Our hearty band of Prince Edward Island subscribers to The New Yorker–about a dozen of us–gathered in conclave last night in the lounge of The Haviland Club.

As it happened, the annual meeting of the Charlottetown Yacht Club was happening in the room next door, meaning that there might never before have been a greater concentration of the Island’s pompous (it’s notable that there was one person who lives in the union of the two groups who opted for the Yacht Club gathering, which, I think, marks it as being slightly more pompous; but it’s a toss-up).

Our gathering was everything I’d hoped it would be: a motley collection of young and old, rural and urban, longtime subscribers and aspirational ones.

Among us were someone who had achieved the hat trick of visiting the New Yorker’s offices, volunteering at the New Yorker Festival, and having had supper with Calvin Trillin.

We heard the tale of a subscription shared between brothers, then inherited when one brother died, then passed along to the next generation (what a life those copies must have had as they wended through the extended family).

Only one of our number had ever entered the cartoon contest.

Nobody had pitched the magazine on a story. Yet.

There was a rainbow of opinion about reading the magazine online, ranging from my originalist position that it is only truly experienced on the printed page, to those who are daily, enthusiastic consumers of the website in a way completely foreign to me.

We talked about whether we read the fiction (ranging from “never” to “sometimes it’s all I read”), whether we read the poetry (“always” to “The New Yorker prints poetry?!”), and whether we read the front-of-book listings (almost everyone seems to, even though we’re 2000 km away from New York and the magazine arrives a week late).

We reviewed a dossier of editorial mentions of Prince Edward Island in the magazine over the last 93 years, running from casual mention of Malpeque oysters to the 1996 article by the aforementioned Trillin about Anne of Green Gables.

Plans to ferry back issues to the aspirational were arranged. Email addresses exchanged. Feelings that we might someday do it again were floated.

My thanks to journalist Meg Campbell for being the catalyst to bring us together; Meg was there last night, with her inquisitive ears on, and it wouldn’t surprise me if something arises out of this from her pen.

Ever since we’ve been paying the people who work with Oliver after school and on weekends, and making Canada Revenue Agency payroll remittances for them, I’ve been confused about one thing: what pay periods to include in my monthly remittances.

Take this week, for example: we paid Oliver’s workers last Friday, we’ll pay them this coming Friday, and the end of the month is today, in the middle. Do I include last week’s pay? This week’s pay? Only a part of this week’s pay?

The answer, helpfully explained over the phone by a CRA customer service agent, is really simple: you remit for the pay you paid out in the month you’re remitting for.

So today I’ll remit for the weeks ending February 2, 9, 16 and 23, because those all fell in February.

But I won’t include the week of March 2. Because that’s in March.

Problem solved.

With new prescriptions for two pairs of eyeglasses in-hand, and two relatively new sets of frames in daily use, I set out to have new lenses put in the current frames.

I was worried, though, that this would mean that I’d need to do without one set of glasses or the other for an extended period, and as each has its strong suit, this wasn’t an attractive prospect.

To my delight, however, when I went into Charlottetown Vision Care this morning to spec out the new lenses, they told me they could give me my current glasses back after taking measurements, order the new lenses, and then simply have me come in for 20 minutes to have the old ones swapped for the new.

I’d no idea this was possible, but it’s a big help.

Catherine and I had a meeting at Colonel Gray High School this morning with Oliver’s teachers, and when the meeting was over we headed back to the car. Snow had started to fall in the interim, and it was lightly dusting the ice below, creating prime slipping conditions.

Catherine is the primary slipping danger in our family, as she has cancer sites in her bones that render her more brittle than the average person; the orthopedic surgeon she consulted with a couple of years ago gave her strict instructions not to fall, ever, under any circumstances, a request she’s (mostly) honoured since.

As Catherine was (gingerly) getting into the car, she said “be careful, Pete, it’s really slippery.”

Advice I promptly ignored, as I threw myself headlong into the task of brushing the snow off the car.

And, suddenly, I was falling backwards onto the aforementioned ice.

It was slippery. Very slippery.

Fortunately I did not break anything, and my injuries appear restricted to some pain in the heel of my right hand when I put pressure on it (most noticeable, so far, if I get out of a chair, using my right arm to help, or if I use a stapler with that hand).

I was concerned, though, that trouble might be lurking–catatonic carpal thrombosis syndrome or some such thing. I didn’t want to go to the ER, and I didn’t want to use my doctor’s time, so I did what you’re supposed to do in non-emergency medical situations, and I called 811.

