My year-long effort to change the way I write my lower case g is paying off.

Catherine, who heretofore I’d never seen drink a glass of chocolate milk even once in 28 years, has suddenly gone gangbusters for it. Cancer meds work in mysterious ways.

Fortunately Purity Dairy is but a hop, skip, and jump away. I’ll need more storage on the bicycle if this keeps up though.

The City of Charlottetown recently announced a program to incentivize local businesses to install bicycle racks:

The City of Charlottetown is offering a cost sharing incentive to provide local businesses an opportunity to install a bike rack at their establishment.

The four bike rack costs $425.00 plus HST, which would be cost shared at $212.50 plus HST each. Installation and maintenance costs for the lifetime of the bike rack would be the responsibility of the partner.

The City has capacity for twenty establishments to partner with for the 2019/20 budget year. Interested businesses can learn more or register online at: www.charlottetown.ca/cycling

I’ve been making a determined effort, this cycling season, to replace all my car trips with bicycle trips: where I used to go to the grocery store, pharmacy, hospital, hardware store, and the farmers’ market by car, I now take my bicycle.

As soon as I started to do this in earnest, I started to notice that there are some businesses with great bicycle parking infrastructure (Receiver Coffee Brass Shop, Upstreet, Murphy’s Parkdale Pharmacy, Sobeys) and some businesses with no place to park a bicycle at all.

The large bicycle rack at Sobeys on Allen Street.

The single best way to advocate for better bicycle infrastructure at local businesses is to ask them to take advantage of this program.

As part of the ask, make it clear that you’re doing so as a customer-who-cycles. This turns your request from an environmental decision into a business one: businesses want their customers to be happy, and they want patronage to be convenient. Looked at through that lens, spending $200 on a bicycle rack is a no-brainer.

Let’s get this program fully subscribed before the end of the month.

Although Art in the Open 2019 was a cavalcade of artistic wonders, my favourite part of it was the portable printmaking studio set up on Victoria Row by St. Michael’s Printshop from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.

I was trying to explain to someone last night the difference between printmakers and printers, and I suggested that it was kind of like they’re Portuguese and we’re Spanish. To the casual observer we’re easily confused with each other, and, indeed, it’s possible to make yourself understood speaking one language to a native speaker of the other. But we’re different nations with different traditions, different sensibilities, different terminologies.

But, that all said, we’re all Iberians, so to speak, as our alchemy involves ink, paper, form and pressure. And so I loved spending time in their midst.

The portable printshop was setup up to print on anything you might bring along with you, using one of a fleet of woodcuts that they traveled with.

I brought along a piece of scrap canvas, and selected this stunning cut by Newfoundland artist Kim Greeley for my print:

I’m so, so happy with the result. You can come see it on my shop door in St. Paul’s Parish Hall next time you’re near.

The St. Michael’s crew were hard at it for hours last night, a little overwhelmed, I think, by the reception they got to their offer-to-print.

I’ve emerged with a newfound appreciation for my Iberian cousins and a resolve to accelerate my plans, long unfulfilled, to visit Newfoundland and Labrador.

Oliver announced late last week that he planned to participate in the much-vaunted Crow Parade that is the spiritual backbone of Art in the Open every year. As a result, Oliver and Catherine spent much of Friday afternoon crow-costume conjuring.

On Saturday evening, at the appointed hour, I accompanied Oliver to the plaza at Confederation Centre of the Arts for the start of the parade and, when the caw came, I walked along beside him out onto Victoria Row.

As we walked along, I could immediately tell he was agitated. This was something of a feat, as I rely a lot–I realized last night–on Oliver’s facial expressions and body language to tell how he’s feeling, and, as he was dressed like a crow, I didn’t have this to go on.

Using all of my fatherly powers, however, and with Oliver reaching deep into himself to help, he managed to communicate that he was anxious and angry about not having any other crows to walk with (in previous year’s he’d been accompanied by Catherine, or by Derrick both of whom, being more game than I, walked with him in their own full crow regalia; I was not dressed like a crow).

Nearing the intersection of Queen Street, exacerbated by noise and claustrophobia and scads of people taking photos, Oliver tipped over the edge and got really, really frustrated, to the point where I thought we’d need to exit the parade and head home. But Oliver insisted that we forge on, albeit in an angry fugue that I knew wasn’t sustainable.

It was at this point that I spotted crow Tony Reddin walking along beside us.

“Tony, would it be okay if Oliver walked along with you?”, I asked.

“Sure!”, cawed Tony-crow.

