I started a new sketchbook on May 26, 2020, on the 3rd day of the “pandemic reopening” at The Bookmark; it’s a paper-oh Circulo Orange on Grey A6, an old favourite.

I try to carry the sketchbook with me everywhere I go–you can’t sketch sketches without a sketchbook–and to fill the time I would otherwise spend mindless on my phone with making a sketch of whatever is handy while I’m eating lunch, or waiting for someone, or just taking a break.

Province House Hoarding

July 10, 2020. This is a corner of the hoarding around the Province House restoration site, colourfully emblazoned with Parks Canada messaging. The tiny window on the right is where you can see Eckhart.

Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row

July 13, 2020. While sitting on the patio drinking coffee at Receiver on a still-cool summer morning. A helpful reminder of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter both.

From Victoria Provincial Park

July 19, 2020. Oliver and I got takeout lunch at Casa Mia by the Sea and took it to Victoria Provincial Park to eat; I made this sketch of the Westmoreland River and the hills beyond sitting in back of our car in the shade of its hatchback.

Phở Queen

July 20, 2020. Another sketch from the patio of Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row, this time facing the opposite direction, looking at The Guild (right) and Phở Queen, the new Vietnamese restaurant next door to it.

Victoria Row Flower Box

July 29, 2020. Another Receiver patio sketch: the flower box at the downstairs entrance to Happy Glass.

Rob MacDonald at Work

July 29, 2020. Rob MacDonald and I often share Receiver Coffee in the morning, and Rob, who’s “at the office” when he’s there, is almost always wearing headphones. Yesterday I was sitting right behind him, and couldn’t pass up the chance to capture the moment.

Cherry Valley School

July 30, 2020. Several years ago the daughter of a good friend landed on PEI with a group of friends intending to stay at a cottage in Earnscliffe. Their ambitious plan to cycle there from town was aborted when they realized how far it was, and so I volunteered to drive them out, catching a glimpse of the old Cherry Valley School on my way. I returned there this morning to make this sketch. It’s a lovely building.

Christ Church Cherry Valley

July 30, 2020. Christ Church Cherry Valley is a church in the least likely of places, down a one-lane road where only a tiny sign at the highway telegraphs its location. I set myself under a tree and made this sketch this morning.

Point Prim Lighthouse

July 30, 2020. The Point Prim Chowderhouse was my ultimate destination this morning; after placing an online order and having 20 minutes before picking it up, I drove down the lane to the parking lot by the lighthouse and made this sketch.

While I’ve been in the habit of simply taking photos of my sketches before posting them online, this time I used a Konica Bizhub C554e photocopier to scan them as 400 dpi JPEGs, full-colour. It’s a less forgiving method, but I like the results.

I used to push my sketches to a Google Photos shared album, back when I was an Android user, but I’ve since gone all-in on Apple’s ecosystem, and there’s no obvious analogue. Which is probably good, as The Dark Ages of Share on OVI taught me. So I’ll post them here from time to time.

Four of Canada’s preeminent folk musicians—Stephen Fearing, Connie Kaldor, James Keelaghan and Shari Ulrich—sing Hard Times Come Again No More in support of Unison Benevolent Fund.

Brilliant.

The similarity between Puritan signage and COVID signage has never been as obvious as at Canadian Tire.

Penn Jillette on Donald Trump, last August, on the The Joe Rogan Experience:

More than most things I’ve read and watched about Donald Trump, I found Pillette’s insights useful.

Speaking about Trump’s qualities that recommended him as a host of The Apprentice, where Jillette was twice a contestant:

You want someone capricious, and crazy, with no filter. That’s what you want.

And that’s what we got.

And so he makes arbitrary decisions… you know, the human brain tries desperately to make those make sense, and that ends up being some kind of entertainment. 

Donald Trump got elected President because there was enough of an audience who wanted to see what would happen in his next episode. I have a close colleague, a now-deeply-remorseful Trump voter, who admitted as much to me about his own reasons.

Jillette continued:

Donald Trump Jr. said to me “of all the people we’ve had on the show, you seem like the only person who’s ever liked my father.”

He said “you actually seem to like him.”

I said, you know, I have a fascination and a respect and a, um, affection, for people who are able to get out of their filters.

And I said some people do that with pure genius, like Bob Dylan, some people do it with bravery, like Lenny Bruce, some people do it with drugs, Neil Young, perhaps, Jimi Hendrix, perhaps, and most people do it with a mixture of stuff.

But I said, Thelonius Monk said “genius is the one who is most like himself.”

And I said, with some sort of mental problems, coupled with, um, greed, and a lack of compassion, your father has somehow found a way to throw off the filters. 

I’ve long maintained that “entrepreneurship” is, at its core, a learning disability: it’s not the presence of some elusive business genius, it is simply common sense coupled with an inability to care what other people think. Trump is the prime example of that. As Jillette rightly points out, this learning disability is similarly useful for creating great art, theatre and music.

Unfortunately for the world, this learning disability does not equip one to be an effective President of the United States.

