I still haven’t seen the movie My Left Foot. It was released in 1989. It won Oscars. Everybody said it was great.

I should have seen it.

But I haven’t.

Thus it should come as no surprise that I held off COVID for more than two years, choosing only this week to test positive. I am a late adopter.

The first sign that something was up was Tuesday night: I felt tired and achy, and then, through the night, had a constant cycle of sleep-wake-have to pee (a lot). I woke up feeling really hit-by-a-truck achy, with a headache and chills and, most troubling, a noticeable dip in my mental acuity: it felt like my brain had one hand tied behind its back.

Because I’m in the higher-risk “over 50” category, I was eligible for a PCR test, and was able to book one for 9:35 a.m. I had my positive result in less than an hour. It was jarring; not a surprise given my symptoms, but after so many negative rapid and PCR tests over the years, I’d grown used to a perverse feeling of superhero immunity.

Yesterday was a write-off: I slept more than I didn’t, got remote help from L. when I proved mentally unable to arrange food delivery, and cobbled together an upstairs-downstairs isolation plan for the household.

Olivia rapid-tested negative, and so I’m washing my hands with a new tenacity and doing everything I can to stay well away from her. She is texting me frequently with concerns about how the house only has a single shower.

Today my brain is mostly back—enough, at least, to allow me to reflect on yesterday, to undertake basic tasks like ordering grocery delivery, and even do a little work. I still have a headache. And I’m still sleeping a lot. But I’m okay.

I’d been so afraid of catching COVID for so long that, symptoms and risks aside, there is a kind of relief that comes with all this.

I’m in isolation until Tuesday—in my compromised state yesterday it took me forever to decrypt the How long do I isolate? page from Public Health: if there was ever a place where a handy web widget would be especially handy, it’s on that page.

After freaking out and insisting that Olivia needed to isolate as well, today I had a very helpful phone consult with Cindy at Public Health, and she let me know that as long as Olivia and I are staying isolated from each other, and she remains symptom-free and testing negative, Olivia can go about life as normal. That will come as a great relief to her. And to me.

I’m enormously grateful for my privilege: I have a large house, enough food, friends and family to help, and relatively mild symptoms. I even presciently took back a loaned air conditioner so that these warm bed-bound afternoons are comfortable. I am, give or take, Canadian case number 3,935,609; I know that I will fare better, and be more comfortable, than many who came before me.

L. and I stopped by her Uncle Brian’s house this morning to drop a bouquet of peonies. I’ve known Brian for almost 30 years—we collaborated on a project soon after I moved to the Island—and if you’d told me back then that three decades hence I’d be dating his niece, I’d never have believed you. And yet here we are.

That’s the thing about dating, not unique to PEI, but here in its finest, purest form: as two networks of friends and family join, interesting coincidences are more than likely to abound. Some delightful, some awkward, some remarkable.

Before I met L. I’d already met her brother, and heard her sister perform. Her mother shared office space with a non-profit I chaired. Everyone in Queens County knows her father.

As the social-connection edges join the previously disconnected vertices that surround us, our network becomes stronger, more interesting, more bound together.

L. and I have been cycling a lot this week, taking my new Brompton bicycle for shakedown rides. We were on our bikes when we dropped the peonies to Brian. And, Saturday morning, we were on the outskirts of the city for an inaugural ride on the almost-open extension of the Riverside Drive active transportation path that runs from the St. Peters Road megasection, parallel to the bypass, to Brackley Point Road.

I dropped digital breadcrumbs as we cycled, and dutifully added the path extension to OpenStreetMap.

And as a relationship strengthens a community, a new cycle path joins previously disconnected parts of the city, and strengthens the community in its own way.

Edges joining vertices. It’s powerful.

When I use OsmAnd to get a cycle route from École François-Buote to Charlottetown Airport, for example, because the new cycle route is part of OpenStreetMap’s network now, that’s how I get routed: 18 minutes, 6.56 km.

Indeed it’s now possible to ride from Sobeys in Stratford all the way to the airport—and beyond—on a safe, separated, smooth active transportation path.

And when the path is extended next year all the way to Mount Edward Road, and thus the Confederation Trail, the city will grow even more connected.

It’s all rather fantastic. The paths. The uncles.

My new Brompton folding bicycle fits neatly inside the back hatch of my Kia Soul EV. The combination of the two makes for a convenient intermodal pairing, of the “how about I meet you at your place and we cycle from there,” where *there* is far away. 

We spent a delightful afternoon in Hope River at a second-day wedding party for our friends Cian and Mary. L. took this lovely photo of me and Olivia.

I’ve sped up my haircut cadence, popping in for an impromptu cut yesterday morning to Ray’s while walking home with Olivia from a Brighton visit.

I always forget that Ray’s is open on Saturday mornings until 12 noon, so it was nice to be reminded by a happenstance wander-by.

The Apple Reminders app is deeply integrated into my life: I use it for my shopping list, my monthly and yearly accounting, to keep track of bills to be paid, and to manage personal projects.

As a steely own-the-infrastructure enthusiast, until today I’d been using Nextcloud to sync my reminders across devices; after watching this YouTube video, I’ve reverted to iCloud syncing, as doing this unlocks a bunch of features—folders, tags, sub-tasks—that only iCloud supports.

The video also proved helpful for understanding a bunch of reminders features that I wasn’t using, or wasn’t using well.

Arrived by courier this afternoon. A present to myself, because, well, I’ve lived through a lot.

And I’m clearly not nearly nerdy enough yet.

Wood-fired pizza. From a truck. 30 seconds from my house. We thought ice cream-proximity was amazing; this kicks it up a notch.

A window of opportunity opened in space-time to allow L. and I the chance to spend a night by the shore together.

We arrived mid-afternoon, and after some now-expected “oh shit, the fridge stopped working” distractions, and some (very buggy) tomato and dahlia planting, we got our bathing suits on and walked down to the beach.

That we had our suits with us at all was due last minute trips back into our respective houses, and even as we were walking to the beach I think both L. and I thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell that we’d actually go in the water. It’s June. The ice just left the harbour, what, two weeks ago?

When we got to water’s edge we put down our sundries and ran toward the water with carefree abandon. She dove in, head first. I followed.

We then spent a remarkable 20 minutes floating down-harbour with the current. The water was crisp, but not inhospitable. We glowed with the feeling of having defied probability, of having followed each other into the unknown.

Relationships can be subtractive—“I thought that love meant, if I go down, you go down with me.”, as John Kim wrote in Single on Purpose—or they can be additive, a gateway to places inaccessible individually.

L. and I took a leap into the ocean.

Whose idea was it?

I don’t know.

But we couldn’t have gone there alone.

Cutting room floor during wedding prep (not mine!). Words by Christy Moore from The Voyage.