When I was at Yankee Publishing a couple of weeks ago, working with my MacBook Air plugged into an external monitor, I realized that very rarely do I have call to use my laptop as a laptop: 99% of the time it’s plugged into a display here, and it’s only when I’m on the road that I use it as it was intended.

So this morning when Apple announced a new Mac mini–the first refresh for this model in forever–I jumped at the change to order one for delivery next week:

For about the same price as a new MacBook Air, I end up with a machine that’s more powerful, with more memory, a larger disk, and more ports. And yet it’s portable enough that I can stuff it into my bag and take it with me.

This new machine will replace my mid-2011 MacBook Air, a machine that has served me admirably for longer than any computer I’ve ever owned. I’ll keep it around and maintained for those rare times that I need a portable machine with a screen; for everything else, I’m looking forward to taking advantage of the last 7 years of advances in Apple’s technology.

Alanna Jankov is running for Charlottetown City Council Ward One–our downtown ward–and I’m going to vote for her.

Alanna and I worked beside each other for many years when my office was on the second floor of The Guild, right next to hers. So I got to know Alanna originally as my landlord, and then got a front row seat as she helped to transform the facility from near-death to robust health.

Alanna has two qualities that are rarely found in arts administrators: she isn’t bitter or cynical, and she can get things done.

Rather than being worn down by lack of cultural funding and support and going to ground, Alanna figures out how to make things happen, using a combination of guile, creativity and connections. She is ambitious. She has ideas. She’s a good listener. She is also, apparently, unflappable: never in six years of texting her about plugged toilets and unexpected fire alarms did she ever react with anything other than good humour.

City Council is a strange beast: unlike provincial and federal levels of government, with political parties and their platforms, each city councillor is independent, and things only get done at City Hall if they are able to find ways of working together, of overcoming the downtown-vs.-uptown-vs.-royalty rivalries, of truly collaborating. No city council in recent memory has appeared particularly good at this, and the city has suffered for it.

You cannot run an arts centre, with its irascible constituencies of artists, board members, funders and patrons without significant collaborative abilities; Alanna has those abilities. And, somehow, she remains centred and upbeat about the endeavour.

Alanna’s platform speaks to many of the issues I hold dear–transparency, transportation, housing–and I have confidence that if she’s elected, she will be an accessible, responsive councillor.

I decided to vote for Alanna late last week; she sealed the deal for me by knocking on our door at 100 Prince Street yesterday looking for Oliver, our first-time voter. She’s already been actively engaged with Oliver about the issues on Facebook, and in the candidates debate two weeks ago; but she took the time to sit down with him yesterday for almost an hour to answer questions about the myriad issues he’s concerned about.

I’m voting for Alanna Jankov because I’m convinced she would make an excellent representative for Ward One on City Council.

From a post about how to ace an interview with venture capitalists:

4. Practice the interview under extreme circumstances

A friend of mine whose wife recently got accepted into YC shared a hilarious but clever tip: practice under manufactured duress. He told me that he would literally throw socks at her, dance in the background, or yell at her while she was reviewing answers — anything to try and throw off her focus.

Last week I was talking to a friend who was about to go to Thailand for the first time, and I told her about our trip there with wee Oliver, many years ago.

That trip was, in a sense, an example of “practice under duress”: if we could fly halfway around the world with Oliver and make our way in utterly different cultural circumstances, we could do anything.

When we flew to Europe a year later it felt like crossing the street by comparison.

That trip to Thailand made all the trips that followed it possible.

Bringing a process that I started 18 months ago to a close, I deleted my @ruk Twitter and Instagram accounts entirely last night.

Although I’d stopped posting to either a long time ago, I was still dropping in from time to time to check in and see what was going on; this never proved to be anything more than dispiriting, and so pulling the plug wasn’t difficult.

I encountered the following fields on a government form required to set up electronic payments and I couldn’t figure out what each meant:

This seems to happen every time I am asked for this information; to avoid having to phone the credit union every time, I’m documenting this here.

• Branch Number (also known as Transit Number) – According to Wikipedia, “Each branch in a financial institution is assigned a unique transit number for identification. The final digit of the transit number indicates the geographical location of the branch.” At Provincial Credit Union, the number is 39073.
• Institution Number (also known as Bank Code, Financial Institution Number) – Each bank and credit union has one. Provincial Credit Union’s number is 839.
• Bank Account Number – what it seems, just my regular old bank account number.

Catherine’s piece Lists of Life is part of the exhibition Who’s Your Mother? Women Artists of P.E.I., 1964 to the Present that opened last night at the Confederation Centre of the Arts.

