As much of North America has been plunged into a deep cold snap, we’ve gotten off relatively easy so far; it’s been cold, but it hasn’t (yet) been cold.

Nonetheless, we’ve suffered our first bout of “the tiny pipe to the dishwasher has frozen” of the season.

The space heater that we’d used in previous winters to help cure this broke down last year, so I was off to Canadian Tire after supper to find a replacement (those dishes aren’t going to do themselves).

Fortuitously, Canadian Tire had a sale on oscillating fan heaters (regularly $32.99, on for $19.99), but the signs advertising this were missing from the shelves, so there were still plenty of heaters in stock (13 left after I bought mine).

The under-cupboard is warming as I type, and there’s hope that the dishes will be washed by bedtime.

In his post Digital devices for world travellers, Edward Hasbrouck contrasts the appeal (or lack thereof) of tiny devices in the USA vs. the rest of the world:

Most travellers in the USA go by car, not by plane, and have plenty of room in their vehicle for a full-sized laptop if they need it on the road. As a result, keyboard devices smaller and more expensive than a “standard” laptop have been niche products in the USA and many other parts of the world — except in Japan and to a much lesser extent in Europe, where more business people travel by train and by mass transit. Few models or even product lines of smaller devices with keyboards — again, except for some that are distributed only in Japan — have been widely available or remained in production for very long.

“Tiny” in the USA connotes “toy-like”, and people expect toys to be (a) cheap and (b) not suitable for doing real work.

Not so in Japan, where “tiny” connotes “finely crafted” and “precious”.

In the same vein, I’ve never owned a mobile phone that I liked the size of more than the diminutive Nokia N70.

Ivan Reitman, prolific producer and director of films (and of filmmakers), was born in Komárno, Slovakia in 1946.

Komárno has an interesting geographical history:

Komárno is a town in Slovakia at the confluence of the Danube and the Váh rivers. Komárno was formed from part of a historical town in Hungary situated on both banks of the Danube. Following World War I and the Treaty of Trianon, the border of the newly created Czechoslovakia cut the historical, unified town in half, creating two new towns.

So Komárno is on the Slovakian side of the Danube, and Komárom is its Hungarian twin on the other side.

Scotty Allen has crafted a small collection of YouTube videos on his hacking adventures, the most well-known of which is How I Made My Own iPhone - in China. His latest video, however, is by far the most interesting yet: a 20 minute documentary about the San Francisco anarchist hackerspace Noisebridge.

I’d never heard about Noisebridge, but after watching the documentary, I fell in love.

Even better than the video, however, is the Noisebridge Wiki; my favourite page there is the one about the elevator, which starts:

The elevator is perhaps the jankyest and most dangerous thing we have at Noisebridge. Please do not use it unless absolutely necessary.

In Scotty’s documentary, one of the people he interviewed said that Noisebridge was reason enough to visit San Francisco; given that I have a brother and two nieces in the Bay Area, I think I’ve all the excuses I need to make a trip soon.

Prince Edward Island hit a new peak electricity load of 280 megawatts yesterday at 5:00 p.m.: Islanders were collectively using more electricity at that point than ever before in history. 

In fact the load, measured every 15 minutes from 5:00 p.m. all the way to 8:40 p.m. was more than the previous peak of 264.66 MW reached three years ago on January 6, 2015.

Here’s what the load, and the wind energy generation, looked like yesterday:

The other story told by this chart is that we were well-served by the wind: between 49% and 77% of our electricity needs were met by wind energy generation over the course of the day.

The increased capacity of the submarine cable to New Brunswick, combined with the wind energy, meant that there was no need to fire up local fossil-fuel generators, despite the peak.

If you’d like to drill into the data in more detail, here are all the samples recorded yesterday as a CSV file.

Show me a rural community that maintains an annual lecture series, and I’ll show you a community where hearts beat a little stronger.

Clyde River is such a place, and the schedule for its 2018 lectures has just been released; judged by the Verna Clow lecture we had the pleasure of attending two years ago these are events well worth attending, and events you should show up early for to ensure a seat.

A tradition we started in 2015 with Episode VII. I’ve nowhere near the Star Wars affiliation that my little brothers do, but I’m a sucker for secular tradition, and the movie was the best one in a long while. One piece of advice for you, gleaned at the snack counter: avoid kale chips; they are a crime against nature.

I wrote yesterday about how Christmas stress gave birth to the crosswords-as-airlocks system, and suggested that 2016 holiday travel “stretched our little troupe to near our breaking point.”

Here’s part two of that story.

After a pleasant week spent between Napanee (Catherine’s family) and Burlington (my family), during which waffles were consumed, Math Minute invented, and a new coffee place discovered, we were set to fly back home to PEI on New Year’s Eve.

For reasons that escape me now, our plane was scheduled to leave Pearson Airport in Toronto at 7:00 a.m. Given that we were in Burlington, 45 minutes drive away, that we had to return a rental car, and that it was a busy travel day, this meant leaving our Burlington hotel at 4:00 a.m.

What was I thinking?

When the hotel alarm clock went off at 3:30 a.m., it became immediately apparent that this wasn’t going to work out: Oliver entered a state of complete apoplexy, and, if only to avoid waking up the rest of the hotel, I sent him and Catherine back to bed and retired to the calm of the washroom to see what alternate arrangements I could make.

Air Canada, bless its soul, rose to the challenge: I got through to an agent on the phone, with no need to hold, and explained the depths of our situation. The agent quickly arranged for us to change our reservation to a later flight, at no charge. Which allowed us to get up at a (more or less) normal hour, and reboot the day.

Mid-morning we made our way to the airport, returned the rental car, and assembled the horses to go through security. Mindful of our challenging experience on the way up, I went ahead and identified the “special services” line we could go through, and beseeched the agent at the entrance to security to wave us right through to that doorway, which he agreed to do. No more than a minute later when we arrived at the line and presented ourselves to the selfsame agent it was like a brand new day, with beseeching forgotten and insistence that we could go through the regular old line like everyone else.

I insisted; they relented; and we were ushered through to the special services line.

We’d had positive experience with special services lines on earlier trips: at Heathrow in 2015 they were a Godsend. And so we had high hopes for smooth sailing.

Our hopes were quickly dashed.

To be honest, I have little memory of the chaos that ensued, but suffice to say (a) Oliver returned to a state of apoplexy, (b) the CATSA staff appeared to have little or know understanding of the anxiety challenges presented by the mix of autism and airport security, nor any sympathy for we supporters thereof, (c) the general vibe was “this kid’s freaking out; are we going to let them through at all,” and (d) in Oliver’s understandable physical reaction to the overwhelming stress of all this, my glasses got knocked off, fell to the ground, and lost their left arm.

Somehow we made it through, got ourselves to a quiet restaurant, plonked ourselves down, and allowed ourselves time to decompress.

A few minutes later, I snapped this selfie:

That’s documentary evidence of me in a state of stress and exhaustion and parental worry.

The flight home, by my recollection, was relatively uneventful. Although looking in my Google Timeline right now I see that we had a four hour layover in Montreal that I have absolutely no memory of whatsoever, so who knows.

There is a silver lining in all of this, remarkably: the stress of Christmas travel, and Oliver’s general late-2016 challenges with stress and anxiety, prompted us to seek help. This resulted in our acceptance, almost immediately, into the Strongest Families program, which was an enormous and transformative help to all three of us.

While 2017 was not without its challenges, the year for Oliver has gotten better and better every week, and we greet this (travel-free) Christmas as a family happier and more resilient.

Oh, and the wonderful Gaudet Optical in Halifax repaired my glasses, under warranty and at no charge, and they sit, restored, on my face as a type this.

A year ago this week we were heading to Ontario for Christmas with my family and Catherine’s. While spending time in the warm creche of those we know so well was aces, the trip itself–the getting there and getting back–stretched our little troupe to near our breaking point.

It all started when we arrived at Charlottetown Airport on Christmas Eve.

Oliver is challenged by the fundamental nature of airport security: the palpable tension in the air, the prospect of separation from us, the being-ordered-around. So we’d developed a routine of requesting a physical search that, previously, had worked well.

Things were looking up when we lucked into a CATSA agent for the search that we’d worked with before, but things quickly went off the rails when he introduced the possibility of a search in a “private room” into the mix. This not only introduced an element of choice, but also changed a routine we’d already mastered.

And there was the room itself: a tiny room that me, Oliver, Ethan the Dog, and two CATSA agents crowded into; a tiny room that was already packed with surplus equipment.

It all became too much for Oliver, and, in the meltdowny flail that resulted, I got accidentally knocked into a pile of metal desk parts. We emerged, battered and chastened, a few minutes later once the agents got done what they needed to get done.

Oliver has no issue with flying itself, but it takes him a while to calm down from stressful wringing experiences, and so he was still quite anxious when we boarded the airplane and got seated. Searching for a quick way to redirect his attention and bring some calm to the scene, I pulled out the En Route magazine from the seat-back and found the crossword puzzle.

It was at this point that I discovered that Oliver and I share a facility and affection for crossword puzzles.

I had no idea.

Working on the crossword puzzle had its intended effect: by the time we landed in Toronto a few hours later we were on an even keel.

Over the next week, as various and sundry travel stresses presented, and we found ourselves En Route-less, I turned to making up crossword puzzles on the spot to inject a needed dose of calm.

These are not New York Times-style crosswords; they’re an easier-to-make-up-on-the-moment-without-exploding-my-brain format, and because they’re created in the moment, they draw from local conditions.

Like this one, constructed about Island Fringe shows that we’d seen that very day:

Once we got home, I continued the tradition of crossword-puzzle-making, building it into Oliver’s bedtime routine (go upstairs, have a shower, brush teeth, get pajamas on, do crossword, go to bed).

And so, as the end of the year edges closer, I’m coming up on 365 crossword puzzles authored.

I’ve made up crossword puzzles about the planets, the days of the week, and LGBTQ issues. I’ve made up crossword puzzles about colours, and kitchen utensils, and family members, and breeds of dogs. I’ve made up crossword puzzles about the streets of Charlottetown, and the countries of Africa, and parts of the body.

When I leave home for travel, I make up a stack of crossword puzzles for Catherine to build into her nighttime routine with Oliver.

While the original crossword puzzle was injected as a sort of fire extinguisher, today the nightly crossword exists as what I like to think of as an airlock.

Changes of state–transitions–are one of the challenging hallmarks of living with autism, and, just like one seeks to ease the transition from space station to space walk with an airlock, anything that can smooth the myriad transitions of life is a welcome tool. For us, at bedtime, crossword puzzles are that thing: rather than just opening the door to the outer space of sleep, we step inside the airlock of the crossword, and by the time we’re done, 5 minutes later, pressure has equalized, space suit is on, and outer space can be comfortably confronted.

Along the way they’ve become an airlock for me too, of course, and a welcome part of my nighttime routine.

I was reading the interesting web page Are You Old Enough?, on the Province of PEI’s website when I came across this passage in a section about alcohol:

If you are under 19, a parent or spouse can give you an alcoholic drink like a glass of wine with Christmas dinner.

I was curious to find the legislative backstop for this statement, and so scoured the Liquor Control Act, where I found what I was looking for.

Section 40 starts off with a blanket ban on supplying liquor to those under 19 years old:

No person shall knowingly sell, give or otherwise supply liquor to any person under the age of nineteen years…

Later, however, there is section 40.6, Exception re minors:

This section does not apply in the case of liquor given to a person under the age of nineteen years by his parent, guardian, or spouse for beverage purposes, or administered to him by a medical practitioner or dentist for medical purposes.

This, then, is the “glass of wine with Christmas dinner” exemption.

The year one spends as an 18 year old–just 8 months away for our [[Oliver]]–is a odd Sargasso Sea of an age.

Once you turn 18, you’re allowed to vote, get married, see explicit movies, get intimate body piercings, and get tattoos.

But you must wait until you’re 19 until you’re allowed to purchase alcohol, buy cigarettes, gamble or buy lottery tickets.

Regardless, it’s nice to find that we’ll be able to have wine with our Christmas dinner this year and not feel like we’re breaking the law by pouring some for Oliver.