Oliver and I cycled the entire Local Food Trail this morning: from home to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, down to Purity Dairy for milk and butter, a double back to Riverview Country Market, and then to Receiver Coffee Brass Shop for bread.

Oliver was much more comfortable on his bike this morning, zipping along beside me and sometimes overtaking. Every time we met oncoming cycle traffic he rang his bell in solidarity and gave a hearty “good morning.”

The only debacle, and it was a minor one, was that the hex bolts that hold my handlebars on came loose as we headed homeward through Joe Ghiz Park. I had high hopes that I’d be able to use the bicycle repair station in the park to get myself sorted, but the hex key, if it was ever there, had been vandalized off.

Fortunately, as we entered the Water Street gravel storage lot to loop around to Receiver, we encountered more professional-grade cyclists, and I was able to borrow a hex set and tighten things up.

You wanna know the greatest thing about cycling to the market? It’s not the carbon we’re not emitting, it’s not the exercise, it’s not our membership in the grand fellowship of cyclists (although all those things are great). It’s that Oliver and I can do it together. Cycling is an inherently social practice in a way that driving a car is not.

Given that Oliver has been cycling for only three weeks, and that he’s naturally taken to this new mode of getting around on Saturday morning, I feel confident that I can say to you that if you live in Charlottetown and you’re still driving your car to the market, you’re doing something wrong.

Please consider following his lead: confront the innumerable reasons you will inevitably come up with for why you can’t possible not take your car, get your bicycle out of the shed, and join us on the trail next Saturday.

When Oliver and I were in Wolfsburg in 2010, we visited Phaeno, the excellent science museum. One of the exhibits there was an “age machine” that would snap a photo of you and apply an algorithm that would project your appearance in the future; it’s a technology that’s now reached our phones via FaceApp.

This photo, by Daniel Burka, featured in this photo montage of silverorange’s 20th anniversary, looks like I’ve been through the age machine filter, but it’s really just the way I look at age 53 (Oliver’s youthful countenance beside me only serves to accentuate my oldness) .

My father and I look nothing at all alike, but I realize, looking at this photo, that the topography of our aging is similar. I can also see hints of my mother, and of my grandparents, on both sides.

Life itself is the ultimate age machine, so perhaps rather than recognizing my actual ancestors, all I’m really seeing is getting older as it’s universally expressed.

There was an electricity outage last night from Charlottetown east, starting just before 11:00 p.m. and ending around midnight. Because I’m logging the electricity load and generation for the province, this outage got captured in the data:

Electricity load dipped to 58 MW at midnight; the night before at midnight the load was 135 MW.

If you are looking for some inky collegiality this Saturday night, August 17, 2019, Pen Night, the monthly gathering of those interested in fountain pens, inks, paper, writing, illustrating and the related arts, is happening at 7:00 p.m. at The Bookmark.

All that’s asked, if you’re planning on coming, is that you RSVP so that a chair can be set aside for you.

You need not be a pen nerd to attend, nor even own a fountain pen: we’re a welcoming bunch and if you show up penless and curious you will likely emerge equipped for a life of fountain pen-loving.

Like the original the fifth estate and e e cummings, my friends at silverorange prefer lowercase. Which makes starting sentences that start with silverorange difficult for someone like me who wants to follow both silverorange’s rules and society’s.

A conundrum I avoid simply by avoiding starting sentences with silverorange.

I have known the founders of silverorange from before they were silverorange; in some cases I’ve known them since they were 14 years old. Now they are at or approaching 40, and I have been, by times, their tenant, their conference co-organizer, their lunch companion, and their partner-in-podcasting. And, as individuals, their friend.

Their company turned 20 years old yesterday, and they celebrated with an event for friends, family, colleagues and clients at Brakish; here’s a soggy audience listening to various of the founders talk about their relationship to the company:

Being in close proximity to silverorange for such a long time has been a unique privilege: I have watched as they transformed from the chrysalis of cocky teenage entrepreneurship into the butterfly of a well-managed, well-respected company.

