For all the corporate merging and rebranding and offshoring that’s happened to what we now know as Bell Aliant, there are vestiges of Island Tel that show up from time to time, offering the kind of warm, neighbourly service we used to take for granted. Today was one of those days, as Installer Steve was on site here at the St. Paul’s Anglican Parish Hall (Reinventorium 2.0) to move the fiber connection from The Guild (I learned, by eavesdropping, that these are called the “F” and “T” ends, respectively, presumably for “From” and “To”).

Steve was every inch an Island Tel employee, literally and figuratively, and he got me up and running with flexibility, good humour, and technical acumen.

By early afternoon I was in business, with 142 Mbps down and 155 Mbps up when connected by 5 GHz wifi:

And a dizzying 307 Mbps down and 153 Mbps up when wired directly into the Actiontec router:

Twenty-four years ago I created my first website wired to the Internet via a 14.4 kbps bare copper connection to PEINet with a modem on either end; if my calculations are correct, that means my Internet speed is now about 21,000 times faster than it was then.

The move isn’t quite complete yet: there’s still the type drawer to come, and a table, and some shelves. And the bits and bobs I took off the printing press. But I’ve got until the end of the month to do that, so I’m going to take a break from moving-stress, get some work done, and enjoy tomorrow’s snow storm.

The team from McQuaid’s came through yet again, and the 103 year old Golding Jobber № 8 has a new basement to call home.

If you ever need something impossibly heavy moved in Charlottetown, I wholeheartedly recommend them.

I managed to get the digital side of the Reinventorium moved today, with the generous help of my friend Ray, who popped over with his station wagon at exactly the right time.

No bandwidth yet—the Bell Aliant installer is booked for tomorrow. But my gear is in place, ready and waiting for it.

But before that, the printing press gets moved: I’m meeting the team from McQuaid’s at 8:00 a.m. at The Guild.

Peter Santenello writes about moving to Kyiv in 2016:

That November in 2016 was a step into another dimension for my mind, and new scenery for my eyes. Kyiv didn’t quite have that same charm as it did in the summer… grey skies fused into grey buildings, like one wide and long brushstroke of paint on canvas.

But I didn’t want everything to be great; I didn’t want the weather to be perfect. I wanted texture, depth, and grit… and Ukraine checks all of these boxes like a seasoned professional.

Every place evokes a feeling in the first twenty-four hours. Ireland, drinking. Bali, relaxation. Las Vegas, excess. New York, busyness. Ukraine… authenticity.

The country has an uncanny ability to keep things authentic. There are a whole set of factors that lead to this outcome, but where much of the modern world is trying to put on a show, Ukraine is one of those places that doesn’t. In a way, it’s very simple here; people only smile if they mean it. There are no “being nice” gestures, only gestures that come from authentic intentions whether for good or bad.

My thoughts returned to this when I read last week that Downtown Charlottetown Inc. has a program called Gritty to Pretty, which seeks to fund “projects [that] will contribute to DCI’s strategic beautification goals.”

While I support the general notion of supporting creative workers in using the city as a canvas, the “Gritty to Pretty” wording of this program infantilizes artists, reducing their creative work to “gussying up the place.”

I don’t want my community to be pretty, like Santenello I want it to have “texture, depth, and grit,” and if the business community is going to subsidize art, it should remove the shackles of “pretty” from its program, embrace the grit, and fund authentic art that changes the world.

(My entry to the Charlottetown Perspectives program in 2012)

One of the nice developments in the annals of democracy here on PEI is that Standing Committee meetings are now broadcast live online, with audio and video archived for later listening and watching. In addition, full written transcripts are prepared of all meetings. As a result, you can now read the transcript of the presentation that Carolyn Bateman and I made to the Standing Committee on Education and Economic Development last week.

The heart of my comments came in these two paragraphs on page 34:

I guess, I would finish off with one comment, which is that my son, Oliver and I go walking at the Holland College walking track every night. We’ve been doing that to try and get some exercise in the winter. The hallways at the Centre for Community Engagement at Holland College are not wide enough for Oliver, Oliver’s service dog and I to walk down. This precipitated a conversation between Oliver and I about whether architects, when they’re designing a building should design buildings so they work just for some people or whether they should work for everybody. Of course, his answer was that they should design buildings so they work for everybody.

Really, I think that the approach that, on a bird’s eye level, we want to be taking when we’re talking about supporting people with autism, is designing all of our systems so that they work for everybody, not just for some people. I think, maybe, what gets missed here sometimes is that Carolyn and I have both spent a lot of time raising young adults or full-fledged adults with autism and they’re our children and we love them. They are not patients. They are not broken. They’re full-fledged contributing members of society and we want to be there to support them and we want them to be supported by the community when we’re not there to do that ourselves.

It’s fumbly-bumbly because I was speaking off the cuff, but if I’d been limited to speaking two paragraphs, it’s these that I would choose.

My understanding of “accessibility” has evolved a lot in recent years, and I think “design all of our systems so that they work for everybody, not just for some people” is a pretty good place to land for now.

The move-the-Reinventorium plans continue apace: on Wednesday morning a team of smart and burly people from McQuaid’s will arrive, equipped with forklift, cables, and grappling hooks, to move the Golding Jobber № 8 two blocks east. This will involve hauling the press up out of the basement at The Guild, into a trailer, down Richmond Street, and then down into the St. Paul’s Parish Hall basement. McQuaid’s moved the press in 6 years ago: they do good work, are rigorous about safety, and are about the nicest movers you’ll ever meet.

My part of this plan involves ensuring that the press can be stripped down to fit through the 31 inch wide door at the other end, and that was this morning’s project.

