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.

Taylor Swift’s Illicit Affairs is spot on.

Now that we’re 56 years into the COVID social contraction, you may be finding yourself in need of a way to jazz up the weekly Family Zoom.

We’ve been at it ourselves since almost the first turn of the deadbolt, gathering Rukavina and affiliated from PEI, Quebec, Ontario and California together for everything from Zoom Pictionary to Zoom Trivia to Zoom Scattergories every Friday night. Oh how much we’ve learned about the promise, curse, and opportunities of family video-conferencing; it makes our early-aughts cacophonous Skype Christmas gatherings look primitive by compare.

But, if you’re anything like us, you’re looking for something new to inject life into the proceedings, and I’m here to recommend Breakout Rooms.

You might not even know that Breakout Rooms exist in Zoom because they’re not enabled by default: the person organizing the Zoom needs to enable them following these incantations.

Once enabled, the organizer can, at any time in the proceedings, manually or automatically, assign people to breakout rooms, which are like mini-Zooms-within-a-Zoom. And, the organizer can later, in turn, call everyone back to the Mother Zoom.

Here’s how we used this feature tonight on the Rukavina Zoom:

Oliver decided, for reasons too complex for typical people to possibly understand, that tonight’s overarching theme would involve veneration of Ethan the Dog, of December, and of Christmas. It was generously left to me to work out the details.

I came up with three small-group-friendly activities:

1. Come up with as many names of people or animals starting with “E” as you can in 2 minutes. Ethan, Enzo, etc.
2. A short 12-question Christmas Trivia quiz (“In which modern-day country was St. Nicholas born?”, for example).
3. Using any means at your disposal, name as many events other than Christmas that took place, or take place, in December.

For every round I let Zoom come up with random breakout rooms; as Oliver and I were the overlords, there remained 5 people to breakout, so one room had 3 people and the other 2 people, and the rooms were different every time.

In addition to being simply a breakout from the everyday, this format allowed people short bursts of one-on-one interaction that the usual mass family chaos doesn’t. I think those who got paired up with young Montreal nephew, flying solo, particularly appreciated the chance.

I suspect we’ll try it again.

Do you have unique Family Zoom ideas to share?

For years I’ve been carting around an old cookie tin filled with rubber stamps I’ve been collecting for more than 30 years, and I finally took it off the shelf today to see what was inside, newly-equipped with an ink pad from Denis Office Supplies.

I wonder if it’s still possible to send 1st, 2nd and 3rd class mail. I wonder why I have a rubber stamp of AMBER.

I’m sure I must have seen the cover of the July 1983 issue of 80 Micro at the time, but its whimsy was likely lost on my 17 year old self.

I especially appreciate that at the heart of the whimsical map lies Peterborough, the actual home of 80 Micro, and, for a time, the heart of the computer magazine publishing region of North America (I have more than a few colleagues, past and present, who spent time working with Wayne Green over the years).

Bruce Stephenson is credit as the illustrator for the cover.