I don’t think I managed to capture the essence of what vertigo feels like in this sketch, but I like it anyway.

I’ve been surfing along the edges of a kind of “background vertigo-like sense” for the last two years: the room isn’t spinning, but everything’s not 100% in focus either.

In the summer of 2017 I consulted a physiotherapist and she walked me through the Epley manoeuvre, which proved ineffective, perhaps because it’s not BPPV that ails me.

In what appears to be an otherwise unrelated development, though, earlier this week I woke up with the room actually spinning in a whole new kind of annoying, and although that subsided as the day went on, it seemed like something new was up, so I tried the Epley manoeuvre before bed and it turns out–very, very conclusively–that in this case it was BPPV, as the kind of vertigo I experienced was a deep-down-holy-shit-what-the-hell-us-going-on kind of vertigo that I didn’t even know was possible.

Fortunately it seems like the Epley manoeuvre did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the BPPV has cleared. Leaving me with my vague, background, vertigo-like-sensation and an abject fear that what I experienced with the full-on vertigo might ever become a permanent condition.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve wondered why there is a cannon embedded in the sidewalk at the corner of Queen & Grafton in downtown Charlottetown. In Never fired in anger: the shore defences of Charlotte Town Harry Holman tells the story of how it got there, and, along the way, a lot more about how Charlottetown was defended. And not.

I read somewhere—perhaps it was “5 Tips to Instantly Up Your Instagram Game” or some such—that, when taking photos of people, you should ask them to open their mouths as wide as possible.

Interestingly, it works. It seems weird, both to them and to you, but the photos that result often have much more life in them than they would otherwise.

I received similar instructions many years ago from a CBC Radio producer: I was going into the studio to record a commentary, and she advised me to make my points so emphatically as to appear (to myself) to be raving. It was very hard to do this, and it made me very uncomfortable, but I had to agree that the result was better.

Oliver got a new phone yesterday—his first that’s not a hand-me-down—and it has a “portrait mode.” This is the “open your mouth as wide as you can” photo I took of him with it.

At the last Pen Night our newest member, Ian Scott, generously gave each of us a blank postcard of heavy Japanese paper, remnants of his crafts tour to Japan, and invited us to experiment.

Sitting in my car last Saturday on the wharf in Victoria I decided, despite my “what if I screw it up—I only have one!” reservations, to try my hand. This is the result.

I’m not entirely satisfied with how it turned out, but it wasn’t a disaster either. Fears of fountain pen ink bleeds were unfounded and the paper took kindly to watercolour paint.

I put the card in the post to Ian yesterday.

Jennifer Brown (you’ll remember her from the Japanese Bookbinding Course and its sequel, as well as from her role as Oliver’s artistic spirit guide) is holding a workshop on Saturday, March 23, 2019 called Good Mail Day! From the poster:

Good Mail Day Art Workshop

The international movement celebrating fun snail mail.

Decorate envelopes and postcards in collage and more.
Make unusual folder letters and envelopes.
Send a surprise to a grandchild, senior of friend!
Each participant works at own comfort zone.

Brown bag lunch. Teas, Coffee and Snacks Provided.

I know, both from personal experience and from watching Jennifer work with Oliver over the past two years, that she is a skilled and creative art educator. If you’ve an interest in mail art, this is your chance to get together with a great group of people in a bright, sunny Crapaud studio, on a March afternoon.

The workshop runs from 10:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and the cost is $60. You can register by contacting Jennifer at 902-658-2354 or by email at browniferjen@gmail.com.

I viscerally remember the 1979 NBC show Supertrain: more so than any TV show or movie I’d seen before, it showed a tantalizing vision of the future that I could get behind. A train with a swimming pool: imagine.

Nothing in the real world had ever come close to Supertrain until I saw this tour of the E001系, an amazing Japanese luxury train that features two-level suites, fireplaces, and an observation car that puts VIA Rail’s dome car to shame.

From David Noel’s Friday’s Five newsletter, a pointer to a video love letter to Berlin by Bob Mould.

We spent most of August 2011 living in Berlin; the way I’ve long-described that amount of time was that in the middle of the month it was far enough both from arriving and departing that it felt like we were really there.

I’ve been back to Berlin several times since then, but only for short 2 or 3 days jaunts; they’ve been lovely trips, but they haven’t had the magic of 2011.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I think I’ve decided the one day someday I will actually live in Berlin. I don’t know when this will be. But I hope it comes true. In the meantime, we will continue to flirt.

If you’ve been following along with my documentation of Crapaud and its roundness, might want to visit the updated Did Crapaud incorporate “in order to purchase a short piece of fire hose?” (Or, How Crapaud came to be Round). I’ve added some materials I came across a couple of days ago in the folder related to the 1950 plebiscite in the collection of the Public Archives.

The Province of PEI has a Civic Address Communities data layer in its GIS Data Layers offering. Civic Address Communities are used solely as the basis for civic addressing: they aren’t real communities, neither in the sense of community identity nor incorporation; they are simply polygons on a map offering 100% coverage of the Island, something that the civic addressing system requires.

As I showed yesterday, it’s possible to “live in Crapaud,” for example, but to have a civic address in Tryon.

Here’s a quick walk-thru showing how you can use the province’s Civic Address Community GIS layer, along with the open source QGIS software, to find the smallest (and the largest) civic address community, by area.

First, download the Civic Address Communities shapefile and unzip it.

Start QGIS, and open the shapefile with Layer > Add Layer > Add Vector Layer. It will look like this:

Next, install the Group Stats plugin–Plugins > Manage and Install Plugins from the menu–and then select Vector > Group Stats > GroupStats and set it up like this:

Drag COMM_NM into the Rows box, and then both sum and Area into the Value box and click Calculate and you’ll see the list of communities and the total area of each community’s polygons (in square meters).

Click on the column header for the total area to sort in ascending order of area; click again for descending order of area.

What you’ll find is that:

• The smallest Civic Address Community is Pinette, at 70,216 square meters (17 acres).
• The largest Civic Address Community is Charlottetown, 44,437,948 square meters (10,980 acres).

The case of Pinette is an interesting one: not only is it the smallest civic address community, but it also only has two civic addresses in it, the first for a house that, although its road entrance is in the Civic Address Community of Pinette, is actually physically in the Civic Address Community of Belfast, the second for Pinette Provincial Park

To the north of Pinette is the Civic Address Community of Mount Buchanan, to the east is Belfast and to the south is South Pinette.

South Pinette, by comparison to Pinette, is, at 2,771 acres, absolutely massive; why what is carved out as Pinette isn’t simply a part of South Pinette is a mystery apparently lost to time.

The greatest thing about mailing things to my young nephew is that he mails me back.