Morgan Mullin wrote a lovely piece about Greco pizza in The Coast this week, In praise of Greco, the greatest bad pizza around; in part;

The appeal of Greco pizza—the only good thing to ever come out of Moncton, NB, where the chain began in 1977—would be easy to dismiss as an elaborate affectation, a put-on reverse-snobbery against the many fine restaurants in the city that prize elaborate technique, atmosphere and sustainably sourced local ingredients. (You will find none of these things in a Greco.)

But this isn’t an inverted, anti-Bon Appetit thing. It’s much simpler. For me, growing up in northern New Brunswick, the industrial, square party pizzas from Greco were the $5 hot lunch that heralded the end of the school week. They were the staple fare of birthdays and slumber parties, and the sweet, neon sauce is smeared on the corners of many childhood memories of mine.

This morning’s Citizens’ Alliance Newsletter included Gary Schneider’s comments from this weekend’s post-Fiona ”Tree Tribute” in Bonshaw; in part:

I wish I had something really inspiring to say, but like all of you, I’m heartbroken by the damage Fiona inflicted on our beautiful trees.

I’m heartbroken for all the wildlife that may not have nesting habitat or  source of food for the foreseeable future.  I’m saddened when I think of not only ourselves, but our children and grandchildren, not having the pleasure of spending time in the wonderful woodlands.  The damage has been traumatic.  In many many ways, we have lost old friends.  There are trees down at Macphail — big pines, a huge hemlock, — that have stood beside me for decades.  I was sure they would outlive me.

Yet when I step back and try to make some sense of this madness, I have to admit that our forests were already in bad shape.  Though we have trees in the Wabanaki / Acadian Forest that can live up to 450 years old, before Fiona our trees averaged about 50 years — a result of overharvesting and land clearance.

Our practices led to the many shallowly rooted White Spruce stands, Trembling Aspen, White Birch; and not enough Red Oak, Sugar Maple, Yellow Birch and Red Spruce.

Gary is, for many of us, our diplomatic representative to the kingdom of the trees, so what he says bears careful listening to.

In She’s Letting Go (Again) Lisa writes eloquently about her decision to go exploring.

But it’s only by entering that uncertainty that I’ve been able to find a new path: learning to surrender, to do small experiments, to sometimes be played by life instead of conducting it. It’s been messy as I learned to trust myself. And while experience has shown me I’m trustworthy, I still have plenty of self-doubt each time I decide to leap.

“What kind of person would be right for Peter?”, one might once have asked.

“An explorer!” a sage might have replied.

What a joy it is to be alongside for the leap and what follows.

Stephen Fearing, in February, on pulling his catalog from Spotify:

What a relief! After years of holding my nose from the stench of @spotify. I’m taking down the music that I own. We must all pick our battles and I’m a very small player, but it feels good to take a stand alongside those I admire.

You can now find much of his music on Bandcamp.

I interviewed Stephen for the radio when I was 22 and he was 25. He was an up and coming folk musician with a new album; I was a squeaky community radio volunteer who’d never interviewed anyone before. We survived it. And we’re both still here.

Red Lights in the Rain.

Our Haviland Club improv troupe moved north to the Irish Cultural Centre tonight for a real show on a real stage with a real audience (of friends and family). And thus our private silliness became public silliness. And public silliness, I gotta tell you, is a whole different kind of silliness.

Much like writing a blog in public is different from writing a journal in private, performing on a stage with an audience is very different from practicing improv in the relative safety of the rehearsal hall. It’s both more terrifying—you can’t stop, the show must forge on no matter what—and more thrilling—you can’t stop, the show must forge on no matter what. Add to this that we are fledglings, who’ve only played together half a dozen nights, and had only ever done a full “Harold” from start to end a couple of times, and it was a risky high-wire act.

As with all improv, there were moment of sheer delight, moments when everybody suddenly forgot the rules and things went off the rails, and a lot of going way way out of the everyday comfort zone for all of us.

And in that shared vulnerability is where the real joy of improv lies: we live and die on the stage together. We make each other shine. We trade gifts. Our divine moments and our fuck-ups are shared equally. 

The show ended two hours ago and I’m still buzzing.

