My longtime friend Catherine Hennessey died in March at the age of 92. 

Catherine was an inveterate collector of things: books, scissors, art, bells, building materials for a house she planned to build herself.

As she aged, contracted, downsized, she moved this archive of interesting things from place to place, home to home, storage locker to storage locker. At one point she occupied 13 lockers in the parking garage at Harbourside, despite being only entitled to one.

In an effort to consolidate, Catherine held a series of sales, starting on her 80th birthday with a silent auction (I ran the online part of this), and continuing on through to a sale that took up most of the old Campbell Lea building.

On Sunday was the posthumous final sale, and Catherine’s friends and familiars gathered on a farm in Emyvale to see what was left. It was an eerie experience seeing things I knew so well—paintings, furniture, photos, bins of scissors—out of their home context. It was made less eerie by the presence of so many people who loved Catherine.

Here’s what I emerged with, a kind of “Museum of Catherine Hennessey” in the same spirit as The Museum of Norm.

Dorchester Street Enameled Sign

Of the type affixed to the side of houses, rather than on a pole on the street. Provenance unknown. Catherine lived on 145 Dorchester Street when I first met her in the early 1990s, in a house she called “Pidwell Lane.”

Playground Sign

This small metal bar, engraved with “Playground,” has “Klassen Bronze Ltd., April/72” written on the back. Klassen Bronze is a Toronto company:

Established in 1950, many years of exceptional service and experience have made Klassen Bronze a world leader in the manufacture, distribution, import and export of letters, numbers and signs.

Leading Box

Labelled as being from The Guardian’s composing room, this is a box designed to hold different lengths of leading (thin lead rules used between lines of metal type). It just so happens that I need a box for my leading, so this was heaven-sent (thank you, Catherine).

Lino Cutters

Why did Catherine have lino cutters? I don’t know. But the box is beautiful, as are the wooden handles. And we’re printmakers.

Island Identity Sign

Catherine worked under the “Island Identity” banner for a time. Others will know more about it; it predated me, I believe. It’s a beautiful hand-painted sign from Custom Signworks.

Cowbell

Catherine loved bells. To own one of hers is an honour.

Dr. Smith Sign

Catherine Hennessey was born Catherine Smith. Her father was Dr. Smith. I love this sign.

Ceramic Pig

Catherine collected pigs. So many that there was a hutch filled with them that sale-goers were invited to choose from. This is the one I chose.

Marble Cutting Board

In an earlier life this piece of marble lined the doctors’ showers at the old Charlottetown Hospital, a fact that delighted Catherine.

Her countertops at 222 Sydney Street were from the same showers; this piece travelled with her to Rankin House at Harbourside.

Tonight I baked molasses bread, from her recipe, and kneaded the dough on it, as she had.

I’m still coming to terms with the role Catherine played in my life (and the role I played in hers). Owning some of her much-loved objects is a small help to that. I will treasure them.

From Eat This Newsletter 305: Hot:

It has been a funny week, with temperatures up in brain-scrambling territory. If this issue is late, which it may well be, that’s because I spent yesterday morning in the cool of a cinema enjoying a glorious restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. If you can, I highly recommend it.

Jeremy’s newsletter, focusing on food and where it comes from, is always a good read. This issue is a particularly good one: mushrooms, coffee, hot sauce—it has it all.

We started Sunday with an almost-20 km cycle over to Stratford, through Fullerton’s Marsh, Mount Herbert, and back home via Bunbury.

It was exposure, yet again, of the Town of Stratford’s committment to active transportation: from getting on the cycle path on Water Street near HMCS Queen Charlotte, we were on a separated pathway all the way to the Mount Herbert Road intersection with the Fullerton’s Marsh Trail, 10 km later.

Once we got to Mount Herbert things got (mildly) hilly; a gentle rain made this slightly easier to manage.

An excellent way to spend the morning of my 25th Father’s Day. Kudos to Lisa for being the catalyst.

A casual mention in conversation with my friend John Flood this afternoon led me to learn that the 1925 telephone directory for the Town of Cochrane, Ontario is digitized and is online.

There are several delightful finds there, including “Don’t Use Telephone During a Thunderstorm” (guidance that followed me into my childhood).

In the listings I see:

• David’s Variety Store, where my mother worked as a teenager (ring 329).
• Lady Minto Hospital, where my mother was born (ring 46).
• Smith, R.M., the furniture store and later funeral home that buried all of my grandparents (ring 239).

What’s remarkable about the R.M. Smith listing is that the funeral business lives on, under the name Irvine & Irvine, and the current telephone number, a century later, is 705-272-3239.

My favourite listing, however, is for my great-grandparents’ house on Fifth Avenue, under Caswell, E.:

And on the cover of the directory there is this section:

My great-grandfather, Edgar Caswell, was both the Fire Chief and the Town Foreman, and so their home telephone number was also the number for both of those. The calls they must have received, at all hours!

