcut: I want the Shortcut to use the “percentage-wind” value, 80.77 in this example.

To create the Shortcut, I launched the Shortcuts app on my iPhone, tapped the “+” to create a new one, gave it the name “what’s the wind energy,” and then added my first action, a Get Contents of URL action to get the contents of that endpoint:

Next, a Get Dictionary Value action, as I needed to pull out just the value for percentage wind energy generation, using simple dot notation for current.percentage-wind:

Because that’s returned as a decimal value, and I didn’t need that much granularity, I rounded off the value using a Round Number action:

I added the words “per cent” using a Text action:

Finally, I added a Speak Text action to read the result:

With the Shortcut saved, I can say “hey siri, what’s the wind energy” to my iPhone and it tells me.

You can save yourself the trouble of recreating the Shortcut from scratch by installing on your iPhone here.

That was so much fun I decided to make another Shortcut, this one to tell me how much water our household has used today.

For this one, I used this API endpoint, which returns data, used also by my Consuming.ca web app, about my water usage, like:

{
  "metadata": {
    "serialnumber": "30142394",
    "address": "100 Prince",
    "location": "Basement",
    "role": "Household",
    "metertype": "water",
    "metertypecode": "13",
    "colour": "#30c020",
    "public": "1",
    "publiclabel": "Miller-Rukavina",
    "active": "1"
  },
  "reading": {
    "current": {
      "value": "7697",
      "datestamp": "2020-11-05 13:56:50",
      "formatted": "769.70 m<sup>3</sup>"
    },
    "firstever": {
      "value": "1171",
      "formatted": "0.00 m<sup>3</sup>"
    },
    "firsttoday": {
      "value": "7696",
      "formatted": "769.60 m<sup>3</sup>"
    }
  },
  "consumption": {
    "today": "100 ℓ"
  }
}

The Shortcut for this is essentially the same as “what’s the wind energy,” but it’s called “how much water have we used today,” and it uses the value consumption.today. If you have particular interest in knowing how much water I’ve used today, you can install this Shortcut on your iPhone too.

In the game of grief, I’ve had a special bonus round as I’ve worked to clean up Catherine’s studio, across the hall from my own shop, over the last ten months.

St. Paul’s Anglican Church has been extraordinarily patient with me, for which I will be forever grateful; as recently as a month ago the studio looked like a slightly reordered version of how it was when Catherine last shut the lights and closed the door. It was an overwhelming task, and I was overwhelmed; deadlines I set for myself — March 31, September 30 — came and went, and I couldn’t find the motivation to just deal with the everything of it all.

While there was, indeed, the practical challenge of simply dealing with unravelling the materials and supplies accumulated over a lifetime of art practice, lurking in the background was the larger spiritual challenge of what amounted to erasing tangible evidence of Catherine. I wasn’t fully aware of just how much of the daunting quality of the task was daunting because of that until this morning, as I made the last push to the summit.

The summit, it turns out, is a lonely place, and the prize for playing the bonus round is a physical manifestation of the emptiness that Catherine’s absence has left.

I confront the emptiness with equal parts melancholy and hope; as I wrote my family yesterday, “What I can feel happening slowly, sometimes very slowly, is the start of the end of the time of my life where I am defined by Catherine’s absence and instead am focused on other things. Future things.” Reaching the summit of emptiness is an important way station, a necessary one. I don’t want to stay here too long, but I do have to stay here for awhile.

I first met Lucy Morkunas in the most in-passing way that one can: in the chaos of the summertime Charlottetown Farmers’ Market she stopped me, introduced herself, and told me I had to meet her friend Kent, who was in town from Ontario; she thought we’d get on (we did meet, several times, and did, indeed, have overlapping sensibilities).

Earlier this year I heard from a mutual friend that Lucy had been diagnosed with collecting duct carcinoma, a rare form of kidney cancer. Knowing that we’d already met, and that I’d some recent familiarity with life, cancer, dying, and death, our mutual friend suggested I might reach out. I did, and the result was a visit to Lucy’s home this summer bearing sandwiches from town.

If you read The Guardian, you might recognize Lucy’s name from the article P.E.I. woman forced to pay for cancer drug already on provincial formulary that ran in the paper on Monday: since that summertime sandwich Lucy and I shared, she’d started and stopped chemotherapy (because it wasn’t working), and has started taking Nivolumab, an immunotherapy that, in her case, has shown great promise.

The problem Lucy’s running into–and the reason for the article in The Guardian–is that the treatment’s costs aren’t being covered by provincial medicare, leaving her to pay the $7,000 per dose cost out of her own pocket. Lucy’s request to Health PEI to cover the cost was met with the response that it “is not in alignment with the criteria and therefore is not eligible for funding at this time.”

I had lunch with Lucy again today.

It was clear that as much as she is, understandably, concerned about getting her treatment funded, she is concerned about the opacity of Health PEI’s response: she wants to know what the criteria are, and why her situation is not in alignment with them.

She wants this for herself, but also, equally wants it for the rest of us who may one day walk down this road. Living with cancer is hard enough without having to run a part-time advocacy and logistics operation on the side, and Lucy is simply advocating for a process that is clear and transparent.

Catherine was fortunate that the treatments for her metastatic breast cancer were all covered 100% by medicare; we were never faced with having to lobby health officials for medication that could keep her alive.

Cancer care is a labyrinth, and Lucy is the first to admit that there are dead ends, points at which treatment must come to an end. What she simply wants to know–and what I think we, in whose name her treatment might be funded, should want to know–is what the rules are and how the decisions are made. We owe Lucy that. We owe ourselves that.

The Antarctic Extremes series from PBS is well-produced and entertaining.

I woke up this morning determined to, well, not particularly determined to do anything of great import. But, as the day progressed, I decided that today was the day to open an online store for my letterpress goods.

It’s been a whirlwind effort, but I’ve done it, and it’s open now for your shopping convenience at:

https://shop.QueenSquarePress.ca/

To get to this point, here’s what I did today:

1. Came up with a new name for my press. I’d been using “Reinvented Press,” named after my digital business, by default over the years, but I was never happy about it: the press needed a name of its own. Given that I live and work on Queen Square, Queen Square Press seemed like the right name (a few years ago, after talking to historians and doing some of my own research, I came to the conclusion that Queen, singular, is the proper name of the square).
2. Registered “Queen Square Press” as a trade name for Reinvented Inc. This required, first, a name reservation ($50) and, once I was cleared to use the name, a $90 registration fee. I was very impressed with the turnaround time on both, and I was able to self-service the entire thing on the provincial government’s website.
3. Registered the domain name QueenSquarePress.ca with Webnames.ca, for $13.99 a year.
4. Signed up for a Big Cartel account.
5. Set up DNS for shop.queensquarepress.ca to point to my new Big Cartel site.
6. Took photos, created products, wrote descriptions, set prices, set up shipping.
7. Upgrade from the free 5-product Big Cartel plan to the $9.99/month plan so that I could do inventory tracking and sell more than 5 products.
8. Launched the shop.

I like Big Cartel: it’s everything you need, and not a single bit more. It’s simpler than Shopify and considerably less chaotic (and with a different business model) than Etsy. It suits me.

The photos aren’t perfect. Not all the things I plan to sell are in place. I might lose money on the shipping. But launching an imperfect shop, in a day, was a better plan than never launching a perfect shop, over a lifetime. Thank you to the excellent Expedition Press, from whom I just purchased a whack of beautiful things, for the inspiration.

Enjoy.