And so Oliver left my side, aligned himself with Tony, and happily walked the rest of the parade route at his side.

Here they are making their way along the Victoria Park roadway (Tony in the brightly-coloured feathers, Oliver to his right):

I can’t imagine anyone better to come across in our moment of need than Tony: he is among the kindest and most welcoming people you’ll ever meet, and he welcomed Oliver into his murder as a partner in crime.

Here they are, at the end of the parade, side by side in front of the gathered crows:

Thank you, Tony, for your crowmanity.

Although my business card says “writer, printer, developer,” a more accurate description you could give to me, given my myriad pursuits, is “reverse engineer.”

My only skill, really, is being able to look at systems, understand their moving parts, and rearrange, reconfigure, adapt, interject, extend, explain.

By lucky happenstance this happens to be a good skill to have for helping to interpret the world to an autistic son: over my parenting years I’ve been able to help him understand complicated systems like “friendship” and “small talk” and “personal space.” Often, in helping him, I come to understand these systems more myself.

This summer the complicated system I’ve been helping him parse is bicycling, and today he leveled up more than once, sometimes on his own, and sometimes with my help:

1. He figured out on his own that if he shifts in to 6th gear he can go really, really fast. But that this takes more effort and requires more frequent water breaks.
2. He learned, with my help, that if you are approaching a stop sign it’s better to stop pedaling and slow down by coasting for a bit (as opposed to slamming on the breaks at the very last moment).
3. He realized, at my urging, that it’s possible to cycle in the rain. At least light rain. And that you can dry your seat off with a paper towel to avoid getting a wet bum.

His final learning for the day came after we turned right from Sidney Street to Prince Street at the very end of our morning cycle. Prince Street is a busier street than most, and so I cycled along side him to be able to guide him in and to provide a little bit of a buffer between him and vehicle traffic. Shortly after we made the turn an SUV came along behind us and the driver got frustrated that he couldn’t pass us right away.

Philosophically I’m very much of the “the road belongs to bicycles and we allow other vehicles on as a courtesy” school, which, I realize, is not an approach shared by everyone.

But, still, we delayed this SUV by perhaps 5 to 10 seconds. And yet the driver decided that this was a good time to vent his frustration and lay on the horn.

“And that,” I told Oliver, “is what you call an asshole.”

Assholes are an important thing to understand when learning about bicycling–and about the world in general–for they confound the understanding of systems as predictable. As such they are among the hardest of phenomena to explain and to understand: if we assume that everyone is an asshole, we’d never leave the house; if we assume that nobody is an asshole, then we’re in for trouble.

The best we can do is to cycle–and live–boldly, to greet adversity with love, to assert our right to take up the road, and, when things get really hairy, to retreat and let the assholes go on about their assholing.

I skipped supper last night and attended a meeting of Extinction Rebellion at Trinity United Church.

My reason for going was simple: Extinction Rebellion has three demands, one of which is:

Act Now: Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.

I wanted to find out more about how they propose to do that.

The current timetable here on PEI is to be net zero by 2050, far enough away so that it’s possible to have “TBD” as a placeholder for a substantial part of our Climate Action Plan. If there’s a way of getting there in 5 years instead of 30, I want to know what it is, and get right on it.

Those answers were not forthcoming.

What emerged was that Extinction Rebellion is as much about responding to a mental health crisis as it is about responding to a climate crisis, and last night’s meeting was much more about the former than the later.

The mental health challenges of having insight into a global catastrophe while the world sits idly by, as though nothing’s happening, is not completely unexplored terrain: anyone who lived through the 1960s and 1970s, and the ever-present fear of imminent nuclear war, can recognize the phenomenon. And the feelings.

I emerged from last night’s meeting realizing that, while I share the underlying scientific concerns of Extinction Rebellion, I am not one of them.

For the time being I want to focus my energies on insulating my house and getting cycle paths built, not stopping traffic on bridges.

At the same time, I was confronted with a group of people with unusually fine-tuned empathy; spiritual canaries in the climate crisis coal mine, so to speak.

And that, to my mind, is reason enough to pay attention to Extinction Rebellion: they are grappling with the psychological effects of climate crisis, and this is something we’re all going to have to come to terms with, sooner than later.

To understand more about our near-future selves, to understand more about the stresses we are all under from the cognitive dissonance of living one way while logic dictates we live another, to see what happens when remorse and anger and confusion and planetary grief boil over into direct action, we should look to our Extinction Rebellion forerunners.