(Given Cochrane’s propensity for burning down, it’s ironic that the telephone number for the Fire Chief was 13).

I was at the camper this afternoon. I had one big failure—couldn’t fix the issue with the Dometic fridge’s refusal to recognize that it was powered by electricity—and a couple of successes, including installing a suction cup shower mount.

Bring on the summer. 

From Morton Feldman anecdote about Barnett Newman by William Denton:

When I was living on 19th Street in that building with Barney Newman, who lived upstairs, I remember for about a year I took the phone out. And he came in one day, and he said, “Oh, may I use your phone?” I said, “Well, Barney, it’s disconnected.” He looked at me, and then he looked down at the phone for a long time, and he said to me, “You’re a hero. How is it possible? How did you do it?”

The summer I lived at 107 Hazlitt Street in Peterborough, in my early 20s, I didn’t have a home phone. It was luxurious.

I’ve gotten into the habit of cycling to Stratford with Lisa every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning. She heads to her workout, and I get an hour of work (or sketching, or reading) done.

This started off as a way of training for our Belgian cycle tour, but the habit stuck, and I treat it as a kind of “off-day training” (I work out on Tuesdays and Thursdays). I also really like cycling with Lisa.

When I started, I would cycle to the Starbucks in the Sobeys plaza, but I’ve found myself, partly from conservation of energy, but mostly for preference, redirecting to The Kettle Black’s eastern output.

This space has a storied history: earlier was Now & Zen, then The Lucky Bean. It was sometimes a locus of fun, but never a regular destination.

The Kettle Black, of source, also has a storied history: its bloodline started in 2008 with Ampersand, which, in 2012, begat Youngfolk & The Kettle Black. YFTKB spawned a new branch on Victoria Row (which became ROW142, ancestor of Receiver Coffee), and then, in new hands, branches on Queen Street (still there), Kent Street (now Ada), and now here in Stratford.

The Kettle Black East has much, much better coffee, friendly multi-tasking staff, good music, and a good vibe. It’s also remarkably well-connected for cyclists, abutting both the under-highway Stratford Trail and a cycle path from the west, and so accessible from both the Southport and Bunbury sides of town.

It’s my new Stratford go-to.

Allan Rankin sang:

The Jeffery boys are strong and lean
The best damn workers you’ve ever seen
They’ll cut more wood than a horse can haul
Near six chords before nightfall

This morning, at The 5th Wave, the daughter of one of the Jeffery boys made me a (very good) shaken iced espresso.

I only learned that she was the daughter of one of the Jeffery boys because Robert Pendergast suddenly appeared.

Robert had been looking for the lyrics for Allan’s song, and ended up at my website, just minutes earlier.

Of course he would show up at the coffee shop.

The cosmic nature of the Pendergy never ceases to amaze me. I suspect Allan Rankin played a cosmic role as well.

(Robert has gone again home to pick up bread that will shortly be on sale here; I’m waiting around for a loaf.)

From Tooltrace is kind of amazing by Matthew Haughey:

Tooltrace.ai is pretty amazing, as it uses image tools (perhaps AI, but I bet not really) to figure out the sizes of everything based on a known scale of a piece of US letter paper, then uses light/dark object recognition to figure out the edges of your tools and creates usable 3D printer files within seconds.

I don’t have the organization wherewithal to pull off making custom 3D printed storage solutions, but I the combination of Gridfinity and Tooltrace.ai appeals deeply to my ancestral “trace the outlines of the hammer on the pegboard” instincts.

We switched our home Internet to Purple Cow (referral link), a Nova Scotia-based provider that resells Eastlink at a discount (we have a 100 Mbps connection for $60/month). This after years of beaming the office Bell Fibe connection across Prince Street from my office.

(Purple Cow’s customer support is primarily offered by SMS. So far, over two installs—one at Olivia’s, one here at ours—I’ve had nothing but top-flight response.)

The update of the in-home technology gave me some insight into the number of networked devices in our home (a number so great that I kept the same network SSID and password to avoid updating everything).

For posterity, here’s the device census summary:

• 8 smart lightbulbs (various vendors).
• 5 smart speakers (1 Amazon Echo, 3 Google Homes, 1 Apple HomePod mini).
• 3 iPhones.
• 3 appliances (clothes dryer, heat pump, dehumidifier).
• 3 computers (a Mac mini, a MacBook Air, and a Chromebook).
• 1 video doorbell (a Reolink).
• 1 EV charger (an EVduty).
• 1 Nintendo DS.
• 1 Brother printer.
• 1 thermostat (Google Nest).
• 1 Apple TV.

There are 28 devices in all.