Steve Martin’s blurb on the back of Tom Hanks’s new book, Uncommon Type: Some Stories, reads:

It turns out that Tom Hanks is also a wise and hilarious writer with an endlessly surprising mind. Damn it.

And I agree: I’m only midway through the book, but I’ve found it witty, irreverent, and wide-ranging. Like Tom Hanks.

Here’s my favourite passage so far, from the opening story, Three Exhausting Weeks:

Being Anna’s boyfriend was like training to be a Navy SEAL while working full-time in an Amazon fulfillment center in the Oklahoma Panhandle in tornado season. Something was going on every moment of every day. My 2:30 naps were a thing of the past.

Recommended.

My first job as a coder, when I was 14 years old, was for Skycraft Hobbies, a small hobby shop that used a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III to manage its inventory using a Radio Shack program called Inventory Control System; through a connection of my father’s I was hired to modify the BASIC code for the system to allow the shop to do things like customizing its receipts.

My second job as a coder was for G.W. Line Canadian Tire in Burlington; I’d started off selling Commodore VIC 20s on the sales floor during the Christmas season, and the next summer I was hired to work out of the Comptroller’s office upstairs to create spreadsheets using Lotus 1-2-3, which was only a year old at the time.

Lotus was the first bona fide PC application I’d ever used, and I thought it was magical, especially when I learned how to use macros to manipulate the spreadsheets programmatically.

My work focused on enabling the Comptroller to analyze things like store sales, wages, and garage mechanic productivity. I was the perfect candidate for the job: I was inexpensive, curious and eager to learn, knew my way around the keyboard, and was, at the same time, mostly blind to the data that was sifting through my fingers.

This morning I was poking through my collection of backup CDs, and I came across one labelled “Important Data Files,” and on the CD was a file named CANTIRE.ZIP.

I copied the file onto my Mac, unzipped it, and, fresh as the day I created them more than 30 years ago, were all those Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. Apparently at some point in the past I presciently copied the backup floppies onto a backup CD.

As a credit to the longevity of the Lotus WK1 file format (and to the power of open source software), I was able to load the spreadsheets into LibreOffice without any problem. Here’s a screen capture of what some of the macros look like:

There’s a bunch more interesting-looking stuff on the “Important Data Files” CD, including Turbo Pascal code that I wrote to manage accreditation for the Canadian Association for Pastoral Education, and Catherine’s correspondence related to her work on the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board in the early 1990s.

Backup disks are fun.

On January 11, 2018 I ordered two books of “From Far and Wide” stamps from Canada Post using its online store.

As detailed here, Canada Post’s delivery standard for online orders, which should serve as a “we’ll get you your stamps within 24 hours” showcase for their logistics fu, is abysmal.

And so it took 12 days for the stamps to arrive.

From the time I ordered the stamps on January 11 it was 7 days until they shipped from Ottawa on January 18. From there the package hung around Ottawa for another day, then took 3 days to get to Dieppe, NB and another day to get across the bridge to me.

Here’s the envelope that Catherine signed for yesterday:

And here’s what was inside:

According to Google Maps, it takes about 9 days to walk from the Canada Post’s distribution centre at 2802 Swansea Crescent in Ottawa to our house, which includes a ferry up the St. Lawrence to the Magdalen Islands and then another ferry from there to Souris.

Canada Post: Just Slightly Slower than Walking!

A year ago brother Johnny gave me a gift of a 2017 calendar of historic maps of the world; when the year came to an end it seemed like a shame to have the map plates go to waste, so I trimmed them out of the calendar and then went looking for a project.

When I came across the quote “A Map is the Greatest of All Epic Poems,” attributed to Gilbert Grosvenor, founding editor of National Geographic magazine, I knew I had it.

I printed the quote of the map plates in Akzidenz Grotesk, 60 point for the body and 48 point for the credit. The type is well-worn, and so required a lot of packing to print legibly, more-so because the paper was textured (you can see the effect of the texture on the South America map in the photo above).

You wouldn’t think that one-way streets would be a spanner in the works of shopping for locally-produced food, but in my case overcoming a one-way street made a huge difference.

Here was the problem: after spending Saturday mornings at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market, Oliver and I would often drive over to Riverview Country Market to pick up some things we weren’t able to get earlier.

Riverview doesn’t carry Purity Dairy milk, and so we’d hold off on buying milk with hopes that we might pick it up elsewhere. Sometimes we set out to make that elsewhere the Purity Dairy plant on Kent Street, which is open Saturday mornings.

The problem we perpetually ran into is that Kent Street is one way, and so I’d head down Fitzroy Street with plans to loop around and back down Kent, but I’d forever be undershooting or overshooting and, in the end, the process proved too dizzying to build into our Saturday morning routine.

A few weeks ago, though, I made an adjustment: after the Market we’d head home for a moment, and then set out to traverse what I’ve come to think of as our “local food trail,” heading the right way down Kent Street and thus removing the dizziness.

Stop № 1: Purity Dairy

I first met Tom Cullen, owner of Purity Dairy, many years ago at a dinner party hosted by mutual friends, and we’ve been faithful customers of his ever since.

Purity is located on Kent Street just opposite Holland College, and they have a small retail shop in their front office that sells milk, cream, sour cream, and, in an oddly helpful service to customers, ADL butter (ADL otherwise being Purity’s primary on-Island competitor). They’re open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and on Saturdays from 8:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Purity has a parking space out front set aside for customers to pop-in, and we’ve taken advantage of this, and the retail simplicity of the setup, to allow Oliver to do the milk run for the past couple of weeks: I give him a chit that says “2 litres of 3%” and he runs in to pick it up while I wait in the car.

This past Saturday, as it happens, Tom Cullen himself happened along while I was waiting, and so I was able to have a chat with him and grab a photo.

Stop № 2: Riverview Country Market

From Purity Dairy, it’s an easy drive along Kent Street to Kensington Road, and then down Exhibition Drive to Riverview Country Market.

We’ve been customers of Riverview Country Market for many years; Riverview has found a sweet spot in the marketplace, offering locally-grown produce along with a variety of imported goods. This Saturday we bought lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, apples, and frozen blackberries.

As a special bonus, this Saturday was also The Handpie Company Pop-up at Riverview, so we got to chat with Handpie Sarah and to pick up some of her pies for Sunday supper.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that Sarah brought Pie Man in with her for the pop-up: you can see him in the bottom-right corner of her sign.

It’s also worth mentioning that Riverview acquired a coffee machine last year, and is making some of the best espresso-based drinks in town these days.

Stop № 3: Receiver Coffee & Breadworks

Leaving Riverview Country Market on Riverside Drive, we head back downtown via Water Street to make our last stop, at The Brass Shop.

We’ve also been longtime customers of both Receiver Coffee and Breadworks, and now that they’re under the same roof, roasting coffee and baking bread out of the Brass Shop, it’s doubly convenient. And their presence on the Trail means that we now make a weekly stop for coffee and bread whereas previously we’d been more hit and miss.

The real draw at Breadworks of late has been that baker John Dale has been making olive bread on Saturdays, and has been fine-tuning his recipe every week, getting ever closer to perfection.

By fortunate happenstance, John was in the shop on Saturday when I stopped by for this week’s iteration, so I was able to get a photo of him as well:

In addition to the olive bread, I also picked up a pound of Receiver’s coffee, as we were running low at home.

The Evolving Trail

This route from Purity to Riverview to the Brass Shop is new for us this month, and so we might mix it up a little in the weeks to come. A stop at Kent Street Market is not outside of the realm of possibility, as they fill in some of the local food gaps in our weekly shop that Riverview doesn’t carry. And I’ve been wanting to become a more regular customer of the Royal Pita Bakery out toward Winsloe; it doesn’t seem like a natural candidate until you factor in that the PEI Humane Society Dog Park is out that way too, and when they re-open after construction we might be able to serve Ethan’s needs as well as our own.

Local food advocates have a long list of reasons why shopping for local food is a good idea, and I subscribe to most of them. The visceral motivation for doing so, however, is that I enjoy buying food produced by people I know, people I can chat with, people who I keep in mind when I’m enjoying their wares, and people who, I hope, have me and my family in mind as their plying their trade.

I have never had the least bit of interest in chess. But this video from The New Yorker featuring Garry Kasparov talking about memorable matches gave me insight into what I’m missing.

I have an Amazon Echo at home, and one at the office. Both are set to allow “drop in” calls: I can just say “Alexa, drop in on the Reinventorium” and I get a live microphone into the office, no questions asked.

Tonight I had to get home for supper before my 3D printer was finished printing. I plan to go back to the office when it’s done to shut things down. But how will I know when it’s done?

Turns out that I can hear the printer printing through my Echo-to-Echo connection. So I’ll simply “drop in” from time to time and head over when I can’t hear the printer any more.

When we last talked, I was wondering when my Canada Post online order for stamps might arrive.

Well, yesterday, a full week after I placed the order, I received my first update from Canada Post, in an email from someone named OTC Batch ID CPC Control M.

________________________________________________________________________________
Thank you for your order placed via canadapost.ca!  Here is the information for
the order you placed.  Your order is being shipped and your payment is being
processed.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Order Number: XXXXXXXXXX
Order Date: 2018/01/11
Reference Number: ONLINE STORE
Payment Method: VISA XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX  

Authorization Number: 007955  

Delivery Service: Standard Shipping  

Transaction Type:  Sale   

Shipping Address:
Reinvented Inc
100 Prince ST
Charlottetown PE
C1A 4R4
CA
________________________________________________________________________________

Item (SKU - Description)                        Quantity  Unit Price     Cost
________________________________________________________________________________

111234 - P2018 FROM FAR AND WIDE BOOKLET OF     2.000     25.50          25.50
________________________________________________________________________________
Tracking IDs:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
You can use the Tracking Ids above to track the status of your order yourself by
using http://www.canadapost.ca/cpotools/apps/track/personal/findByTrackNumber?

I fed the “tracking ID” provided and got a more detailed update:

So my order–for stamps, remember, simply for stamps–is set to be delivered 13 days after I placed the order.

And, apparently, a signature will be required to accept the delivery. But I won’t be home. So who knows what will happen.

It boggles the mind that an agency selling its own products, with its own delivery network, cannot turn around an order–for stamps!–in less than 13 days.

Stay tuned.

Coming up in February at Mediamatic Biotoop in Amsterdam, an Abundance Dinner, prompted by a good year for cabbage:

It was a good year for white cabbage. In fact, the affluent cabbage harvest was too much for farmers to process for a fair price. Our current economic system has turned this perfectly eatable and nourishing foods into worthless surplus. The costs to harvest cabbage cannot compete with the low prices demanded by the market. Is it also possible to add value in a different way? During this dinner we celebrate ‘worthless’ white cabbage and re-instate and determine its value together.

File this under “reasons to move to the Netherlands.”