With the talk about the scourge of bottled water this week, let’s not forget that people like Leo Broderick and Mary Boyd have been calling for its elimination for years.

The Pendergast family has been an important presence in our life on Prince Edward Island: they are an enormously talented bunch, whether concerning matters of food, books, music or philosophy. And among the kindest lot you’ll ever encounter.

The talent has made it to the next generation: young Shane Pendergast–you may remember him from the film he made about John Bil–is an entrant in the CBC Searchlight competition, and you can vote for him right now as easily as clicking right here, listening to his track (you don’t have to listen to it to vote, but it’s a good track, and you should), and clicking Vote.

You can do this, apparently, up to once a day.

While other students were busy writing exams, Oliver spent the week meeting with all manner of people about what comes next for him.

While we had a busy schedule running around town, we could all sleep in a little later than usual. But school started back up today (Oliver’s last semester of public school!), and so I woke up, as usual, once Stephanie Kelly read the CBC news headlines. The home stretch!

The next time you’re getting an x-ray done at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (or perhaps heading to day surgery or physiotherapy) be on the lookout for this photo by Hon. Gilbert Clements in the hallway.

While you’re at it, look out for tapestries by William Kurelek and Harold Town along the same stretch.

Oliver reviews the last 10 years to mark a decade of his blog.

I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years hold for him.

In August of 2006 we made a quick 24 hour trip to Halifax for a medical appointment; Oliver and I took a spare hour and test drove a Smart Car. I recorded the “video podcast” we made in the car on my Nokia N70 mobile phone, but didn’t post it online at the time because, well, there wasn’t an easy way of doing that back then (Google didn’t buy YouTube until November of that year).

Fortunately, Catherine had the recording saved in her email, and so, now that posting video online is easy, we can present the review to the world:

The video quality is horrible–the N70 3GP files were very low resolution, and not intended for anything other than sending mobile-to-mobile–but you can make it out okay. I especially like the establishing shot, pointing up at the retracting Smart car roof.

Last year Oliver and I test drove a Smart car again, this time an electric model, but the video was wonky, and all that remains as evidence is this AI-generated version conjured up by Google Photos.

The Social Model of Disability is a new term for me:

The social model of disability is a way of viewing the world, developed by disabled people.

The model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference. Barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets. Or they can be caused by people’s attitudes to difference, like assuming disabled people can’t do certain things.

The social model helps us recognise barriers that make life harder for disabled people. Removing these barriers creates equality and offers disabled people more independence, choice and control.

The term special needs is one that I’ve never liked; reading the tenets of the social model of disability makes me realize that one of the reasons why is that it places focus in the wrong place: “special needs children” don’t have “special” needs, they have the needs they have (as we all do).

The needs they have may be unmet, but they are only “special” because we choose to class them as exceptional.

People are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference.

Rachel Nabors, writing in You literally cannot pay me to speak without a Code of Conduct, includes a principle I’ve been trying to adopt myself of late:

I have a principle that drives my every decision in life: do unto others as I wish people had done for me when I was young and needed help.

My Saturday afternoon activity yesterday in Greater Crapaud was seeking out the Tryon River Trail, a trail maintained by the Tryon & Area Historical Society that runs through the woods and along the salt marsh beside the Tryon River.

The main trailhead is on Route № 10 before you go around the bend to the church, across the road from the Tryon Museum.

Conditions weren’t the best for a hike yesterday, so I could only make it about halfway through the first trail segment before I had to double back to Samuel Holland Lane and walk up the road a bit to where the trail continues along the river on the other side. About 5 minutes into that stretch of the trail there’s a lovely bench in a sun-filled glade that was about the most peaceful place on Earth I’ve come across in a long while.

I added the trail to OpenStreetMap, so it’s now available on Waymarked Trails should you like to seek it out one winter afternoon yourself; adding trails like this is another daily OpenStreetMap habit, like updating the hours of your local restaurant, that can be built into a blogging routine with positive spin-offs elsewhere.

Rob Delaney, who co-writes and co-stars in the British TV show Catastrophe, is a very funny man. But as funny as he is, he is even better at truth-telling, which is what he does in this interview with Russell Howard about the death of his son Henry and the grief that followed.

Midway through the interview Delaney discusses the discomfort others have with talking to someone who’s experienced a loss:

What I would say to someone in that situation—and it’s not one size fits all—you know somebody who’s lost, you know, like a big one, like a sibling or a child or a spouse or something: they’re thinking about that… I’m thinking about Henry. So if you come up to me and you say, you know, “hey I heard it’s been just about a year since your son passed away,” and I would say “yah, yah, it has…”, you might think you brought him up; you didn’t bring him up, I was already thinking about him, and you allowed me to just talk about him a little bit and think about him, and to me that’s such a pleasure…

I heard something similar several years ago from a friend whose son had died: when others avoided the subject, out of fear that bringing it up would be uncomfortable, it was a little bit like his son had never existed. Like Delaney, he was thinking about his son all the time, and to be able to share that with someone was a gift, not a discomfort.