While we’re on the topic of my eyes, here’s a snazzy scan of my left eye that Charlottetown Vision Care sent me after my last eye exam:

My optometrist Dr. Judson helpfully took me on a tour of what information is communicated here during my exam; I was distracted enough by the fact that I was looking at a detailed scan of my eyes with those same eyes themselves that I retained very little of what she told me, save “there’s nothing to worry about here.”

Here’s a selfie I took yesterday, retouched by my father; it’s becoming my new avatar, replacing the one that stood me in good stead for a year:

I’m wearing my new eyeglasses, just arrived Friday from Gaudet Optical in Halifax where I ordered them a couple of weeks ago. I ordered a pair of “computer glasses” at the same time, to use while I’m at my workstation, and I’ve been alternating between the two pairs over the weekend.

As the bifocal prescription in the glasses above — my “everyday” glasses — is someone increased, and the shape of the glasses is round as opposed to rectangular, and as the computer glasses have a completely different lens designed specifically for viewing a computer screen, my brain is exhausted at all the rewiring it’s having to do. I need to take a day and sit in a dark room just to give it a rest.

The “everyday” glasses come from the French company Anne & Valentin; the model is called “On the Wave,” a model that a Japanese website describes like this (in translation):

Full of handmade feeling like carved from stone texture features. A sense of volume that stand out with precisely machined edge, of Anne & Valentine unique to stick to handwork, our eyewear that captures the essence of beauty.

Something gets lost in the translation, but there are elements of truth there.

Something I hadn’t noticed until now — it’s hard to notice things on your eyeglasses when you’re wearing your eyeglasses — is a thin metal strip inlaid into the left arm:

I’ve no idea what the meaning of this is. But I’m the kind of guy who likes having mysterious symbols hidden in his eyeglasses, so it works for me.

Beyond the wonky brain adjustments required, and the secret inlay, the new glasses are something of a bold departure from the “get as innocuous a pair of glasses as possible” approach I’ve taken to eyewear selection in the past. The Gaudet Optical slogan is “fine eyewear from functional to outrageous,” and while these are by no means on the outrageous end of their spectrum – I saw some pretty amazing eyeglasses that hover around or beyond that end — they are by no means wholly functional either. They say something – I’m not sure what – and that’s a completely foreign concept for me. Needless to say, it took some gumption to go out of the house for the first time.

I was sad to learn this morning that architect Zaha Hadid has died.

My first experience of her work was when, in 2010, Oliver and I visited the Phaeno science museum in Wolfsburg that she designed. It’s a remarkable building: somehow it’s both round and jagged, existing on a single level and yet very deep. We’ve visited many, many science museums over the years and Phaeno was, by far and away, my favourite of the lot.

Later that same year we took a family trip to Basel, Switzerland and hopped across the Rhine one afternoon to visit the Vitra furniture factory where Hadid had been commissioned to design the fire station; it became the first of her buildings to be realized.

She was a great architect — perhaps the best of her generation. I’m so sad we won’t get to see what the next 30 years of her career would have produced.

It gives me no end of joy that what The Guardian describes as the “younger wing of the talented fiddling family,” the Chaissons, have stepped up to keep the Rollo Bay Fiddle Festival going. If you’ve never been to the festival, this year would be a good year to start: it’s July 15th to 17th, 2016.

And of course you should also go to the PEI Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival, on the same grounds, from July 1 to 3, 2016; that this festival can live on at the same location is another spin-off of the youth wing doubling down.

We’re a family that uses the built-in Text-to-Speech capabilities of Mac OS X more than most: Catherine, Oliver and I all have different uses for it, but we all have our Macs reading to us every once in a while.

Macs have been able to speak for a long time, and the capability got a lot better when the new “Alex” voice was introduced in 2007 with the release of  Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. And it’s been Alex that we’ve been using for our reading ever since.

It turns out that there’s an even better voice than Alex in recent versions of Mac OS X, a voice called “Samantha” that sounds remarkably similar to the one that Siri uses on iOS devices. Apparently Samantha has been lurking in my Mac for some time, but I didn’t know about her. Here’s how to enable this voice.

Open System Preferences and click on Dictation & Speech:

Click on the Text to Speech tab and then on the list of “system voices”:

From the pop-up list of voices, select Customize…:

And in the pop-up list of customized voices, search for and then check the box beside Samantha:

Finally, select the Samantha system voice (it will take a few minutes to download):

Now, inside almost any Mac app you can select a passage of text and the, on the menu, select Edit > Speech > Start Speaking to hear Samantha read it to you:

But wait, there’s more! You can also have the Mac convert Samantha’s reading of any text into an audio file for later playback: just select the text, then right-click and select Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track:

You’ll see a pop-up asking you to select a voice and a filename:

A few moments later you’ll find a new track in iTunes:

Here’s what that I paragraph I selected sounds like:

Last week in Halifax we stopped in at DeSerres on Barrington Street and I bought a Buntbox, a two-piece (bottom and lid) cardboard box. 

