I took the new Kia Soul EV to Access PEI to register it and I left with a new plate sticker, a new registration slip, and $23.00.

This is because registration for electric vehicles is free, and I’d already paid up for a year’s worth of non-electric registration expiring in April.

So the government paid me to register my car.

(Okay, they actually refunded me $23.00 I’d previously paid them…).

There was a small panic at the counter when my helpful clerk, who’d never encountered this odd situation before, worried that it would throw her ability to balance her daily accounts out of whack, but she was assured all would be okay.

Remember how we test drove a 2016 Kia Soul EV from Mike Kenny at Pure EV a month ago?

Well, in what may well be the longest test-drive-to-purchase period ever, today we took possession of the selfsame Soul.

Here’s my post-purchase shot from Mike’s Facebook page (Catherine’s hiding inside):

Much more to say about this soon, but for now let us take a moment to remember the 2000 VW Jetta that Mike took on trade:

That Jetta served us well. We bought it new in the fall of 2001, meaning that it’s been our car for almost as long as Oliver’s been our son (while it feels like we covered a lot of ground in it, the mileage when I handed it over to Mike was less than 130,000 km).

I’ve been writing here about the Jetta almost as long as we’ve owned it, from that heady first check-engine light experience on.

I would be remiss if I didn’t tip my hat to Bob and Nettie Likely, who sold us the Jetta, and to Dave and Dorothy at Dave’s Service Centre on Belmont Street, who’ve kept it on the road for the last 8 years.

The Android OpenStreetMap-based app OsmAnd has an intriguing scheme whereby you can register your OpenStreetMap account and a Bitcoin address and then receive regular monthly deposits of Bitcoin based on your contributions to OpenStreetMap.

Over the last year I’ve received the equivalent of about $16.00 in Bitcoin as a result.

Today I got my regular seasonal appeal from the Internet Archive for a donation; I remembered from previous years that they accept Bitcoin donations, and that I had some Bitcoin to donate, so I sent them everything I had.

There’s something about this that I find enormously appealing.

In one last mad attempt to prove my love, I rode my bicycle to City Cinema tonight, thinking that somehow all reports of the incompatibility of snow, ice, salt, and sand with cycling were exaggerated.

Alas, they were not: it was a slippery, sketchy, cold end to a May-to-December romance that had to end.

This was truly the year of cycling for me: my first ride of the year was on April 30, out Kensington Road to the PEI Brewing Company for an energy efficiency event. That was a hard slog, and I had to hop off and walk up the last hill.

It got better.

I started cycling to get the groceries every week. I rode out to Home Hardware when I needed nails or electrical tape. I rented an ebike and rode to York. I cycled to the airport for an early morning flight, and back from the airport after a late night arrival.

By far and away my happiest cycling moments of the season were with Oliver: with Herculean effort he willed himself to become a cyclist this summer, and after only a week we were cycling to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market every week. There are few greater memories I have this year than of cycling along the Confederation Trail with Oliver, having a chat, and waving at the people we passed with a happy hello.

Somewhere in there something snapped in me, and I transitioned from “I’ll do this because it’s the only just thing to do in a climate crisis” to “I really (really) love this.” Cycling stopped being a chore and became a joy.

Which is why it was especially hard to lower my bicycle and its trailer into the basement tonight and close out the 2019 cycling season.

I’ll be counting the days to May 1, 2020.

I took this photo of me and and Oliver last week on the train home from Ontario. Its accidental fogginess proved an accurate reflection of how we were feeling at the time.

When I was 16 years old, my father and I started a company together called Cellar Door Software.

We got the name from the CBC: one day we were listening to the radio in the car and heard a segment where listeners had been invited to submit nominations for the most mellifluous words in the English language; someone suggested cellar door. We agreed. And that became the name.

(We also had a pretty nice-sounding cellar door at our family home in Carlisle).

The personal computer was the grand overlap between my life and Dad’s: he was an early adopter of computers, using them from the punch-card days onward in his work as a scientist. We both became fascinated, in the early 1980s, with personal computers, eventually acquiring a Radio Shack Color Computer for the family.

Cellar Door Software became an umbrella for two projects: my work as a programmer, and our joint work offering computer courses, both at the local high school at at the Hamilton YMCA, to children and adults.

We borrowed $2000 from CIBC to start the business in September of 1982 and we ran it for three years until we closed it down–likely, if memory serves, because I moved away from home–in August of 1985.

