From a profile in The New Yorker of Mo Willems:

Mounted on a wall at the back of the workspace was a Calder-like sculpture of a metal circle hovering beneath a metal bracket, and looped onto a metal triangle with a rope. Willems said that it was one of his “magnet doodles.” He took up metalwork after Cher suggested that he needed a non-remunerative hobby; soon he had made a grill for the back yard, a window guard for his daughter’s room in the shape of a large metal snake, and a car-size red metal elephant that lives at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, in Amherst. Willems’s magnet doodle recalled the magic of science shows from childhood, but I’d never seen anything quite like it. “I used to feel that when I turned the lights out it collapsed,” he said.

From an interview in The Creative Independent with Michael Stipe:

Was it always important for you to have a creative outlet that was not connected to music making? Something outside the world of R.E.M. that was just for you?

Music was always like a beautiful fog around me. I’m very susceptible to music. Anyone who has been out to dinner with me, been out in public with me, will tell you how distracting music can be for me. It blocks out all other input. In a way, the band blocked out all this input for me for a long time. It made it very hard for me to be able to focus on other things, like reading books.

I was doing all these other things, I was learning all these other skills, either through the band or in conjunction with the work that I was doing with the band. At a certain point, I found myself surrounded by amazing and unemployed film people who wanted to do things. So Jim McCay and I put together a production company and started working with people like Jem Cohen and James Herbert. Through River Phoenix I met all of these other amazing people and eventually we started Single Cell Pictures and started working on films.

I love the phrase “non-remunerative hobby,” for it describes so much of what I spend my time on. I can’t imagine what it would be like to do only one thing, all the time, every day.

Like I did last year, I’ve assembled a list of the things we really enjoyed about this week’s March Break trip to Halifax:

• The best meal of the trip was undoubtedly at EDNA. This place fires on all cylinders: transcendent staff, comfortable room, good music, absolutely fantastic food (the best gnocchi I’ve ever had, hands down). I’m only sorry we waited so long to search it out.
• There’s been a shift in the coffee scene for the first time in a long time: Weird Harbour is now my go-to, replacing the venerable Two If By Sea. Overseen by the serene Dan Weir, the place evokes the good old days of ROW142 here in Charlottetown. Runner up is Narrow Espresso in the South End; the coffee’s not quite as good, but the space is fun and the folks are friendly.
• Yu Yo was our favourite find of the trip: we went twice, and had good tea and great service both times. And bought more stationery than is healthy.
• We really, really enjoyed the new Discovery Centre.
• Fruition, in the Seaport Market, satisfied our need for a vegan eatery after a few days of non-vegan indulgence. It doesn’t get more “why on earth would you need a bun for a veggie burger?” vegan than this; the food was tasty, though, and we’ll be back.
• Ethan’s favourite new thing was the Ardmore Park Service Dog Area; he loved it.
• We stayed at the Hampton Inn Downtown, on Brunswick Street. It’s not the cheapest place to stay, but you can’t beat it for being central, with both the South End and the North End an easy walk, and Quinpool Road and beyond a straight shot up Cogswell. The rooms are clean, the beds comfortable, and the breakfast plentiful and hot.
• Last year it was Oliver’s computer that needed fixing; this year it was mine. The Apple Store rose to the challenge again, and swapped a new battery into my 2011 MacBook Air with only a couple of hours wait (this is, by far and away, the longest any computer has ever lasted me; and it’s still going strong).

Meanwhile, Halifax appears to be continuing to eat itself: the downtown remains in a constant state of construction, with cranes and barriers around every corner. I’ve no idea who the market is for all the new office space and condos that are going up; are these new people, or just a rearrangement of people already there? The net effect of this, at least for the moment, is that Barrington Street, which was the vital heart of the city when I first visited in the 1980s, remains a veritable wasteland, and it’s not clear what the end game is. I suspect little will be settled if we return in a year’s time.

Oliver and I left Halifax just before noon yesterday, stopping for coffee at Narrow Espresso, dog exercise at the Ardmore Service Dog Park, and lunch at Pete’s on the way out of town. There was word of a blizzard hitting Prince Edward Island in the early evening, and we didn’t want to end up in the middle of it, so we made good, if not hurried, time.

Short of some showers on either side of the Cobequid Pass, and some snow in the middle of it, the weather was dry and sunny, with no hint of anything else.

We made good time, dropped the car at Enterprise in Charlottetown around 4:00 p.m., and walked back downtown. The sidewalks and streets were clear, and there was a hint of spring in the air.

By the time I went to bed, around 11:00 p.m., there were a few flurries, but it looked like this blizzard was a phantom.

As such, it came as a complete shock to wake up this morning and find the Island paralyzed by a dump of 20 cm of snow blown around by high winds. Our back deck had more snow on it than it’s had all winter. There were icicles hanging from the front of the house approaching 2 feet long. The screen door at the front had blown open in the night and our vestibule was covered in a dusting of snow.

As I write, approaching noon, the sun is coming out, the snow has stopped, and things are slowly returning to normal.

This was, in short, the freakiest storm of the winter: it came out of nowhere, left buckets of snow, and then moved on before we’d had a chance to notice.

I’ve never hoped for the arrival of spring more.

For as long as Oliver’s been able to walk, a trip to Halifax has meant at trip to the Discovery Centre. In recent years these trips have become less eagerly embraced as the original location on Barrington Street fell into gradual disrepair pending the development of its replacement. We made our last trip to the Barrington location last March Break, and it was indeed the nadir: a tired old collection of rough-around-the-edges exhibits in a space that had seen no upkeep in a long while.

What a difference a year makes: the new location, sharing Nova Scotia Power’s building on Lower Water Street, is as different from the old as you can possibly imagine: it’s a fresh, modern take on the science museum, and over the last two days we’ve spent 8 hours there.

By far and away the highlight of the new facility is the Innovation Lab, which has two really great activities: an electricity-experimenting bench, filled with mix-and-match batteries, light bulbs, motors and switches, and a couple of benches outfitted with LEGO motors and all manner of gears and connectors. Both activities are pleasantly open-ended, and we spent several hours in the lab connecting and experimenting; a large part of our return for a second day today was the opportunity to go back and try things out again.

The lab also features a 3D printing station, but it’s frustratingly static, and behind a protective barrier: just a product demo, really (albeit of an Ultimaker, for which we feel a kind of familial pride). This would have been okay 5 years ago, but these days it would have been wiser to invest in 3D printing technology that would allow visitors to get their hands dirty; as it is the exhibit telegraphs “this is magic technology for special people only” and not “you will soon have more agency over the stuff of your daily life.”

Also in the lab are four PC laptops running Scratch and connected to Makey Makey devices; these seemed to go largely unused, perhaps because to really dig into what’s interesting about this setup takes more time than most are willing to invest during a visit (and, to be honest, it’s not a well that’s very deep to begin with; it may be that the Scratch emperor has no clothes, or at least fewer clothes than adults think).

Next door to the lab is the centre’s inaugural temporary exhibition, on the Science of Rock ‘n Roll. The electronic drum kits there are great fun, and we spent a lot of time at them; the audio mixing stations, which let you experiment with a multi-channel version of a David Bowie track are also quite engaging. They could lose a lot of the window dressing that surrounds, however: the flashing lights and the poster displays and cabinets of old audio gear would be fine if interpreting some strange new kind of music that nobody had ever heard of, but as it is they were simply taking up space (and making it harder to hear).

The second floor features areas devoted to electricity, health and flight. The electricity section provides little more than a brief overview of various generation methods, surrounding several lackluster touch screen-driven activities that failed to capture our attention. There’s so much missed opportunity here, given the centre’s proximity to a Nova Scotia Power facility; I hope they work to improve this in future. The flight section is pointless, and best skipped. The health area, although also a little too touch screen-heavy for our taste, has several compelling activities covering the senses, mental health, and nutrition, and we returned for a second day to re-sample some of them.

My favourite part of the new building is the musical staircase that leads from the second to third floors: as you walk up and down the stairs, sensors to the side detect your motion and play musical notes. It’s delightful. And it’s wonderful just to stand at the bottom and watch the surprise on the faces of unsuspecting visitors encountering it for the first time as they walk down the stairs.

There’s a tiny Dome Theatre off the main floor that’s running a selection of astronomy-related films and demonstrations. We attended one called “Our Place in Space” that was narrated by a live presenter and was quite well done. I appreciate that the centre opted not to go the IMAX route here (as many other science museums have), if only because it allows them to offer tickets for only $2 over regular admission.