Silverorange (damn, I slipped) is perhaps most remarkable for the cultural transformation it’s gone through in recent years, seeking to throw off the toxic masculinity of the ironic brogrammer to become a company that thinks deeply about inclusion, respect, and diversity.

As co-founder Steven Garrity wrote two years ago, in A company on the verge of adulthood:

We’ve discovered that it’s both hard and easy to change the culture of a company. At one of our annual company retreats, we were discussing ways to improve our team over the coming year and one of our employees made a revolutionary suggestion:

    We should be nicer to each other!

He was referring mostly to a culture of sarcastic insults we had grown accustomed to, but we all agreed that treating each other with more respect was worth a shot. It seemed like a good opportunity to shed our ironically ugly humour. As one of the key culprits, I can safely say that in addition to being unnecessarily negative, it just wasn’t funny. We don’t miss it.

This small initial change was surprisingly abrupt and surprisingly easy. It seemed like only a matter of days before what had been totally normalized started to stick out as inappropriate. We even came to refer to the echoes of our former vulgarity as “old office humour” — a phrase we still use as a reminder/warning to ourselves.

If we hadn’t addressed this glaring surface-level ugly tone in our humour, making our team more diverse would have been much more difficult.

I was witness to, and at the very least a complicit bystander to, silverorange 1.0, and that the company grappled with itself and emerged so fundamentally changed gives me great hope about the possibility for positive change to happen almost anywhere. Including inside myself.

Brav[o|a]s.

Happy 20th anniversary, silverorange.

I’ve had a rare weekend by myself at 100 Prince Street: Oliver’s been at the Cloggeroo Folk Festival in Georgetown since Friday, and Catherine’s been in hospital, trying to get her back pain under control.

I used the opportunity to leave the car in the driveway for the entire weekend and cycle everywhere. Here’s a trace of my cycling (recorded by the Bike Citizens app on my phone):

I cycled 30 km yesterday, which included two trips to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and a trip to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market from the hospital.

I learned a couple of things along the way:

1. It takes 15 minutes to cycle from our house to the hospital. That’s really only a few minutes longer than it takes to drive, and most of the way is along the scenic multi-use trail along Riverside Drive that’s separated from vehicle traffic. The hospital should take advantage of this to encourage visitors to cycle. And if you’re going to visit someone yourself, consider taking your bicycle.
2. There appeared to be no provision whatsoever made to the multi-use trail during sewer construction in front of Riverview Country Market on Friday: the trail was blocked, but with no cycle detour, forcing cyclists to cut through the parking lot and navigate uncontrolled construction vehicle traffic. If active transportation is going to become a first class option in Charlottetown, we need to make equal provisions for routing cyclists around construction as we do cars and trucks.
3. Taking a water bottle along on cycle trips is a really, really good idea. I’ve never gotten into the habit of doing this, but I will now.
4. The cycle lane along Belvedere Avenue from Ellis Brothers to Mount Edward Road is in horrible shape, the result of several construction projects that degraded it. This is a shame because otherwise it’s a great cycle route: lots of room on a broad shoulder, and a great east-west connector across the city.
5. It would be nice if we could connect the path that goes around the Charlottetown Event Grounds with the Riverside Drive multi-use trail; as it stands cycling from one to the other requires a detour through the back of the Wendy’s parking lot.
6. The Irving Gas Station on Riverside Drive charges $1 for using its air pump. Huh?
7. The bicycle parking lot at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market is very well used. Indeed, there’s a need for more bicycle parking there, as it was full when I arrived.

I’ll bring forward many of these issues to the Mayor’s Task Force on Active Transportation; if experience so far is any guide, the city will take quick action to address them.

The (full) Bicycle Parking Lot at Charlottetown Farmer’s Market

My friend G. was unable to find replacement plastic clips that hold a window screen in place, so I offered to fabricate some on my 3D printer.

I made the model in Tinkercad; the hardest part to figure out was how to make the short edges rounded.

As 3D models go they were super-quick to print, at about 8 minutes each

On the left is the original that I worked from; in the middle is my first attempt, and on the right is my second.

A lovely cover by Pomplamoose of Ed Sheeran’s Beautiful People.

A great New York story from Laurie Brown.

Earlier this summer my friend Andrea casually mentioned that she was planning to join Island Nature Trust’s guided walk to St. Peters Island.

My ears immediately pricked up: if I am a lover of islands, I am doubly a lover of the islands-of-islands, and also a lover of visits to seldom-visited places, so this was right up my alley. I immediately registered my interest, something I timed perfectly as the CBC publicized the opportunity the next day, and the list of spots immediately filled to the brim and over.

Which is how I found myself standing on the end of the Hennebury Road in Rice Point this morning at 10:30 a.m. sharp, pack filled with water and two granola bars, staring at the feet of the other intrepid to compare my footwear choice to theirs.

There was, I learned quickly, no consensus on the appropriate footwear, as what I saw ranged from bare feet (sported by the extra-especially-intrepid Ed MacDonald) to flip-flops to water shoes to rubber boots to people, like me, who decided to make no concession whatsoever to the environs and wear what we wear every day.

My small intrepid sub-group consisted of Sandy (the driver), Andrea (the instigator), Ruth (heretofore known only in lore as “my good friend Ruth” in frequent mentions by Andrea) and Ruth’s cousin Kim. If you are an expert Islander, you should have no trouble triangulating their full identities.

After a briefing from Island Nature Trust staffers, our group of 40 headed down a cut in the cliffs to the beach. Low tide was coming up at about 11:40 a.m., but there was a mostly-not-underwater path clear once we’d rounded the point and walked by Camp Seggie, where we could see our destination in the distance:

The advice from Island Nature Trust on footwear was:

Please wear footwear and clothing that you don’t mind getting wet or possibly muddy.

I must admit that, before we set out, I’d imagined that I would be able to successfully hopscotch from sandbar to sandbar and remain completely dry. This was not the case: the way was certainly low-tidey, but there were periods of wading (never beyond my calves) that required an adjustment to my general aversion to mud and wetness. When on the tidal flats, do as the tidal flatters do.

This is what our route across and back looked like, tracked by OsmAnd on my phone:

The weather was about as beautiful as you could possibly ask for, the company collegial and entertaining, and once I got used to having wet feet I decided that I should walk around with wet feet all the time.

We made landfall on St. Peter’s Island at 11:34 a.m., making the journey from Island to island almost exactly 60 minutes. We then walked around the western tip and along its south shore. The tide was now fully low, and the way was clear, if a little slippery.

Here’s Andrea, Ruth and Kim making their way:

While many among us were demonstrably more hardcore birders, naturalists, and rock-hounds, I was happy to find that our sub-group was comfortable ambling and chatting and having a sit-down.

I tried to take photos that might capture the wonders of St. Peters Island and its coast, but they ended up mostly being washed out and insufficiently capturing of the rough grandeur. Which is okay by me, as the experience did seem to be one that needs to be experienced to capture its true essence.

We reached the farthest point of our journey just before 12 noon, and then retraced our steps to the launching-off point where we stopped for a group photo:

The way back, even though only an hour after low tide, was somewhat more rough-going, with deeper pools to wade through (this might have been, in part, because we lollygagged and paid insufficient attention to the smarter hikers who were better at wending). Here’s what the view of Prince Edward Island looked like from the shore of St. Peters Island:

We set off from the St. Peters Island coast at 12:30 p.m. and arrived on the “mainland” at 1:20 p.m., making better time on the way back than there, despite the wading.

It was an exceptional experience that I’d recommend to anyone: joining Island Nature Trust and therein getting a subscription to their newsletter is perhaps the best way to keep abreast of your next opportunity.

(The benefit of going with Island Nature Trust is that they’ve got the experience to pick a date with the right combination of tides and winds; there’s nothing to prevent you from going over independently, but you run the risk of misjudging the timing and being stranded for 12 hours until the next low tide).