Every weekday morning for three years I drove Oliver to Colonel Gray Senior High School. When we arrived at the school, I would text his educational assistant–usually Dave, but sometimes Jill or Laura or Maritza—so that they’d know to come outside and fetch him to go on their morning constitutional.

We are here, I texted every morning like clockwork:

Oliver turned this into a stirring recitation one morning when we had a little bit of extra time to kill in the car while waiting.

When it came time to pick a subject for tonight’s Artist Trading Cards event at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, We Are Here popped into my mind as a kind of baseline statement of claim for humanity.

The times may be challenging, but we are here. So to speak.

I had a couple of 100 packs of № 1 shipping tags here in the shop, and decided to use those as a starting point (shipping tags come in standard sizes; № 1 are the smallest, at 70 mm by 35 mm).

I chose 30 point Futura Bold (acquired in 2015 from Letterpress Things) for the typeface, and Southern Ink Dense Black as the ink. I experimented with using upper and lower case, but opted for all caps for symmetry’s sake.

Shipping tags turn out to be a joy to print on: they’re nice and meaty, easy to get in and out of the press, quick to dry.

I printed 50 each of WE, ARE and HERE:

Once they were printed and dried, I decided that my artist trading card partners would need something to lasso their sets together, so I purchased three boxes of 1 inch silver “loose leaf rings” from Staples:

While I went into this project thinking WE ARE HERE, I realized, as I continued, that there are many combinations that can be made from these three words:

WE ARE HERE
WE HERE ARE
ARE WE HERE
ARE HERE WE
HERE WE ARE
HERE ARE WE

Mathematically, to calculate the number of permutations in this case, where there are 3 objects combined into sets of 3, you simply add up the integers from 1 to 3, so 1 + 2 + 3, to get 6 possible combinations.

I’ll be trading sets tonight at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, starting at 7:00 p.m. Unfortunately, due COVID, it’s not a public event, so you’ll have to use your imagination to recreate the thrill of the trade.

My font of 120 point Akzidenz Grotesk is missing the apostrophe. But there’s a comma. And what is a comma but an apostrophe in need of a lift.

Spotted near the Murphy Community Centre on Richmond Street in Charlottetown: “No Parking” has given way to the “circle P slash.”

Ellie, who until recently was a #vanlifer with her partner Charlie, has gone solo, ditched Charlie and the van, and flown from the UK to South Korea, where she must quarantine for 14 days. She’s vlogging about the experience, focusing on the interesting minutiae.

On my computer I had a task list called “Peter” that was empty, and that I never used. So I deleted it. I did not realize that, in doing do, I was also deleting my calendar of the same name.

Oops.

In the normal course of affairs this would have been a cataclysm: appointments, meetings, events, all lost track of. My personal and professional live in ruins.

These times are not normal, though: a weekly Friday appointment, plasma donation tomorrow, Pen Night on Saturday, a dentist appointment next week, two meetings in September. It took me 5 minutes to rebuild my calendar from scratch.

There truly is nothing going on.

That said, I discovered that I need a more robust backup routine for my personal data. I’ve put doing that on my calendar too.

My Artist Trading Cards entry (from the back), hung in the window of 100 Prince Street on bright orange string. They also come in “Here We Are,” “Are We Here” and “Here Are We” models.

For more than a month now I’ve been consuming a diet, every morning, of the blog posts I wrote on that day, over the last 20 years.

Beyond giving me a sense of my mortality, I’m using this to triage blog posts that need updating. This involves things like dealing with the Share on Ovi fiasco, repatriating photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube, and fixing any odd early-oughts HTML that needs fixing.

Here’s how I do this.

I use Reeder on my iPhone to consume RSS feeds (see aboutfeeds.com for what this means), and one of the RSS feeds I consume is this one, which contains the “on this day” posts. 

Here I am, for example, reading, reading this stressful blog post from 2019:

When I come across a blog post that needs updating–something I’ll do later in the day, once I get to the office–I invoke an iOS “Shortcut,” like this, selecting “Update Blog Post”:

This Shortcut creates a reminder for me, in the Reminders app:

When, later in the day, I get to the office and have some spare time, I open up the Reminders app, and see a list of URLs to update:

Over a month of doing this I’ve developed the muscle memory to make it a habit, and I’ve come to enjoy the daily bit of detective work that patching up shaky old posts entails.