One Friday evening earlier this summer we enjoyed a lovely supper at our friends Michelle and Bill’s house out in East Royalty. Returning home after supper we were in kind of a rush, as Oliver and I had plans to take in an Island Fringe show. Add to this rush that it was hot (and that our car has no air conditioning), that Ethan spotted another dog as I pulled into our driveway and was barking uncontrollably, and that there was a gaggle of young hipsters chilling on the porch next door, and I was not at my driverly best.

It was at this point that passenger side mirror met eavestrough. You can see the evidence still:

It’s remarkable that, in 19 years of backing this car into this driveway with this eavestrough located where it is that I hadn’t done this sooner: it was an accident waiting to happen.

By some miracle I didn’t rip the eavestrough right off the house; indeed it suffered very little damage, and young Henry from next door was able to make quick work of unmangling it before I even exited the car.

Otherwise the damage was limited to my pride, and to the destruction of the sideview mirror, which I carefully removed once I’d retained my cool. Here’s the mirror, deconstructed:

Replacing the mirror turned out to be a lot easier than I thought: I was able to order an aftermarket replacement from Amazon for $66.27, taxes and shipping in:

The mirror assembly arrived a week later, and I followed the helpful instructions in this YouTube video to install it. I had all the tools that I needed for the job, save the T45 Torx driver that’s used to remove the large bolt that holds the mirror itself; T45 Trox drivers are, apparently, rare birds, as Home Hardware had none, and Canadian Tire, in its wide range of Torx sets, had only one that included a T45. So I bought that set.

Once I had the T45, the only tricky part was getting the door to snap back into place via the plastic clips that hold it on: the clips were in various states of decay (the car, after all, is 20 years old), and sproinged off or got crushed in my early ham-handed attempts at reattachment. So I’ll make a visit to the VW dealer this afternoon to purchase some replacements. But in the meantime, I have a new mirror:

The replacement mirror, despite only costing $57, has all the functionality of the original: it’s heated (for defrosting in winter), and can be controlled remotely from the driver’s side mirror controls.

I’d rather this hadn’t happened at all, but I’m happy to have been able to repair the car myself, and those in my right-hand blind spot should feel slightly safer now that I can see them a little better.

On August 15, 2019, T3 Transit Bus 68 started its day just after 6:30 a.m. servicing Route № 3, the route that goes counter-clockwise around the city from downtown through Parkdale, Sherwood, Hillsborough Park, and West Royalty.

For the next 12 hours it drove a total of 245 km, servicing both Route № 3 and, on occasion, Route № 1.

Here’s what its day looked like, compressed down to 2 minutes:

Oliver and I caught the bus at 4:38 p.m. at the corner of Beach Grove and Maypoint Road; it was running about 8 minutes late. It made up a lot of that time, and dropped us downtown 10 minutes later, close to on-time, at 4:48 p.m.

Bus 68 finished up its day just before 7:00 p.m., with one final counter-clockwise run around the city. It then headed back to the garage for the night before starting back again, just after 6:30 a.m., the next morning.

How I Made This

I pulled real-time bus location information from the T3 Transit ReadyPass map. This gave me 2,258 time-stamped bus position points in a CSV file, like:

logTime,busNumber,routeNumber,lat,long,cellStrength,speed,updateTime,accuracy,battery
2019-08-15 06:37:43,68,3,46.234024047852,-63.12748336792,0.019,0,2019-08-15 09:37:42,58,244
2019-08-15 06:37:59,68,3,46.234027862549,-63.12748336792,0.019,0,2019-08-15 09:37:53,49,244
2019-08-15 06:38:14,68,3,46.234027862549,-63.12748336792,0.018,0,2019-08-15 09:38:10,42,244

I imported these points into QGIS and used the TimeManager plug-in, with interpolation set to “Linear interpolation for big datasets” and a time frame size of 15 seconds. I exported the resulting frames to PNG files and then combined the 2,926 frames into a single MP4 video with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i frame%5d.png  -movflags faststart -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" video.mp4

I can watch the resulting video over and over and over: it’s like a transit ballet. Or a transit video game.

In a way that keeps one foot in each of North American and European café billing practices, Island Chocolates sometimes takes money up front for coffee, and sometimes advises “just take a seat,” with the implication one should pay afterwards.

Walking in the front door this afternoon, on my weekly break while Oliver is making art with Jennifer Brown, I suddenly realized that two weeks ago things had gone in the “have a seat” direction but that I hadn’t actually paid on the way out.

I penitentially declared my sin at the cash today, and was thanked for my honesty.