Per the kind-of-quinquennial schedule (2001, 2006, 2015), Oliver and I were due for a trip up west, and a kind invitation from our friend Thelma gave us a conceit.

We left Charlottetown late morning with the Kia Soul EV fully charged; it was threatening rain, but pleasantly cool at 22ºC, and we made good time. 

Our first stop was Viva La Crepe, relocated this season from Summerside to Miscouche for our convenience. I had the taco bowl, Oliver the chicken crepe; both were tasty and exactly what we needed.

We continued west to Route 12, and then northeast to Foxley River where we spent a very pleasant afternoon with Thelma, fortified by strong coffee, excellent chocolate chip cookies (made by her mother), and joined later by Thelma’s partner Steven.

One of the bonus visitor experience features Thelma offers is access to her level 2 EV charger, which we eagerly availed ourselves of, having only 36 km of range left on the Soul when we arrived. Alas it was not to be, as I foolishly forgot that I’d set the car to start charging at 4:00 a.m. every morning, whether at home or in Foxley River. So we left with the charge we brung.

Fortunately the new fast charger in O’Leary was handy-by, and we arrived there with 18 km of range, so there were no worries but for needing to park the car behind the charger to get access to it. We charged for 19 minutes and that got us up to 80%, in theory just enough to get ourselves back home without charging again.

Although the hour was getting late, I realized we were just down the road from our friend John Cousins, and that it would be unlikely we’d be back up west for some time; unable to find John’s phone number, we took a chance and popped in; John warmly welcomed us with his pandemic tales and a tour of the log building he and his grandson are renovating.

Back on the road as night fell, the air was a pleasant 18ºC and the going east was easy. To stanch the smallest itch of range anxiety, we pulled into Summerside for a quick 9 minute EV top-up back to 80% at Canadian Tire. The rest of the drive home was cool and just-on-the-edge-of-too-foggy.

A good day.

Jessica Spengler, writing in her plague journal:

I’m just idling right now. I have killed the headlights and put it in neutral. I’m not looking ahead, not speculating, trying not to worry, trying not to get frustrated. I am making do, making the best of the situation, and making merry when I can. And I am not making plans.

That paragraph happens to come very close to describing what it was like supporting Catherine through 5 years of living with incurable cancer.

Which might explain why, relatively speaking, pandemic life, while not a walk in the park, hasn’t slayed me: I’ve developed mad skills in a realm of coping that’s conveniently become globally relevant.

Oliver and I went West today, and when my own foolishness resulted in a putative EV charge in Foxley River going awry, we fell back on Plan B, making it, with 18 km range to spare, to the new Efficiency PEI fast charger at the Tim Hortons in O’Leary.

All of the parking spaces with easy access to the charger were occupied by drivers of gasoline-powered cars who paid the EV charger no heed. Fortunately I was able to manoeuvre close enough on the back side to get the cable to reach and the day was saved.

 In The Fight for Reproductive Justice episode of the Brave Voices, Bold Actions podcast, my sister-in-law Monique Lacombe looks back at her experience birthing her eldest son, my nephew.

An edited version of the interview is available in print.

Regular readers will know well of our Saturday habit of having smoked salmon bagels for breakfast, a tradition that started many years ago at Kim Dormaar’s stand at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market.

During the most severe weeks of the lockdown, when nothing was open, I made do with ad hoc homemade bagels; in early July the market re-opened but, alas, without Gallant’s, our current bagel source.

However, Tyler and his crew are now opening their shop out past the bypass on Saturday mornings, and we’ve been driving out there every week, getting our bagels, and then clandestinely eating them whilst walking about the newly-all-outdoor market. 

This has meant, however, that we weren’t cycling to the market, a prime source of both exercise and father-and-son collegiality each week. This morning that changed, as I convinced Oliver that we had it in us to cycle all the way out to the end of beyond for our bagels.

We left home at 9:30 a.m., riding down Richmond Street to Cumberland, out the Confederation Trail past UPEI and the Charlottetown Mall; we left our bicycles near the Mount Edward Road intersection, as there’s no shoulder and lots of dangerous trucks on Mount Edward North of the bypass. The walk from there to Gallant’s was only a few minutes, and we arrived at 10:10 a.m.

Our bagels, ordered by phone once we were near, were ready to take with us. And as tasty as ever.

We ate the bagels on our way back to our bicycles–an egregious violation of protocol that Oliver generously allowed–and cycled (almost all downhill) to the market. After some market shopping we cycled down to Purity Dairy for milk and butter, to Receiver Coffee for bread (an effort we abandoned as the hipster lineup was out the door) and home, riding in the driveway at 11:30 a.m., exactly two hours after we’d left.

The total journey was about 12 km, so we’re getting closer to my end-of-season goal of seeing us cycle 20 km in a day.

There is, of course, How to Start Your Own Country, Erwin Strauss’s 1999 thorough review of the topic.

But I learned, via the book Sealand, that there was also a BBC TV series of the same name; all six episodes are on YouTube.