Catherine’s father, Grant Miller, died on Friday. 

Grant’s obituary contains this wonderful phrase:

This peaceful and modest man had a deep appreciation for the wonderments and beauty of nature, delighting in his collected works of art and wood-carvings.

I can think of no better way to describe him than as “peaceful and modest.”

Grant and I were bonded by a love for Catherine: we may have had very little else in common, but we had that; I know that he knew that I loved and respected his daughter, and that connected us.

From Grant I learned about service to the community, about how to be a loving father and a loving partner, about the importance of appreciating good food and good company as a complement to working hard. I may even have developed something of an appreciation for the finer points of curling.

In January, when Catherine was in palliative care, a complicated series of events led to Grant being connected to my mobile phone from his long-term care home in Ontario. Neither of us expected to be talking to the other, but we did, if only for a few minutes. And while the circumstances, for both of us, were less than ideal, that connection, born over 28 years, was obviously there.

My heart goes out to Oliver, who’s lost his two grandfathers in less than a year, and to Grant’s wife, Catherine’s mother, my mother-in-law, Marina, who’s lost her daughter and her husband in the same year.

Grant will be buried on Tuesday in Sydenham, Ontario. Time and COVID will prevent us from traveling to the service, but we will take a walk in Prince Edward Island National Park at Greenwich, enjoying the wonderments and beauty of nature, in his memory.

Marina, Catherine, Oliver and Grant, summer 2007.

I put Jackson the Tomato and Fiero the Pepper in the ground on June 3, 74 days ago.

Jackson has grown and grown, to the top of the tomato cage, and has 5 tomatoes growing, of various sizes:

Fiero has had a single hot pepper for many weeks, and that single pepper gradually ripened from green into an intense red:

It’s taken me some time to get a good watering cadence going, and I’m still not there. But both Jackson and Fiero are still alive all these weeks later, so I must be doing something right.

Thank you to my friend Brenda for starting me down this new garden path.

It’s Artist Trading Cards night again at Confederation Centre of the Arts this week (2017, 2018), a modified socially-distanced version without bar or snacks or entertainment, and with encouragement to place collected cards in a Ziploc bag and “wait a couple of days to admire your cards.” 

I assembled my entry today, a triptych inspired by Oliver. Here’s part one:

It isn’t ”downtown as an active transportation first district” that I called for in April, but it ain’t nothing either: Charlottetown Launching Slow Streets Initiative.

The City of Charlottetown is launching a Slow Streets Initiative to help encourage active transportation throughout the City. Gay Avenue is the first road featured in the initiative with W. Burns Street being added by Friday, August 21.

The designated Slow Streets will allow more space for pedestrians and cyclists by featuring signage and barrels to notify motorists using the road to slow down and be mindful of pedestrians and cyclists that may also be using the roadway. 

Traffic in this area will be monitored and, although it is not mandatory, it is strongly recommended that only local traffic use these streets. Local traffic is limited to any residents who live in the area, those visiting residents in the area, or anyone wishing to access businesses in the vicinity. Local traffic does not include motorists just wishing to travel through the street.

The Slow Streets Initiative is a pilot project which will end in October, when a review will be completed by City staff to determine the effectiveness of the project.

Kudos to the residents of Gay Avenue for holding themselves up as a test case, to Bike Friendly Charlottetown for bringing the idea forward to the Mayor’s Task Force on Active Transportation, and to City Council for coming together to make this happen.

(Photo by Steven Garrity, area resident)

From Belt Magazine, A Night at the Drive-In During a Pandemic Summer: 

A night at the drive-in remains an attempt at unfettered escapism, if we can keep the bumper stickers out of our lines of sight and numb our minds to the occasional too-apt scene. For a moment tonight, as Rocky carries Dr. Frank-N-Furter to the top of the RKO Pictures tower, it works and something happens at the drive-in. For a second, all of us are together, totally. We are seeing exactly the same thing, all at once. It feels so foreign now, this kind of shared experience in real time—and sacred, like a solar eclipse or an inside-the-park home run.