One of the unanticipated delights of the piece is that, because it’s suspended over the opening at the edge of the second floor gallery that looks down to the first floor, it dances in reaction to the air currents flowing through the building. No more so was this evident than when the formalities of the opening were happening immediately underneath it: the piece jiggled and swayed every time the audience applauded or the speakers spoke.

The other unanticipated aspect of the piece is how it casts shadows on the wall behind it:

The piece consists of of a set of lists, stitched on netting, which are suspending inside a ethereal fabric room:

About 20 years ago I developed a taste for around-the-world travelogues; the first was Who Needs a Road? and I continued through Half-Safe, First Overland, Away from My Desk, Offbeat in Asia, In the Circle of the Sun, and innumerable others.

Something that almost every around-the-world tale shares is a gradual fade from incredible detail in the early pages to facile overview as the journey wanes. As the trips start we might see each day receive a page or two, with the details of every meal and every village related; it’s not uncommon, toward the end, to breeze through a week or two per page – “…and after that we passed through Albania…” Before you know it, the trip is over, regular life resumes, and unless there’s an epilogue, we’re left wondering what happened next. Which would be the most interesting part: it’s easy to cross Siberia on a motorbike compared to what I imagine is the difficult transition from river-fording to resumption of a desk job.

Of late my attention has turned from reading about long voyages to reading cancer memoirs; related genres, in a way. And my underlying motivation, to try to shine light on the vast expanses of the unknown, is similar.

I’ve just finished reading Nina Riggs’ The Bright Hour; before that Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Teva Harrison’s In-Between Days, and, many years ago, my friend Laurie Kingston’s Not Done Yet.

The gutting thing about reading cancer memoirs is that the hero always dies at the end. You know this going in, and the note about the author on the dust jacket inevitably reads “lived in Austin” rather than “lives in Austin.” As with around the world books, the minute-by-minute detail of diagnosis and early treatment slowly gives way, as months pass in the blink of a chapter. And then, tragically but necessarily, there is no detail of the final weeks and months, and the epilogue–there is always an epilogue–inevitably reads “…wrote those last words 2 months before she died.”

If, like me, you are reading a cancer memoir as a travelogue, a travelogue for the sort of journey that you happen to be accompanying someone you love on, then this sudden fade to black is confounding in the same way as not hearing how the trip through Albania went.

I have no idea what lies in Albania. And it’s hard to talk about what Albania is like because there is a sneaking, if irrational, suspicion that talking of Albania gets you to Albania sooner than you want to be there. Albania is terrifying both because it’s the end of the voyage and because so little is written about it. And what comes after Albania?

I have the gift of having two friends who, alas, have seen their wives die of metastatic breast cancer in the last year, and they have both been generous with relating their experiences and their wisdom. But even they cannot do justice to the terrain that lies ahead, as they are already on the other side of Albania, in a faraway place that I know I’ll end up but cannot yet comprehend.

From Ian Petrie, delivering the McRobie Lecture (as syndicated by Citizens Alliance News):

The thing about relationships… and this gets us back to Schumacher…  is that people who care for each other’s welfare will treat each other fairly… maybe one year the buyer says I need a favour… can you drop the price to keep my boss happy.. The next year the farmers says I need a few more cents…. but when the relationship is linked purely by a number… purely by this is the price take it or leave it… and these big wholesalers and retailers can do this… then the partner in the relationship with less power loses…. and right now that’s always the farmer… right now food retailing is like the Game of Thrones.. And farmers are the disposable armies that go about slaughtering each other…

I benefit from a number of relationships that would meet Ian’s (Schumacher’s) standard for “small is beautiful,” and it makes me happy every time we transact. Sometimes my mechanic Dave says “you can get me the next time” when the repair is minor and it doesn’t make sense to write up a bill. Sometimes I buy a package of 11 eggs from Paul when the chickens refuse to lay in multiples of a dozen. My coffee at the Farmer’s Market was on the house today to recognize Oliver’s fantastic Halloween costume (I got the better end of that deal!). I recommended to Oliver’s art teacher that we up her rate to $40 from $35 as a way of solving the problem of making change every week. When I have a problem with my credit union account, I email Connie and she sorts it out for me.

Economic relationships like this, where “people who care for each other’s welfare will treat each other fairly,” are as different from how one buys a coffee at Starbucks as to exist in a different relationship universe; we should all strive to move 100% of our transacting in this direction.

Ian Petrie is one of the wisest people I know; when he holds forth like this, we’re all better for the listening.

Catherine has a piece in the show that’s opening tomorrow night at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. As it’s a complicated, delicate piece that’s to be mounted high in the air, its installation has spread over three days. Fortunately the gallery has a crack curatorial team, and it’s all coming together.

Here’s a sneak peek; come to the gallery tomorrow night for the opening to see it in all its splendour.