After a couple of rings and a bleep and bloop through a shallow phone tree I was talking to a very helpful and friendly registered nurse. They took my name, my family doctor’s name, and my date of birth, and then walked me through an exhaustive set of questions over the course of about 10 minutes (is there a bruise? is there a puncture? is there swelling? do you have full range of motion in your hand?). At the end of the flow chart was the recommendation that I could ice my hand, take pain relief if needed, and see how things go over the next 7 days.

The most impressive part of the dialogue was the nurse asking me to repeat back the instructions I’d just received to make sure I understood them: that’s a great idea, especially when dealing with people who are, inevitably, under more stress than average.

Given the range of calamity that could have befallen me, I’m more than happy to deal with a little bit of pain in my heel for the next while, and to avoid stapling.

811, meanwhile, has revealed itself to be a treasure of a service.

My keyboard of choice for the last 10 years or so has been the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard, which I switched to after many years of the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro.

I don’t love the Sculpt: its key travel isn’t fantastic, I don’t like the combination of the function keys and special-purpose keys (like volume controls) into one row of keys with a toggle, and the key labels tends to wear away pretty quickly with regular use.

But its ergonomics work well for me, I love the fact that the numeric keypad (which I seldom use, but keep handy when I need to do a lot of bookkeeping) is a separate device, leaving room on the immediate right for my mouse. And it’s still in production, relatively easy to pick up retail almost anywhere, and is reasonably priced (although I wish you could buy it without the companion mouse, which I never use looks like you can buy it separately from Amazon now: woohoo!).

My first Sculpt here in the Charlottetown office finally gave up the ghost today. The key labels, especially on the left side, were long-ago worn away, and the keys had been gradually more mushy for a while; the final straw was the right-hand side of the space bar giving up.

Fortunately I pre-planned, and had a backup Sculpt at the ready, upon which I type this very post.

It’s taking some getting used to, as the key travel is crisply new, and all the subtle modifications in hand behaviour I’d unknowingly been making in recent years to accommodate the decay of the old one are no longer needed.

Posting my eyeglasses prescription here has got me out of a jam more than once since I started doing it, so I’ll continue the tradition: here’s the updated prescription for progressive bifocals I received this morning from Charlottetown Vision Care:

Moving back in time, here’s the 2016 prescription:

And the prescription from 2014, one I never had filled:

And the prescription from 2012:

And the prescription from 2008:

I’ve now enough data points that making a table is useful to see the evolution of my prescription:

Right Eye (OD)

My right eye, at least from the inside looking out, is the most challenged one: if I toggle back and forth between my eyes, whether wearing my existing prescription or without eyeglasses, the right eye is demonstrably weaker than the left.

The only change this time from the last prescription is in the “Add” column. This is described here as:

The Add, short for Reading Addition, is the additional correction required for reading, this can be used to make either reading glasses, bifocal glasses or Varifocal glasses. This figure is an indication of how much extra power is required ‘on top’ of the distance prescription for near or intermediate glasses.

On this prescription the “Add” went from +1.50 to +2.00:

Left Eye (OS)

The stronger eye, which presumably why its “Sphere” measure (“the strength of lens required to correct your focus “) is less than the right. Again, the only change here is the “Add” from +1.50 to +2.00:

My optometrist assures me that there’s lots of room in the corrective spectrum to continue correcting my vision for years to come.

Oliver is taking Global Issues this semester at Colonel Gray, and to start things off the class talked a lot about the United Nations.

This prompted me to read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the first time, and, by way of helping to commit it to memory, to start to set and print portions of it.

Here’s the result of the first effort: the first sentence of Article 1, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

It’s set in a mixture of 30 point Futura Regular and Bold, and printed in black ink on standard white index cards.

It turned out, despite its simplicity and brevity, to be a bear of a passage to print, as there wasn’t anywhere particularly convenient to tuck the tongues of the gauge pins, so I had to improvise. But I persevered, and managed to print 100 copies. I’m going to try to print the title, in something resembling United Nations Blue, as a next step. Which will be my first attempt at mixing colours.

This photo, taken early this morning, sums up the winter of 2018 perfectly. Yesterday was warm, today is cold. The cycle repeats week after week after week. As a result, our backyard is, alternatively, an ice rink, a swimming pool, and a mud bath. Ethan the dog is not amused.

While I feel guilty for patronizing Big Tea, on a cold winter afternoon there’s no better place for a break than the front counter at David’s Tea.

Every morning The Old Farmer’s Almanac sends a tweet with a photo of the sunrise over its Dublin, New Hampshire headquarters. This morning’s photo was simply spectacular: