From Why I Cook, by Tom Colicchio:

Elizabeth is an industrial town nestled into northern New Jersey’s historic manufacturing belt. It’s best known for its shipping container port (one of the eastern seaboard’s largest), the titanic Singer Sewing Machine plant (where Grandpa Felix worked), and (as Lori reminds me) for having produced that totem of young-adult fiction, Judy Blume, who went to school with my mom. Rumor was that Elizabeth had once been lovely, but by the 1970s there were few parks and green spaces, unless you counted the thatch of trees by the Elizabeth River that also grew old tires and retired refrigerators. Maybe that’s why almost every Italian family I knew had a grandparent like mine, patiently coaxing vegetables and plants from small backyard patches of concrete, following the rhythms of their home country. Is that what has me out weeding in the mornings? Is it in my DNA?

This certainly describes my father’s parents, who cultivated a thriving garden in the yard of their house at 97 Mary Street in Brantford, Ontario.

They would have inherited this from my Ukrainian and Croatian great-grandparents, and doubtless didn’t give it a second thought: it’s what you did  

If memory serves, it was more a garden they tended in parallel rather than collaboratively, but tend it they did, and the produce they harvested from that postage stamp-sized plot was awe-inspiring.

Here’s a photo of my grandmother holding my 2½ month old father, standing beside my Baba in her garden, in Fort William, Ontario in 1937:

And here’s a photo, one I’ve posted before, from the Brantford Expositor newspaper, of my grandfather in that Brantford garden, holding prized beans:

Harry Holman recently published an account of a wintertime journey from Charlottetown to Halifax in 1867, over two posts: one, two.

While the tale of the journey across the Northumberland Strait is itself harrowing, Harry reminds us that travellers first had to get from Charlottetown to Cape Traverse:

The road was utterly chocked with snow, in many places twelve feet deep, but my driver was an old stager at the work and knew well how to find a track even when there was no trace of a sleigh having passed over the ground before us. We had a splendid horse who worked as if he was aware that the journey had to be done, and that the better he stuck to it the sooner his night’s rest would come. The whole distance is about thirty-four miles by the road, but the devious route we had to follow made the distance nearly half as far again.

About seven o’clock we stopped for supper at a very decent house, which I will call, by courtesy, an inn. Here was good and substantial refreshment for man and beast.

I was pleased to see my driver showed himself deserving of the excellent horse he had, by the great care he bestowed on him ere he thought of even entering the house.

After an hour’s rest and having laid in a good source of caloric, we started in again. The cold was now intense. Notwithstanding that I was buried in buffalo robes. I felt as if dressed in muslin.

I shall never again complain about the interminably long 45 minute drive to Borden-Carleton, and the 13 minute drive over Confederation Bridge, by which we now complete the same voyage. 

I had an appointment with my nurse practitioner at 9:15 a.m today, during which I had some blood drawn to allow them to run some tests.

I got a call back from her office at 1:45 p.m. with the results (everything in range).

Clearly our health care system has significant issues. But it’s also clear that, at least sometimes, it works amazingly smoothly and efficiently. 

Looking for the extension ladder to help deal with ice dams on the back roof. It wasn’t there. I’m not actually sure we own an an extension ladder. But it was a nice snowshoe. 

See also this summertime photo of the same view. 

The Kimberly-Clark “Professional” paper towel dispenser—product name “ICON Rolled Towel Dispenser”—is a thing of functional beauty. 

Rare in the paper-towel dispensing machine world, it just works. 

There’s no need to frantically wave hands in just the right spot, no need to crank an emergency backup crank, no need to pull out paper towel with wet hands (which always causes the towel to disintegrate). You just rip off a piece of paper towel and a new one rolls out to replace it:

In Charlottetown I’ve seen them at Papa Joe’s and Tekila; weird to say, but I’m more inclined to eat at places that have them.

Our printshop has ended up, for reasons neither Lisa nor I can remember, with an uncommon amount of yellow ink. 

Some of this yellow in is Akua Diarylide Yellow, which is a rich, lovely yellow that cries out to be used.

I took advantage of this yellow-glut yesterday, carving a lino block of an abstract sun into Japanese vinyl, and printing 50 copies to become part of a larger date book project I’m working on:

I’ve just finished reading the post reclaiming our emotional sovereignty: repairing the cultural poverty that currently meets disorganised states, by Jason Field. 

It is not a light read; it’s a dense 20,472 words masterwork that, despite the foreign terrain for me, prompted more ah-ha moments than anything I’ve read in recent memory.

If I had to select a single paragraph that explains why, it’s this one:

In this renewed ability to hold ourselves, the logical next step comes to put down some of the bags that we have picked up along the way. This can be scary on the first presentation. Knowing how heavy they have been in the past, we must prevent ourselves from projecting one data point into the future indefinitely.

Oftentimes, we think we can pretend something hasn’t happened, I’ve tried that for decades, but the body knows, and our day is not ours (lost sovereignty) because of it. Until we face what was previously too much, we will have great difficulties calling ourselves sovereign over our experience, and our body is here to help us through it too.

So much of my own work in recent years has me return to the statement “I’m not the kind of person who…,” and surely that’s exactly what “projecting one data point into the future indefinitely” is all about.

I remember a visit to a psychologist a decade ago in front of whom I, genuinely, honestly, asked “I’m wondering if it’s possible that I’m feeling things that I’m not aware of.” 

Looking back at that now, I realize how naive I was, how almost everything about me was working hard to “pretend something hasn’t happened,” and how, in the years before and since, my body has been trying to tell me this.

Later, Field writes:

We can’t (and shouldn’t) pretend disempowering events never happened.

But we can commit to re-building ourselves and, in doing so, become the agent of our own rescue.

His post is a compelling treatise on how to start doing that.

It’s not an easy read. It took me three days. But it was a worthwhile effort.

Ten years ago, at pei.consuming.ca, I released a web app that displayed the current Prince Edward Island electricity load, and the proportion of that load being met by wind energy generation.

Ten years later, the app is still there, recently updated to include generation from local solar and diesel plants, and energy imported by submarine cable.

What once looked like this:

Now looks like this:

The app pulls data from the Province of PEI, and from the New Brunswick System Operator, and is updated every 15 minutes.

I was proud to play a small role in this week’s episode of the CBC Radio This is PEI podcast. 

I am, it seems, the canonical source of the audio and video of the Peter Pan Burger Basket $1.99 television commercial directed by my friend Dave Moses, and featuring a cast of Charlottetown legends. 

The producers reached out to me when they couldn’t find it elsewhere, and I found a copy squirrelled away in my archives.

It’s a great podcast episode, and has me wanting a Peter Pan Burger Basket something fierce.

Remember that cold I alluded to back in early January, the one I claimed had “broken”? 

Well, 24 days later, illness holds onto me with its steely claws. Sore throat. Cough. Congestion. An evolving variant of what hit me earlier.

The earliest I could get an appointment with the nurse practitioner or doctor in my “medical home” was February 24, and I couldn’t wait that long: I’m not sleeping, I’m tired, and having a constant cough is debilitating.

So I decided to chance making an online appointment at the Boardwalk Clinic with SkipTheWaitingRoom.com, something I’d tried to do several illnesses ago, but had always failed at because all available appointments disappeared mere minutes after the 7:00 a.m. opening bell.

Today I was ready: at 6:59 a.m. 

I started clicking “reload” on the appointment page.

Reload. Reload. Reload.

Just as 7:00 a.m. struck, a booking link appeared: I was, in the blink of an eye, already assigned booking slot #13.

From there the process was flawless: I filled in my personal information, gave them my travel time to the clinic, confirmed my appointment via SMS, and was given access to a status page that showed me a constantly updated window when I could expect to receive an SMS to leave home.

I got the text to leave at 9:38 a.m., I arrived at the clinic at 9:45 a.m., got ushered to an examination room at 10:08 a.m., and saw a doctor about 5 minutes after that.

Diagnosis: my viral infection of yore inspired a bacterial sinus infection. Kindly Dr. Beck prescribed me antibiotics for that (“Amoxicillin/Clavulanic Acid”), I got the prescription filled and (I hope) I’m on the road to recovery.