We used the $2000 for a bunch of capital expenses, which my brother Mike found in a PDF file this week:

• Grand & Toy filing cabinet ($64.64)
• Centronics printer ($616.25)
• Sears cassette recorder ($40.53)
• Texas Instruments cassette recorder ($69.00)
• Used Atari 400 computer ($80.00)
• Two used 5-1/4” disk drives ($10.65)
• TRS-80 Model 4 computer ($1000.00)
• Electrohome monitor ($170.13)

The printer (a dot-matrix) and the TRS-80 Model 4 were both in service of my work for Neil Evenden at Skycraft Hobbies, where I modified an inventory control system to better suit the needs of his hobby shop.

Our primary source of income otherwise were our courses at the high school and at the Y: in both cases we used Sinclair ZX-81 computers and black and white televisions, one setup for every two students. We taught the very most basic programming, like:

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10

It was my first exposure to teaching, my first exposure to “entrepreneurship,” and helped me pay for university.

Over the three years we ran the business we earned a total of $3946.30.

At some point during our business tenure I had an opportunity to take a batik course, and I created a sign for the business; it’s hung in Dad’s workshop ever since:

When my father retired from his position as a research scientist at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters, he took on the task of editing and distributing a monthly newsletter to his fellow retirees. By the time he handed over the editorial reins in 2018, he’d put out 100 issues, filled with announcements, jokes, cartoons and updates. He took the newsletter very seriously, and my mother, brothers and I all have memories of various family vacations and functions requiring time set aside to allow Dad to set up his laptop in an impromptu workspace to ensure the newsletter went out on time.

When Dad died two weeks ago, I sent a note to the new editors of the newsletter, and they sent word of his passing to the retirees mailing list, which prompted a flood of messages of condolence, often with work stories from the early years.

I offered to send a brief note for inclusion in the newsletter, on behalf of my brothers and I, which they generously agreed to include. This is what I wrote:

A Special Note from Norm’s Son

Our father, Norm Rukavina, longtime editor of this newsletter, died this week at the age of 82.

There has never been a time in our lives when we didn’t closely associate Dad with “The Centre”: the family moved from Ottawa in 1968 so that he could take up work at CCIW, and he remained there for his entire career. His involvement with CCIW and, later, NWRI, was the backbone of his life and, as his kids, the backbone of our childhood. During the late 1960s and through the 1970s we joined Dad in the field each summer on the shore of whatever Great Lake he was focused on the nearshore sediments of at the time; while he took core samples, we learned about salamanders from park rangers. We watched the Moon landing in the back of a Government of Canada VW bus while in the field. We all remember the experience of getting presents from the CCIW Santa Claus every Christmas in the auditorium, and we marvelled at how closely our presents matched what we’d discussed with our parents. Other memories include the CCIW open houses, getting to eat in the cafeteria when Dad would take us to work, being on a first name basis with the Commissionaires. And nightly references around the supper table to mysterious places like “Hydraulics” and “Tech Ops” and “Drafting,” of which we knew little.

It took Dad a long time to retire: we always got the impression this was a combination of there actually being follow-up work that needed doing, with, perhaps, a sense that he wasn’t quite sure what would happen if he stopped working altogether. Eventually, however, there came a day to load the last cardboard box into the car, hand in his pass, and drive home for good. After retirement Dad took great pleasure in editing the retirees’ newsletter: it kept him in touch with good friends, kept him wise to the latest technology, and provided him with a steady stream of jokes to send his children. He also enjoyed the get-togethers enormously, and would speak to us of people he’d meet up with, names we’d been hearing for years and years and years.

From the day he started work in Burlington, Dad kept a daily journal, mostly just bullet points about what had been achieved that day. We picked some off the shelf tonight and were amazed that the cast of characters in his working life in 1968 included many people we’ve heard from on the phone or by email this week with memories and messages of condolence. It’s brought us tremendous comfort to know that Dad was a part of so many people’s lives. Working at The Centre was, to we kids, simply what a Dad did, and so formed our assumption about how working life worked. It was a pretty good template to start out with.

Thank you to everyone who’s reached out this week to us; it’s truly appreciated. We’re suggesting that those who want to memorialize Dad make a donation to the Joseph Brant Hospital Foundation (jbhfoundation.ca): Joseph Brant took excellent care of Dad in recent years, and in his final weeks. It’s also been an important part of our family’s life for more than 50 years, most recently with the more than 1,500 hours of volunteer work Dad did there after retirement.

The editors, Jo-ann and Clint, added a note of their own:

Norm was instrumental in starting our CCIW retirees coffee club, which now has over 200 members, and produced 100 issues of this newsletter, up until May 2018. We have big shoes to fill. It’s a great help in keeping the retirees in touch with each other, and our monthly coffee meetings are well attended, usually numbering 25 to 40 people. Norm was a wonderful man, very well liked and respected.

Norm was also one of the original Research Scientists at CCIW working in the then Limnogeology Group. He was one of the “Trailer Trash”, working on site in the trailers before the current building was erected. He was a good friend and colleague and he will be long remembered and missed by many.

Until last week I never truly understood how valuable, important and comforting condolences are: the notes, cards, and emails we’ve received, and the people who’ve stopped me on the street, or at the market, to express their sympathies have all offered tremendous comfort. Who knew.

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Annual Meeting of Engineers PEI today in Charlottetown, with a talk I called The Government That Swallowed a Pond (Using Open Data and GIS to Inform Policy and Influence Behaviour).

I used the opportunity to expand on my August talk at the Applied Geospatial Research in Public Policy Workshop, Where PEI Public Servants Live and Work (and can we get them to leave their cars at home?); since I prepared the data for that talk I’ve received additional data from the Province of PEI on the home and work locations of government workers (up from 4,519 people to 13,211 — it turns out that if you ask for “each employee of the PEI public service, across all departments and agencies” you don’t actually get everyone; I had to submit three additional access requests). I’ve also explored additional capabilities of QGIS, especially its ability to bulk-calculate driving directions using Openrouteservice.

And I added some images of lovely postcards of Government Pond collected by the late Boyde Beck:

Images that look a lot different from the view of Government Pond one sees today:

Fortuitously, two days ago I received an email from a member of Bike Friendly Charlottetown asking if I might have data that could bolster their case for building the active transportation lane across the Hillsborough Bridge that the previous government committed to. Always ready to do just-in-time research, I dug in yesterday, and the result was an additional act in my talk on that very topic.

First, I plotted the home postal codes of the 404 people who live in Stratford and work at Queen Elizabeth Hospital (the largest public employer of people who live in Stratford):

Next, I used the Openrouteservice plug-in for QGIS to calculate their combined total daily commute: Openrouteservice provided me with a driving distance for each postal code that I then merged with my employee count table to get the total commute distance, which I multiplied by two to get the commute to and from work. The result: 6,540 km of driving between Stratford and the QEH every day:

I took that 6,540 km of daily driving, and estimated the carbon emissions of those drives, using the EPA average figure of 251 grams per kilometer of driving, and then multiplying by 251 workdays to get a total emissions per year figure of 412 tonnes:

Next I used the Openrouteservice isochrone tool to determine that 333 of those 404 workers can cycle from home to the hospital in under 30 minutes:

I used the Openrouteservice directions tool to calculate the driving directions for each of those 333 people, determining that if they’re each driving to and from work right now, they’re collectively driving 2,378 km every day:

Finally, I calculated the emissions savings if all of those drivers switched to cycling: 149 tonnes of CO2E per year.

I’m only showing maximum potential, of course: 333 people could cycle to Queen Elizabeth Hospital, it doesn’t mean that they will, or that they’re physically capable of doing so, or that they have bicycles, or that it’s safe to do so, even with a lane on the bridge. But it’s a place to start: it shows us what we’re missing, and what we can strive for.

The engineers were a friendly, welcoming lot (and there were a lot of them — more engineers that I ever imagined PEI might have). They asked some good questions, told me some things I didn’t know (like the time in 1997 that the government closed the Provincial Admin Buildings parking lot for a week!). I’m hopeful that some of the data and approaches I demonstrated might prove useful as they conjure our transportation future.

You can download the slide deck I presented as a PDF; I’m working on assembling the data I used, and documenting the analysis I did in more detail, and you can stay tuned for that.

3 Al Purdys, from Bruce Cockburn’s 2017 album Bone On Bone, has been running through my head since I first heard it last week.

It may have inspired in me a newfound love for poetry, especially the poetry of Al Purdy, from which much of the lyrics of the song are drawn:

Stand in the swaying boxcar doorway
moving east away from the sunset and
after a while the eyes digest a country and
the belly perceives a mapmaker’s vision
in dust and dirt on the face and hands here
its smell drawn deep thru the nostrils down
to the lungs and spurts thru blood stream
campaigns in the lower intestine
and chants love songs to the kidneys

(Excerpt from Transient, by Al Purdy, from Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996).

In Rukavina family written history, perhaps the preeminent distillation of my grandmother Nettie came in a note she left for my father (her son) one day, taped to the back window of her house in Brantford, Ontario:

For those of you who don’t read Pig Latin, that’s “the key is under the back porch in basket.”

My grandmother placed a lot of faith in the notion that those of the criminal element were not skilled at foreign languages.

And in her son (who was).

It worked.

My father saved the note all these years, in an accordion file marked “Rukavina Memorabilia.”