The documentary The Booksellers : A behind-the-scenes look at the New York rare book world is streaming in Canada on CBC Gem.

If you travel west from Charlottetown on the Trans-Canada Highway, as you leave the city you cross the North River on your way to the Town of Cornwall.

According to the Cornwall Island Narratives Project, the year a bridge was first constructed over the North River at this point is somewhat in dispute, but it seems clear there was a bridge there by the middle of the 19th century.

From 1935 onward we can follow the evolution of the North River crossing through aerial surveys.

1935

In 1935 there was not yet a causeway, but a “narrow bridge, only wide enough to allow for one lane of traffic,” connecting Poplar Island to North River:

Detail from 1935 Aerial Survey of Prince Edward Island.
Copyright Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada,
reproduced from the collection of the National Air Photo Library, Natural Resources Canada. 

1958

By the 1950s, the narrow bridge had been replaced by a causeway:

Travel across the North River was made easier during the mid 1950’s with the construction of the causeway.  The project began in 1953 and was completed in 1955.  In the Annual Report of the Department of Public Works and Highways of the Province of Prince Edward island for the year ending March 31st, 1955, the following statement was made by bridge engineer, J.D. MacDonald: “North River Causeway is near completion and it would appear that this type of crossing is more desirable than a bridge structure in cost, time of construction, life, maintenance and the numerous assets provided by the artificial lake.”

Detail from 1958 Aerial Survey of Prince Edward Island.
Copyright Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada,
reproduced from the collection of the National Air Photo Library, Natural Resources Canada. 

2000

By 2000, the causeway had been modified to include a longer bridge span, and Poplar Island, which had gradually been populated by retails shops over previous decades, was now home to a full-fledged plaza:

Detail from 2000 Aerial Survey of Prince Edward Island,
Corporate Land Use Inventory Project, Department of Agriculture and Forestry,
copyright Province of Prince Edward Island. 

2010

Over the decade from 2000 to 2010, the retail development on Poplar Island was joined by COWS Creamery to the east (since the point there has been even more development, as COWS has expanded and the intersection with the Trans-Canada Highway has been modified into a roundabout).

Detail from 2010 Aerial Survey of Prince Edward Island,
Corporate Land Use Inventory Project, Department of Agriculture and Forestry,
copyright Province of Prince Edward Island. 

Graham Rogers Lake

When the North River Causeway proper was first created in the 1950s, the body of water to the north, now more geographically isolated, was given the name “North River Causeway Lake,” a rather uninspired if accurate name; this name stood until 1968 when the lake was renamed Graham Rogers Lake by Executive Council, in memory of the late B. Graham Rogers:

Prince Edward Island Executive Council Memo, October 3, 1968
Provided by Elizabeth Gaudet, Provincial Tax Commissioner and
Prince Edward Island representative on the Geographical Names Board of Canada.

Rogers was a long-time public servant, and the Prince Edward Island representative on the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (now the Geographical Names Board of Canada); he was, by all accounts, a dynamic and engaged bureaucrat. Rogers died in the spring of 1968; he was succeeded on the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names by the late Doug Boylan.

As you make your way west across the North River Causeway today, navigating via Google Maps, you will see Graham Rogers Lake off to your right; please tip your hat as you do.

Detail from Google Maps, as of August 2020.

Beyond the usual serving of later stage Liam Neeson, there are two redeeming features of The Commuter (now streaming on Netflix):

1. The opening sequence, that drives home the “man commutes every day on the same train” point, is inventive; it owes something to Notting Hill, to the point where I’m almost certain that “just like in Notting Hill” must have been uttered at a production meeting.

2. The end title credits, in the style of a transit map, are imaginative and have lovely attention to detail; they’re the work of Prologue Films, and you can watch them here.

Otherwise there is a lot of grunting, half a dozen standard plot points, and some first-rail train derailment CGI.