Me and Patrick Trainor walking with our chests way out, part of the introduction to the show. (Photo by Mike Rukavina)

The entire improv troupe on stage: Bridget, Berni, Me, Ann, Patrick, Sue, Pam and June. (Photo by Laurie Murphy)

There are some really interesting things happening in lightbulbs these days, and if you haven’t taken a look at lightbulbs lately, it’s time.

Last month I bought a Merkury Smart Wi-Fi LED Bulb Dimmable White at Walmart for $10 and put it in the front vestibule. Because we already have a Ring doorbell there, and the Alexa app can respond to sensors in the doorbell, I’m able to have the light come on when anyone enters the vestibule, and then off again after 2 minutes of inactivity.

The bulb is also dimmable via apps or voice speakers, so I can “Hey Google, set the vestibule light 30%,” which was nice when we had a vestibule dinner party.

Today at Home Depot I bought a Philips WiZ LED bulb for $20 that has IoT integration, and changes colours on command. So, variously, “Hey Google, change the lamp colour to blue” (…red …green):

What’s technologically interesting about these bulbs is their low price, relative to an earlier generation of IoT bulbs, their ease of setup, and, most of all, how it’s now possible to squeeze enough smarts into the base of a lightbulb for it to be communicated with via Bluetooth and wifi.

The inconvenient thing is that every brand of bulbs comes with its own app that needs installing on my Phone to support setup and integration with speakers and other devices: at present I have—let’s count… Apple Home, Google Nest, Google Home, Wemo, LG ThinQ, genie, Amazon Alexa, Ring, and WiZ—9 apps in total in the “Home” folder on my phone, each controlling a different but overlapping set of devices. Setup of these devices has gotten much much easier with every new generation, but the requirement for each brand to have its own app doesn’t scale much further.

As a result of this foolishness, my home wifi network presently has 30 devices connected to it, ranging from my EV charger to my laptop to my phone to my electricity meter reader.

What a great time to be alive ;-)

Why is it that my Google Home speaker can understand “Meh Groovle” and “Fey Rupal” from 100 feet away, and spring instantly to life, but its reaction to “Hey Google, stop,” when I want it to stop playing something, is to completely ignore me repeatedly.

Ann Cakes hit it out of the park for Olivia’s second birthday party tonight: their tiramisu cake was delicious and expertly-crafted.

Many years ago, in a bid to carve out a place for myself at 100 Prince Street, and to lay down some of my own aesthetic tracks, I painted one of our three bedrooms orange.

Or red. Or red-orange. Or orange-red.

Whatever the colour’s name, it was bright and brash and kind of disturbing. For a while the room was dubbed “the hell room” for the feeling it inspired.

Here’s what the Hell Room looked like a few days ago:

After painting the room I acquired a smart IKEA lounger and a reading lamp. The plan was that I would retire to this peaceful oasis of calm and finally do all that reading I never seemed to be able to find time or space for.

That didn’t work out.

Orange-red-orange-hellscape turned out to not be a colour palette conducive to calm reflection. The IKEA chair was uncomfortable, and hit my reading-elbows in an uncomfortable way. The reading lamp, for reasons unknown, maintained a temperature of 500 degrees, and was most unappealing to be near.

And while all those things were true, ultimately the problem I was trying to solve—doing something to make myself feel more at home in this house—was a larger project needing broader solutions, not all of them related to paint and furniture.

This became moot a few years later when the room evolved to become a storage closet for our mountains of stuff, and then, a few years after that, when Catherine moved into the room during her cancer treatment. The red-orange-red that was supposed to calm me became a conversation starter and aesthetic irritant to all who encountered it.

Here’s what the room looks like this morning:

Don and Derek from Colonial Painters were in this week for a second round of painting—they painted the lower floor and the upstairs hallway this summer—and the result is a room transformed. 

Paint is powerful.

The relaunched 511 website for Prince Edward Island is a cavalcade of useful features, chief among which is that you can define a route, like your commute to and from work, and then set up alerts to receive by email and/or SMS, when there are delays, closures, construction, or adverse weather conditions along that route.

Here, for example, is the setup for a notification for my drive from home to Stars for Life every Monday and Thursday: