From the “Note to Reader” in East West Street:

The city of Lviv occupies an important place in this story. Through the nineteenth century, it was generally known as Lemberg, located on the eastern outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Soon after World War I, it became part of newly independent Poland, called Lwów, until the outbreak of World War I, when it was occupied by the Soviets, who knew it as Lyov. In July 1941, the Germans unexpectedly conquered the city and made it the capital of Distrikt Galizien in the General Government, known once more as Lemberg. After the Red Army vanquished the Nazis in the summer of 1944, it became part of Ukraine and was called Lviv, the name that is generally used today. Exceptionally, if you fly to the city from Munich, the airport screens identify the destination as Lemberg.

Lemberg, Lviv, Lyov, and Lwów are the same place. The name has changed, as has the composition and nationality of its inhabitants, but the location and the buildings have remained. This is even as the city changed hands, no fewer than eight times in the years between 1914 and 1945.

The city is again at the heart of geopolitics, reports The Economist:

When Russia’s president sends 190,000 troops to invade your country, which he refers to as “historically Russian lands”, one logical place of retreat stands out. That is Lviv, a city that was Polish from 1918 to 1939 and part of other central European states before that. It is a place of baroque buildings, art academies and fiercely anti-Russian sentiment. Its location, in the far west of the country, could make it the last place in Ukraine that Russia tries to conquer. That makes it appealing not just for those fleeing the rest of the country, but also for those eyeing up a potential seat for Ukraine’s government if Vladimir Putin’s forces manage to seize the capital, Kyiv.

Lviv is four hours drive north of my Ukrainian family’s home place in Serafyntsi (Серафинці).

Here’s what morning sounds like in Serafyntsi—and, for that matter, in much of rural Ukraine, when left to its own devices.

My heart is with my family there, and with all peace-loving Ukrainians.

Elderflower Farm sells pear sauce at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market. Why hasn’t pear sauce ascended to apple sauce’s equal? It’s very good.

Last night, fresh off a good evening of silliness, I quickly checked my phone before returning home to find that my house had emailed me. 

“Your heating system failed to heat your home,” said the email. Which came from Google by way of the Nest thermostat that controls one of the three zones our oil-fired boiler has:

Based on your local weather and recent heating system performance, your home should’ve become warmer while the heat was on between 10:09 AM and 6:04 PM on February 24, 2022. Instead, the temperature decreased by 4°C.

I didn’t know my thermostat was paying attention to this degree!

While I was on my way home anyway–where I found the temperature, was, indeed, a chilly 13.5ºC–I take comfort from knowing that my thermostat will by watching out for me when and if I travel farther afield.

The extent of my knowledge of my HVAC system is “when something goes wrong, try pressing the reset button on the burner.” So when I got home, I tried that. The furnace sprang to life. The water temperature gauge started to slowly creep from 100ºC to 200ºC, and eventually the radiators started to receive hot water, and the house slowly warmed up.

The house was still warm in the morning, but when I came home around lunch time it was down to 18ºC, despite the thermostat being set to 20ºC.

I called Kenmac Energy and talked to Mike. Mike said he’d despatch someone, and 10 minutes later there was a knock on the door, and two enterprising technicians went down to the basement to see what was up.

”The nozzle and the oil filter were plugged up,” was the report, once they emerged. 

Heat is back to normal. I am chastened: I should have booked a cleaning last summer, but I didn’t. I’ve got a reminder to book one come July.

This was the scene I was greeted with in my driveway the other afternoon. I have no idea what befell horse and rider, and I fear I may have been involved somehow, without knowing it.

Let’s be careful out there.

An unfortunate pen leak caused me to need to empty my Bolstr bag for a wash. Here’s everything that was in it, the 2022 edition of my “everyday carry” kit:

• two KN95 face-masks, one active and one spare.
• Medium Rare-brand cloth mask
• AirPods Pro
• watercolour set
• water brush
• Kaweco fountain pen
• Baron Fig ballpoint pen
• AirTag
• Apple earbuds
• wallet
• two tubes of lip balm
• USB stick
• car keys
• house and office keys

James A. Reeves’ luggage went missing at Heathrow:

Our luggage went missing somewhere in the depths of Heathrow, so I bought a cheap change of clothes at a discount chain called TK Maxx, which has the same logo and chaotic atmosphere as TJ Maxx in the States. Only one letter was different. This minor tweak captures the uncanny sensation of being on the other side of an ocean, yet everything feels more or less the same now that we’re living in the shadow of an end-game corporate colossus.

From Wikipedia:

TK Maxx is a subsidiary of the American apparel and home goods company TJX Companies based in Framingham, Massachusetts. … The chain uses a slightly different name from that of the TJ Maxx stores in the United States, to avoid confusion with the British retailer T. J. Hughes.

A confounding problem for someone like me who swipe-types thousands of words a week on my iPhone: the keyboard capitalizes words after a certain kind of delete, after a certain kind of autocorrect.

Swipe-typing on my iPhone is already a perplexing mix of inconsistency and getting “orgasm” when I want to type “program.”

Parliament’s Grievous Angel Charlie Angus On Getting from Darkness to the Light.

Sage, bracing words from one of our country’s most eloquent legislators.

During my public school years teachers would frequently write PLO on blackboards as a signal to custodians to not erase what was written, during nightly cleaning—Please Leave On.

That we were all returning home each evening to watch news of the PLO—the Palestinian Liberation Organization—was somehow ignored by everyone but me.

In grade 7 we had an all-school assembly, presented by a farm safety group, to talk about the dangers of the PTO, and getting caught up in it, something the farm kids understood intuitively that was lost on the rest of us.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned it stands for Power Take Off, the spinning gizmo off the end of tractors from which all manner of farm implements can be powered.

Browsing the KitchenAid mixer attachments website today, I realized that their stand mixers have what amounts to a PTO; they call it an attachment hub. You can attach a pasta roller, a sausage maker, or a juice squeezer.

What’s remarkable is that KitchenAid supports “cross-generational attachment compatibility” meaning that attachments from the 1930s can be used on modern mixers.

In an era when phone charger standards change with the season, this is a commendable buttress against obsolescence.

My first coffee in a coffee shop for 2022, a gift of the slight lessening in the march of COVID and the resulting slight loosening of the “stay in your homes and lock your doors.”

Not pictured: one of Angel’s chocolate wafers, which I’d missed.

The coffee—a hand brew by Hai at The Shed—was fantastic.