Because they’re sold flat-pack, I’m thinking that I could print on the cover with my letterpress.

Turns out that Buntboxen can be ordered online from the manufacturer in Germany. Their website has a very slick widget for selecting the top and bottom colours that looks like this:

Ordered direct they are 2.36 € each; last week I paid $3.49 for mine. Which happens to be, at today’s exchange rate, exactly the same price. In other words, a good deal.

I love watching TV. I love talking about TV.

Somehow I’ve ended up with a group of friends who, mostly, have interest in neither watching TV nor talking about TV. I need to find a way of fixing that.

In the meantime, here are the shows that are keeping me up late at night these days:

• 11.22.63 — Based on a Stephen King novel and starring James Franco. Scratches my time travel itch and my 1960s nostalgia itch both.
• Billions — Stars the great Paul Giamatti and the equally great Damian Lewis: reason enough to watch. But there’s a great supporting cast and it’s tightly shot and edited with an compelling, pulsing sound track.
• Broad City — Sweary and otherwise profane and too much for some in the household. But I love it.
• Colony — Science fiction from the LOST team and starring Josh Holloway from that series. Aliens invade earth. There’s a shimmering wall around Los Angeles. Hijinks ensue. It’s better than he average cable sci-fi.
• Madam Secretary — There are some strong Téa Leoni feelings, pro and con, in my sibling community (pretty well the only people who will engage me in talk about TV these days); I’m on the pro side. This ain’t no West Wing, and it’s a little too much like The Waltons from time to time, but it’s got enough to keep me watching.
• The A Word — Currently airing on the BBC. Inevitably controversial as it portrays the life of a family where one child is on the autism spectrum, and how can you get that right. It may or may not be an accurate portrayal of life on the spectrum, but the first episode at least suggests it’s a pretty good approximation of life of parents of someone on the autism spectrum.
• The Americans — Just started back up after a long hiatus. More deliberative than I generally like, especially in recent episodes, but I enjoy the 1970s spy nostalgia. Could go either way this season.
• The Blacklist — James Spader. That’s all you need to know. Confusing by times, and dragging a little these days, but still, James Spader.
• The Catch — Mireille Enos (The Killing) and Peter Krause (Sports Night, Six Feet Under) star. It’s got shades of The Thomas Crown Affair. I love a good caper series.
• The Night Manager — Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston star in this BBC series written by John le Carré. Locations are delicious; supporting cast is talented, and Laurie and Hiddleston are a joy to watch.

Filling in the gaps otherwise are Modern Family, Scandal, and The Big Bang Theory.

And I’m waiting for new seasons of Casual, Catastrophe, Homeland, Mozart in the Jungle, Mr. Robot, Narcos, Sherlock, Shipping Wars, The Affair, The Code, The Man in the High Castle, UnREAL and You’re the Worst.

Oh, and that crop of comic book-derived shows that I watched a lot of last year – Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter, Arrow, Flash, Gotham: I’ve completely lost interest in them. To the point where I wonder how I ever had any.

When I was 10 years old, in 1976, I had a radio in my bedroom that, in addition to receiving on the regular AM and FM bands, also picked up the audio of TV broadcasts. And so, perhaps unbeknownst to my parents, I would often go to sleep with the radio under my bed, a single earphone running up to my pillow, listening to whatever TV show it could pick up.

The show I remember most was All’s Fair, a politically-themed sitcom starring Bernadette Peters and Richard Crenna. What’s most remarkable, looking back, is that I never actually saw the show on a television: I only listened to it on the radio: I had no idea what the actors looked like, or where it was set. And, at 10 years old, I likely had little idea of the dynamics of “she’s a liberal, he’s a conservative” relationship at the core of the plot. But I was, nonetheless, a regular listener.

The show only lasted a single season; apparently it wasn’t remarkable enough to others to have made it into syndication or a Netflix revival as other shows of that era have. The only video evidence of the show that survives digitally is the opening credit sequence on YouTube:

As is my habit, here’s a review of what’s hot and exciting in Halifax (see also 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2013).

