When the Cornwall bypass gets turned on this week, road sections formerly known as “Trans-Canada Highway” will get renamed; Valerie is on top of what they’re getting renamed to.

My friend Ton wrote a special blog post just for me to highlight a feature he added to his blog to make it easier for (and other non-Dutch or non-German readers) to read his non-English posts on translation. And it works!

Looking back over the digital breadcrumbs that Google sprinkles along my daily travels, I realized this morning that I haven’t driven our car at all for the last 15 days.

This hasn’t been part of some grand plan; I’ve simply been able to get around by bicycle and bus for the last two weeks (I did get a car ride home from a friend last week, so I’ve not been completely car-free).

Ironically, this streak will be broken this afternoon when Oliver and I drive out to Green Party HQ in Sherwood to do some volunteer data entry door-to-door brochure drop-off: we’ve both been nursing colds, so cycling out is simply too much, and the bus schedule has an unfortunate midday absence of buses to Sherwood on Saturdays.

From the introduction to Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life:

And finally, in Chapter 9, I describe the single most important thing you can do to improve your sex life. But I’ll give it away right now: It turns out what matters most is not the parts you are made of or how they are organized, but how you feel about those parts. When you embrace your sexuality precisely as it is right now, that’s the context that creates the greatest potential for ecstatic pleasure.

From the introduction to Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture & Resistance, by way of explaining how focusing on building cycling infrastructure misses the mark:

I disagree with this approach, both as an advocate for bicycling and as an anthropologist. The development-based strategy sidesteps key questions about race, place, and mobility: Who decides what to build, who gets paid to build it, and who will frolic in those future streets? If the answers point to inequity, and they very often do, so will the fruits of the strategy. My approach to changing street culture takes a step back from designing new street systems and focuses instead on the human infrastructure that shapes our current mobility. Culture, social networks, who we spend time with; the relational nature of being social creatures plays a fundamental role in where we live, how we travel, who we value, and, crucially, how we transition to more sustainable lifestyles. We carry our identities and histories with us as we mobilize into public spaces like streets, and from within our individual bodies we transmit norms and new ideas. We can’t design a future where race and other hierarchical structures don’t matter in transportation unless we reckon with how they’re embedded in today’s unequal mobility landscape.

Both authors are saying, in essence, the same thing: embrace your infrastructure as you find it, and focus, instead, on the personal, cultural and social issues layered on top of it.

On Wednesday night I had some errands to run: I needed a carbon monoxide detector, some light bulbs, some vitamin D, and some throat lozenges (the latter because I was feeling a cold coming on, a cold that did, indeed, come on like a freight train on Thursday).

In the normal course of affairs I would have run these errands by getting in my car, driving out to Canadian Tire for the CO detector and the light bulbs, and then stopping at Shoppers Drug Mart on University Avenue, on the way back, for everything else.

But, as it happened, earlier in the day on Wednesday I’d received word from Home Hardware that they’d taken me up on my suggestion of installing a City-incentivized bicycle rack; not only did I want to show Home Hardware some love for doing this, but Home Hardware also happens to be a much easier cycle from my house downtown than Canadian Tire, and Murphy’s Parkdale Pharmacy, which is on the cycle home, has excellent bicycle parking too. It also happened to be a nice night for cycling, before a forecast Thursday storm. So the die was cast.

There are a bunch of ways to get from 100 Prince Street to Home Hardware: the most direct involve Longworth Avenue/St. Peters Road or Kensington Road; I hoped that I could avoid the hill involved in either of those routes, and also avoid some car traffic, by taking the Riverside Drive multi-use trail out to Garfield Street and then cutting west to St. Peters Road.

It turned out that Garfield Street too has something of an incline, so I wasn’t able to completely avoid hills. But it was a nicer cycle ride, so I’m happy I went that way; the ride through the Roman Catholic Cemetery was particularly atmospheric, as the lights and candles on the graves made the route feel like a magic realism shortcut into another dimension. Which perhaps it was.

At Home Hardware I did, indeed, find the reported bicycle rack, handy-by the front entrance:

Once I arrived at Home Hardware, I was reminded that, beyond convenient bicycle parking, there are some other good reasons to shop there, including its plentiful, helpful staff (I was asked if I needed help by three separate people; this has never happened to me at Canadian Tire, ever). I found the CO detector and the light bulbs (both on sale!), and was in and out in 5 minutes.

To get from Home Hardware to Murphy’s Parkdale Pharmacy I took advantage of the wide bicycle lane along St. Peters Road that’s almost entirely downhill.

It’s not the best bicycle lane in the world, as there are some storm drains that have sunk into pavement that you need to watch out for, and it’s important to have both a “see” and a “be seen” light on your bike if cycling at night, as there’s a lot of traffic entering and leaving St. Peters Road, but otherwise it’s a pleasant almost-100%-coast.

Parkdale Pharmacy has had good bicycle parking for years and years, right by the front door:

If you look carefully at my folding basket on the right you can see the I added some milk to the bill, white and chocolate, as I realized we were out.

The cycle ride from 100 Prince Street to Home Hardware took 17 minutes; it was 4 minutes from Home Hardware to Parkdale Pharmacy, and then 12 minutes to get back home.

Kudos to both Home Hardware and Murphy Pharmacies for realizing that good cycling infrastructure is good business.

Had I opted for the typical plan for running these errands, I would have driven my car out to Canadian Tire and back, a total journey of 9 km, which, according to the EPA, would have seen me emitting about 2.2 kg of CO2.

I heard a passing reference to the late motorcycle stunt impresario Evel Knievel last week that brought back a lot of memories. In a way that would perhaps boggle the mind of younger people, Knievel was a significant pop culture presence in my youth; it seemed that he was forever on the brink of some motorcycle-jumping grand feat or another.

For reasons I cannot explain, I have a very strong memory of seeing the 1977 film Viva Knievel! in the Empire Theatre in Cochrane, Ontario shortly after it was released.

With the help of my brothers and my parents I was able to narrow down the timing of our 1977 visit to Cochrane, to my maternal grandparents, to the middle of August, and then, with the help of the excellent Cochrane Public Library, I was able to request a scan of the movie listings from The Northland Post for that week. And, sure enough:

I am fascinated by films like this that bridge the generations: Viva Knievel! starred not only the eponymous Knievel, but also Gene Kelly, Laurent Hutton and Red Buttons, actors who seem like they should exist in a different time stream than Evel Knievel but clearly don’t (see also Ethel Merman on The Love Boat, playing the role of Gopher’s mother and singing a song from A Chorus Line).

That 1977 trip to Cochrane saw us continue on from Cochrane to Winnipeg; I was 11 years old, and it was perhaps the most of epic of the family camping trips we took when I was a kid. Perhaps that’s why I remember Viva Knievel! so strongly.

This is Oliver’s testimonial for Darcie Lanthier, Green candidate for Charlottetown, running on her Facebook page. And he’s right on all points.

(The photo was taken on the day Oliver joined both the provincial and federal Green parties in February; he picked a good day to do it).

An essay in Belt Magazine by Harmony Cox begins:

In the months before I came out of the closet and asked my husband for a separation, I did a lot of things. I googled terms like “later-in-life lesbian” and “irreconcilable differences.” I quietly began the work of separating our finances. I slept in my bed—my newly-purchased separate bed, where I’d been sleeping while we tried to work things out—felt the cold space next to me, and cried.

But mostly, I drove.

What with the maelstrom that our family has found itself in for the past month, I’ve been hard-pressed to find any time to help out on Darcie Lanthier’s Green campaign here in Charlottetown. But things have calmed down now enough so that when campaign HQ phoned last week looking for volunteers, I was able to sign myself and Oliver up for a stint of data entry this afternoon.

But then Oliver caught a cold, and is in no shape for getting off the couch, let alone doing data entry, so I bus-cycled by myself up to Darcie’s campaign office, on Brackley Point Road near Ellis Bros., just after lunch and offered up my services.

I’ve done a lot of election-related data entry over the years, but of the non-partisan sort. And even then, I was, more often than not, the supervisor of the systems upon which armies of people more talented than I were doing the data entry. So this was my time to experience full-on partisan data entry, and to use someone else’s system to do it with.

The Greens, it turns out, are a technologically-advanced lot, and the system was a lovely vehicle for doing what needed to be done. So much so that my fellow data-enterer and I finished our task quickly, and were looking for something else to do.

“How would you feel about helping out with the telephone canvas?”, I was asked by the friendly campaign team member guiding my way.

Panic set in. Call people!? Strangers?! Me? There’s no way in hell I can do that.

“Sure, I’d be happy to do that,” I squeaked out.

People further down the campaign volunteering rabbit hole than I have told me that the first call you make, or the first door you knock on, is the hardest one. And that was certainly true in my case. I dialed the first number with some trepidation, not knowing what would be on the other end.

To my surprise, I wasn’t yelled at. Indeed it was a rather pleasant call.

So I made another one. And another one.

And after about 15 minutes I was cooking with gas, and actually enjoying myself.

I kept on going until the call-queue ran dry, and packed up and cycled home around 5:00 p.m., feeling energized; on my way out the door I offered to do more over the course of this week, something 1:00 p.m. me would never have imagined 5:00 p.m. me doing.

Flour from Crystal Green Farms, milk from Purity Dairy, butter from ADL, eggs from Paul Offer. Only the baking powder and the salt came from away.