I arrived at the office to this error message on the screen of my MacBook Air. The “Accept” button seems like a very Zen approach to the issue.

Jeremy Keith has assembled a compelling collection of writing about writing online.

Our lodging in Amsterdam, Zoku, had an “almost everything store” in its 6th floor “living room,” a set of drawers containing a bunch of useful things one might need when traveling:

The selection here is obviously western hipster-traveler oriented, but the labels on the drawers still serve as a useful guide as to the things you might want to remember when you travel.

Also, the presence of SIM cards is brilliant: every hotel catering to international travelers should simply offer a SIM card as a part of the check-in routine.

Oliver started grade 12 at Colonel Gray High School today; while we drive to school these daysm as opposed to walking, we simulated the previous start-of-school pictures for completeness sake.

Grade 12, 2018

Grade 11, 2017

Grade Ten, 2016

Grade Nine, 2015

Grade Eight, 2014

Grade Seven, 2013

Grade Six, 2012

Grade Five, 2011

Grade One, 2007

The first time Oliver used the sink at our Malmö Airbnb, he emerged exclaiming “The sink sounds like a didgeridoo!”

I asked him to record this, and he emailed me this sound.

Which does, indeed, sound like a didgeridoo.

Luisa took this photo of me when we were in Malmö and called it my “author photo.” It’s a testament to her skills as a photographer and to the quality of the OnePlus 5 camera. It also means I need to write a book to deserve it.

I planned to edit together several video clips that Oliver and I shot to review the smart fortwo electric drive this morning, but Google Photos just alerted me that it had done this itself.

The result is very very weird, but may in fact be more compelling than anything I could have created myself.

We had an hour to kill before IKEA opened this morning, so we stopped in at O’Regan’s Mercedes to test drive a smart fortwo electric drive (and learned, in the process, that smart no longer makes non-electric cars).

We shot a full video review, but the short story is that while the old gas-powered smart drove like a sluggish riding lawnmower, the electric drives like a rocket.

If we didn’t have the need to carry three people and a dog around—and if the PEI government offered the kind of electric vehicle subsidies that other provinces do—I’d seriously consider it to replace our Jetta.

This closing video of Smart Stuff That Matters 2018 captures the spirit of the weekend well.

I came surprisingly close to offering up my phone for Elmine’s wrecking hammer; in the end, though, I realized that I’d have no way to find our hotel in Amsterdam without it, and no way for people at home to contact me. It’s good to be aware of our technological dependencies in such stark ways from time to time.

I have often described the PEI Cancer Treatment Centre as simultaneously one of the saddest and happiest places on earth: when the sound of the “my treatment’s done and I’m cancer-free” bell rings out, there is no greater wave of joy to be felt flowing through the halls; but it is also a place of heart-wrenching conversations and great suffering, and you can see this chiseled into the faces of people in the waiting room, both those living with cancer and those supporting them.

In the last four years that I’ve been accompanying Catherine to treatments and doctors visits there, Tom Rath seemed ever-present; Tom, undergoing treatment for his own cancer, never had anything but a smile on his face, though, and we always took a minute to chat when we ran into each other. I’d known Tom from his days as a bed & breakfast operator in Murray Harbour, when he was active on the Tourism Industry Association of PEI, and had lost touch with him for many years once he stepped away from that; it was nice to make his acquaintance again, despite the circumstances.

Tom died on Sunday; the Eastern Graphic has a lovely description of his life, and his contributions to his communities, many of which I didn’t know about (I also had no idea he was another one of the seeming multitudes of Islanders born in Hamilton, Ontario).

I will miss my chats with Tom, and my heart goes out to his wife Frances.