• We has an excellent sashimi lunch today, inventively prepared, at Alex Oh Sushi & Rolls, just up the street from Pete’s Frootique on Dresden Row. It’s hard to describe the presentation, but it involved twigs. Recommended.
• After finding a depressing selection of eyeglasses frames in Charlottetown — it proved almost impossible to find anything that wasn’t rectangular and brown — I followed the recommendation of my friend BJ and dropped in to Gaudet Optical on Quinpool Road this morning. Personable optician Chris Ross was my guide through their dizzying selection of frames — “from functional to outrageous” is their tagline — and he helped me winnow things down to two pairs, one to house my everyday bifocals and a second pair for computer use. I ended up spending more than twice what I would have paid in Charlottetown, but I’m very pleased with the results, which should be posted to Charlottetown next week. I was guided in my selection by the eyeglasses worn by actor Alex Jennings in The Lady in the Van. And, according to my friend Dave, by Costas Halavrezos. So rectangular and brown are out and round and blue are in. I’ll either be the most fashionable man in Charlottetown, or a cartoon-like laughingstock. Stay tuned.
• The ferry to Dartmouth continues to be one of my favourite activities in the city. For $2.50 you get a 15 minute trip across the harbour and, if you’re lucky like we were, you get to witness shipping traffic up close. On the other side is an outpost of The Wooden Monkey and the original Two If By Sea, so you can eat and drink before heading back.
• The basil rice we had on Sunday night at Thai Ivory Cuisine on Quinpool Road was almost as good as I remember having in Thailand.
• Inkwell is celebrating 5 years in business soon. Who would have thought a shop selling letterpress-printed creations would last? But it did. And that’s a good thing. All credit to Andrea Rahal for her perseverance, especially amidst the chaos in the neighbourhood while the behemoth Nova Centre goes up across the street.
• Last summer Upstreet in Charlottetown had a party for the neighbourhood and it featured a pop-up barbershop operated by Sailor Bup’s from Halifax. Oliver got his sharpest haircut every that day, and so we made sure to book him in for a cut on this visit. We were not disappointed: Cory Murphy gave him an excellent cut on Tuesday afternoon and he’s looking as sharp as ever.
• I hadn’t been in Point Pleasant Park for more than 20 years, but [[Ethan]] wasn’t getting the exercise he needs so we resolved to fix that with an afternoon hike in the sun today. I had no idea what wonders awaited us: there are great gobs of history around every corner in the park, and every significant feature is sign-posted with a QR code that leads to a SoundCloud-hosted audio commentary. Ethan got a long walk and we learned more about batteries (the military kind) than I thought possible.
• We’ve been staying at the Best Western Chocolate Lake, a hotel I’d never heard of until it showed up as an option for using my Airmiles. To picture where it is, imagine that you’re coming into the city from the airport, and you turn too early at the Armdale Rotary, heading up the hill to the right rather than around the bend to Quinpool Road: the hotel is about 3 minutes up that road. The hotel goes to great pains to advertise its dog-friendliness (to the extent that Cocoa, the house dog, lives in the lobby); this turned out to be a mixed blessing for us: Ethan was, indeed, welcome. But so were a lot of other dogs, which meant for more-than-usual stress during morning and evening pees in the back yard, and an incident with a yappy dog in a neighbouring room barking incessantly when it smelled Ethan. All things considered, I think we do better when Ethan’s the only dog in a hotel. Our wing of the hotel, the low-rise one along the side, is rather tired-looking: the rooms are clean and bright, but nothing to write home about. Otherwise, though: the location can’t be beat, it’s minutes to anywhere in town; there’s plenty of free parking (always a $20/night ding at the downtown hotels); the wifi is included and is reliable and fast; and there’s a serviceable breakfast buffet included. And, even with the competing dogs, having a patch of grass along the lakeside was nice.
• The Dutch Licorice tea at Humani-T on South Park Street (just around the corner from Spring Garden Road in the same building as Plovers) was just what we needed after a day of around-and-about. So much so that we stopped by twice this week. We also had supper at their second location, near the Hydrostone; while the downtown location is airy and welcoming, we found the North End one cramped and tatty. But that licorice tea (only available downtown), man that was great.

We’re off back again home tomorrow; it’s been an enjoyable four days here in the big city.

(You can also read Oliver’s own summaries of our days here: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday)

We’ve been Mountain Equipment Coop members for years and years; we’re by no means in the target demographic of rock climbing kayakers, but I’m a big believer in cooperatives, and on the occasion that a new winter hat or bicycle lamp is needed and we’re in Halifax, it’s nice to be able to shop there.

Tonight we raised the bar and participated in a “Backcountry 101” workshop at the store, a basic introduction to topographic maps and their use in nearby places like Kejimkujik. We were a small determined group of 5, led by an intrepid MEC staffer who schooled us in the ways of scale, datum, contour lines and orienteering. It was a quick 60 minute introduction, but we emerged smarter, and bought our own map of Kejimkujik on the way out so as to be able to exercise our new skills.