The aspect of the new Discovery Centre I find most disquieting is the corporate branding: the “Nova Scotia Power Energy Gallery,” the “Medavie Health Foundation Gallery,” and so on. I don’t believe corporate sponsorship belongs in science education: this should be a completely public endeavour, free from corporate influence and branding. The Discovery Centre isn’t alone in this, alas: during our visit to the Ontario Science Centre several years ago, I was shocked by the degree to which the Centre, largely free of branding when I took a high school semester there 30 years ago, has fallen prey to the same (Pepsi is a “beverage partner” – how does that square?). I don’t envy those that took on the task of getting this new facility built: public money isn’t exactly overflowing these days, and there’s an almost-automatic default to private sponsorship, at least for “matching” dollars; perhaps it’s too late to hope that we can reverse this trend.

That aside, however, we were so happy to have an opportunity to spend a couple of days in the new Discovery Centre. We bought a membership for Oliver (at $50, it’s a bargain, especially when you factor that it includes free admission to ASTC member institutions), and, as they accept the Access2 card, I was admitted free as his companion, so we felt no pressure to cram in as much as we could in one day; going back for day two was a great chance to see things we’d missed and to revisit things we loved. We’ll be back.

Rotten Tomatoes on the film Table 19:

Table 19 is marginally more entertaining than actually sitting with a table full of strangers at a wedding — although most screenings won’t come with an open bar, which makes it a wash.

Perhaps we’ll not see this tonight.

From El Deafo by Cece Bell.

Meags Fitzgerald’s book Photobooth is one of my favourite books, for its prose, style and tone, and because photobooths are things I love dearly.

To my surprise and delight, a cabal including UPEI and the Canada Council is bringing Fitzgerald to Charlottetown at the end of the month: she’s presenting her work at Charlottetown Rural High School on Friday, March 31, 2017 from 1:50 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. It’s open to the public. You should go.

While we’re on the subject of graphic books: Oliver and I were in the (also surprising and delightful) Weird Harbour coffee shop today (thank you, Ben Wedge for the pointer!) and we found a copy of The Best American Comics 2016 on the shelf in front of us. Two pieces stood out: Here, by Richard McGuire, and Blanket Portraits by Geneviève Elverum.

We immediately walked down the hill to Strange Adventures to see if we could purchase copies of same, but, alas, neither was in stock, so I resorted to an Amazon order instead (Blanket Portraits appears only inside Drawn & Quarterly Showcase Book 3 from 2005; for some inexplicable reason, Amazon sold it to me used from a dealer in Germany for 47 cents plus shipping).

Halifax’s Ardmore Park has a fenced-in exercise area that’s set aside just for service dogs:

“It is important hard-working service dogs get a chance to exercise and have some off-leash down time, like any other dog. The creation of this small exercise facility will provide a safe, place for me to take my guide dog without the worry of losing track of her, like I might in a big park. It’s also easy to get here by bus,” said Helen McFadyen, Chair of the municipal Advisory Committee for Persons with Disabilities.

An estimated 75-80 registered, professionally- trained service dogs provide assistance to people with disabilities in the Halifax Regional Municipality. They include; guide dogs for the blind, ‘hearing’ dogs for the Deaf (which alert to bells, knocking, and alarms), seizure alert dogs for people with epilepsy, and ‘special skills’ dogs trained to perform specific tasks for a person according to their disability or medical condition.

What a fantastic idea!

To get access to the service dog park you need to have a registered Halifax service dog: this is easily accomplished, even for temporary visitors, by visiting the Halifax Service Centre in Scotia Square.

It took us about 10 minutes to register: we needed to show proof that Ethan is a service dog (we used Oliver’s Dog Guides ID card for this), and to provide Ethan’s breed, colour, and date of last rabies shot. We were issued–at no cost–a Halifax service dog tag and a credit-card-sized key card that unlocks the magnetic gate at the park. We’re allowed to keep the card between visits, meaning that Ethan will always have a place to run around outside when we’re visiting Halifax.

We visited the park every day of our trip to Halifax, and Ethan absolutely loved it (so much so that he decided to steal Oliver’s glove and run around with it as a demonstration of his freedom; the only way I got the glove back was to trade him for my hat: poodles).

Thank you, Halifax.

Sometimes you open a magazine and find an article about the young lad you once looked after as a two year old, now a successful water buffalo cheese maker.