This involved, among other things, hacksawing off an inch from the axle, removing the drive belt and the bicycle wheel it runs on, taking off the motor, and wrenching off the connecting rod.

This last bit was a challenge: it was easy to unbolt the top end, but the bottom end’s bolt is, ingeniously, accessible only through a small porthole on the inside of the press, a region of uncommon grease and gunk. After deducing that I needed a 1-1/4” socket for that bottom bolt, I got everything aligned, filed off a little bit of metal that was dinting the bolt, malleted the socket into place, and ratcheted the bolt off. I was covered in gunk by the time I was done, but the connecting rod is off:

When the morning was done, I measured the width of the press, and it’s now coming in below 31 inches wide. Unless I’ve missed something (three dimensional space is not my strong suit), we should be good to go.

We have gotten into the habit of going to Receiver Coffee’s pizza-pasta night on Thursdays at the Brass Shop. The food is tasty, the price reasonable, the staff friendly and the vibe as mainline hipster as Charlottetown gets.

Last night, though, something was off: we showed up just after 6:00 p.m. expecting the usual packed room but found ourselves the only customers. While a few more people dribbled in over the next hour, relatively speaking the Brass Shop was deserted.

It turns out that counter-programmed against pizza-pasta night was a soft opening of the new Upstreet downtown beer store in the old Tweels at Kent and University.

The overlapping region of the Venn diagram of pizza-pasta hipsters and beer hipsters runs strong; it seems that we three were among the few sitting outside it.

Who would have ever thought that such a scheduling crisis would ever afflict Charlottetown.

Twenty-five years ago today I started work at the PEI Crafts Council, just up the street from where I sit right now.

And thus began our new life on Prince Edward Island.

Catherine followed a month later, once she’d extricated herself from her myriad projects in Ontario, and we took up residence in a tiny two-room apartment at 50 Great George Street, around the corner from where we live now.

I was 27 years old, wet behind the ears, and quite unprepared for the adventures that lay ahead. As I wrote last week to a new friend:

It was certainly a cliff-jump for us, a young couple in our late 20s moving to a place where we had almost never been, with no family or friends. Plan #1 was to stay for the 18 months of my job contract. But then Catherine found studio space, and I made another job, and we bought a house, and we had Oliver and 25 years passed.

For a good amount of that time I had itchy feet, and would conjure up plans to move us to Paris (etc.). But then, one day, I woke up and felt connected to the place in a way I never expected and now the gravitational pull of the Island runs strong.

So Plan #2 is to stay.

I’ve lived on PEI longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, and when I speak of “home” here is what I’m talking about.

I’ll never be “from here,” of course. But the importance of that has receded into the background, and I do truly feel like I belong here.

Thank you to everyone who’s smoothed the path for us over all these years: friends, colleagues, co-conspirators.

And thank you to Catherine who, when I phoned her from the payphone in the Confederation Centre Public Library and told her that I’d been offered a job on the Island, and had suggested I could start work in two weeks, didn’t leave me on the spot. Prince Edward Island is the great adventure of our lives together, and I couldn’t have–wouldn’t have wanted to have–done it without her.

Ten years ago this month, Wendy MacDonald approached me after a Prince Street Home and School meeting to see if I’d be willing to put my name forward for the position of Regional Director for the Charlottetown area on the provincial board of the PEI Home and School Federation.

At the time Wendy asked, I was only vaguely familiar with the fact that there was a provincial federation, and I knew little about what it did or why it did it. But Wendy is a formidable inviter, and as I was already in a position to know of the good works of Home and School at a local level, I agreed to let my name stand.

A month later, at the Annual General Meeting of the Federation, I was elected to the position, and began what ultimately became a 10 year run, in various positions, on the board (from regional director, I became Secretary, then Vice-President, then President, and, for the past two years, Past-President).

My work with Home and School went completely against type: I have had lifelong doubts about the approach we take to public education, a general discomfort working in groups, and negligible social skills. Like many people, I’d carried around a stereotypical view of “PTA parents” as overbearing joiners, a stereotype constantly stoked by the popular culture.

But, somehow, I fit right in. I found my peers on the provincial board to be interesting, engaged, smart parents and guardians with a desire to improve not only the education of their  children, but the education of all children (the mission of the Federation focuses on “the total well-being of all youth”). I have never left one of the 60-odd provincial board meetings I’ve attended over a decade feeling anything but energized. And I believe that, working as a board to support our members in 56 schools across PEI, we’ve achieved significant things together.

Last night I attended my final monthly meeting as a board member: my term as Past-President runs out at our AGM on April 14, 2018. Fittingly, the last meeting was a particularly rollicking one, where we hashed out the details of our AGM, and discussed the best way to feed our members’ oft-stated desire for more opportunities to engage with each other (as opposed to listening to speakers) and our desire to breath new life into our longstanding policy resolutions process. Over three hours of discussion we came up with a solid plan, and I’m excited to see it spring to life in April.

Board member for the Colonel Gray family of schools Sandy Nicholson snapped this photo of a slice of our group last night just before we adjourned (Sandy too is coming to the end of her term on the provincial board; I wouldn’t be surprised to see her return in the future, though!).

Another pointer from my friend Elmine to an interesting interview on Dutch television, this one with Hillary Clinton, interviewed by Eva Jinek.

Jinek herself has an interesting life story:

Jinek was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and grew up in Washington, D.C., where she attended Sheridan School. Her Czech parents decided to move to the Netherlands when she was eleven. “Just before I went to high school, they decided that they would prefer that my brother and I grow up in Europe. I remember it was six weeks until I spoke my first word in Dutch.”

Of all the experiences that might be traumatic to a teenager, “we’re moving you to a different country for high school; oh, and by the way, they speak Dutch” surely must rank highly.