But then, without sympathy, the lights come up, and we are all right back here somewhere in 2020—amid a pandemic summer, in a country fraying at the seams.

The time warp is over.

The Brackley Drive-in has been open all summer with a COVID-accommodating setup; we haven’t been yet, simply because none of the “classic” double bills they’ve programmed have caught our eye. But maybe we should go regardless, for that rare gift of a shared experience.

Peter Bihr writes about The Ryanair Test, suggesting that new technology be looked at through an as-if-operated-by-Ryanair lens:

What would this look like in real life if it was operated by Ryanair? Would it still be cool, or totally suck? Where would all the up-sell happen? How would it be to be blasted with ads while using it?

A similarly helpful test, when we’re formulating public policy, might be to stop to consider how whatever program or service we’re calling for will look like when operated by government.

Not by an idealized utopian government, but by the actual always-partly-broken, powered-by-fallible humans government.

Too often we make the mistake of coming up with plans that assume they’ll be implemented by caring, future-thinking people, skilled in systems thinking, and with the agency to evolve plans as they go. This is almost never the case.

Scrolling through the updated Photos app on my newly-updated-to-Catalina Mac, I came across thumbnails of the sketches I’d posted here earlier. They have a completely different quality once shrunk down like this, and you can almost imagine them being panels in a wordless comic that involves Rob MacDonald, Cherry Valley and the East Point lighthouse.

Something to note about our new refrigerator: unlike every other refrigerator I’ve ever purchased, it came without “butter compartment” in the fridge section and without ice cube trays (and a shelf for them) in the freezer section.

I wonder how these features got designed out: there’s an interesting home economics story to be told there, I’m sure.

We compensated for the lack of ice cube making capability by purchasing a Good Grips No-Spill ice cube tray; for butter storage, we opted to handle this on the outside, and are now proud owners of a Village Pottery French butter keeper, inspired by purchase of same by our forerunning friend Jonas on a visit two years ago.

Around about 6:30 a.m. this morning, with just the earlymost stirrings of the day started to make themselves known, I rolled my head in a way that seemed unremarkable as I was doing it. Until it didn’t feel unremarkable at all, and instead felt like I was on a roiling ocean liner amidst a hurricane: the room was spinning, and I was, it became clear, a victim of “sudden onset vertigo”–BPPV.

I’ve been fooling around the vertigo for some years now (here, here) and I’ve come to classify it into two types: there’s the background feeling of being slightly out of sorts that I’ve lived with unceasingly for a couple of years that appears to be related to the tendency of my eyes to not track properly, and there’s the tsunami-like vertigo I experienced this morning.

Fortunately, because of my longstanding dalliance, I had the steps of the Epley Manoeuvre (mostly) memorized, and was able to deploy it quickly. The positive effects were almost immediate, leaving me feeling less like on a roiling ocean liner amidst a hurricane and more like on a roiling canoe on a choppy day.

Unable to face the notion of sitting in front of a screen for the morning, I called in sick, arranged the pillows on the bed for best anti-dizzying effect, and spent the morning motionless. It helped.

Oliver, bless his heart, brought me lunch in bed. I resisted all urges toward productivity (so what if the office humidity skyrockets to 75% because I don’t empty the dehumidifier: the basement will survive). It was a wise move, as I felt better and better as the day progressed, and, as I write, I feel more hungover than roiling. 

Thank you, Dr. John Epley, for your crafty manoeuvre.

The Festival of Maintenance finds itself in need of maintenance:

We’re now looking to hire a designer who can help us with a rebrand and get people as fired about maintenance as we are.

We’re looking for someone who can help us communicate some tricky concepts — care, repair, shared (and often hidden) labour — through a cleaner, more recognisable brand.

The festival is once of those things that comes along, rarely, that hits almost every single one of my buttons.