I’m forever looking for ways to make finding library books easier, and recently I found something that I use almost every day, a “shortcut” for iOS and macOS that let’s me easily search the PEI Public Library Service catalogue.

If you have a Mac or an iPhone, and some basic familiarity with “Shortcuts,” you can download the shortcut here.

In operation on the Mac, it looks like this:

I’m simply clicking “Search Library” in the dock, getting prompted for a book title, and the library catalogue opens in Safari with a search for that book.

In the Shortcuts app it looks like this:

Some cool things about this, part of the magic that Shortcuts brings:

• It works equally well on my iPhone as on my MacBook Air.
• It works with Siri: I can say “Hey Siri, Search Library” and I’ll get prompted for a book title, which I can speak, and the search will open in my browser.
• One my iPhone, it also works as a “Share Sheet” item meaning that I can highlight a book title, click “Share” and select “Search Library” and the library catalogue search will open, like this:

Shortcuts isn’t quite “HyperCard for the 2020s,” but it’s a pretty amazing piece of kit to have built into all the Apple things.

I was writing to my Dutch friend Frank this morning about his post Renewal.

Reflecting on my own move away from paid work 18 months ago, I realized that work, for decades, had been my all-powerful trump card.

If I was bored, or distracted, or annoyed; if I needed time to myself, or wanted to get out of doing something, “I’ve got some work to do” was the reason that could never be questioned.

It was a superpower that, along with income and colleagues, I gave up when I stopped working. A superpower I was never until now so conscious of.

What I need to learn to do instead is how to set boundaries, stake out time and space for myself.

I’m not good at that: I’ve never had to be.

I find myself taking perverse comfort in work-like activities—paying bills, maintaining this website, filing taxes—because they allow be a small measure of that trump card.

Realizing that I can allow myself the luxury of reading all day without needing a database memory issue to get me there is something I’m ever so slowly easing myself into. 

John Dale was right: once you start baking with sourdough, it’s hard to stop. This morning we celebrated Lisa for Stepmother’s Day with sourdough cinnamon rolls. 

I missed the COVID sourdough wave, but recent developments have welcomed me in, late to the party.

First, Dave Atkinson wrote, in his weekly email newsletter, about his sourdough revelation:

Modern bread is made with refined wheat. A good chunk of the grain has been discarded. And it’s made with instant yeast. That’s not how we made bread for the first 99.99% of its history. Before a hundred years ago, it you ate bread, it was the whole grain. More importantly, it was made through fermentation. It was made with sourdough.

It turns out, a lot of people with gluten insensitivity can eat sourdough bread. I had somehow not heard this. The act of slow fermenting changes the structure of gluten making it easier to digest.

Next, Jeremy Cherfas recalled the COVID sourdough wave, and linked to a helpful earlier post, with a lot of helpful comments, about sourdough starter.

Finally, as if the above was queuing me up for action, my sister-in-law Karen offered me some sourdough starter (née her chiropractor’s sourdough starter), which was enough to push me over the edge.

I started out slowly, making a couple of loaves of bread, graduated to pizza dough last week, and over the last 24 hours I made bagels. Bagels that, if I don’t say so myself, are rather amazing.

Here’s the process in photos.

I used this recipe, which called for 12 hours of letting the dough rise, so, after mixing everything together in a stand-up mixer with the dough hook, I left the dough in a metal bowl, covered, overnight. When I woke up this morning, it had doubled in size:

I divided the dough into eight pieces…

…and shaped the pieces into balls, and then poked a hole into each one, and shaped them into bagels:

I let the bagels rise, covered, for another hour:

After this second rise, I boiled the bagels, four at a time, two minutes per side:

After giving them a little time to cool down, I baked the bagels on parchment paper in a 425ºF oven for 25 minutes. The emerged golden brown:

Once the bagels had cooled, I sliced them up for lunch. They had a pleasantly chewy crust, and a pleasantly bagel-like interior:

Needless to say, we enjoyed sandwiches on bagels for lunch:

One of the items on the wall at the Victoria Schoolhouse that catches my eye, every week as we go there for acting class, is a list of all the teachers who taught at the school, over the 101 years from 1872 to 1973:

For no other reason that “somebody is going to be looking for this list at some point in the future,” I’ve transcribed the list, and I’m pasting it here for posterity.

(If you ever have a chance to pop into the school—it’s a community hall now, and home to the village office—it’s worth poking your head into the main hall to look at the collection of artifacts related to the school’s past.)

I’ve also produced a CSV of the same information, as well as another CSV that lists each teacher, sorted alphabetically, and the period(s) they served.

From a list of ten Instructions for Myself by James A. Reeves, No. 10 is:

Artificial intelligence cannot make cool shit, but it can help me learn how to make cool shit.

Brilliant.

I lied: there was one more print shop upgrade today. I installed my father’s Boston KS pencil sharpener. See also The Museum of Norm.

Our final print shop upgrade of the weekend: we hung a metal rack, inherited from architect Bill Chandler, and formerly used to display material samples, on the wall, with an eye to using it to displaying “tiny things that can be hung from pegs.”

Those in the photo are some tests.

I feel like I’ve become mid-level accomplished at drilling into concrete (key: patience).

Another studio update today: we hung a print by Martin Rutte on the wall behind the press. An excellent wellspring for creative inspiration.  

We made two nice updates to the print shop today.

First, we recycled a shelf that had outlived its usefulness at home to become printmaking ink storage. This required, among other things, drilling into concrete mortar (slow, dusty).

Second, we came up with a way of displaying our inventory of prints for a planned series of pop-up sales. We ended up using vinyl gutters for this, which was inexpensive ($22, all-in) and easy to install.

Stay tuned for announcements of our pop-ups, where you’ll get to see both in person.