Some tiny updates on our upcoming trip to Europe:

• This is the first time I’ll be travelling across an international border with Oliver without Catherine, so we need a Consent Letter, signed by Catherine and notarized by a lawyer. Campbell Lea comes to our rescue here.
• We’ll be in Nuremberg for two nights. I’ve never been to Nuremberg, but the allure of Playmobil is too strong to resist.
• Oliver is very excited about meeting Til in Vienna. But mostly because of the Count von Count overtones.
• Although it’s sometimes a little confusing, I’ve been finding bahn.de is a good general-purpose site for exploring rail timetables and fares. And I used it to pre-book our Nuremberg to Paris train.
• We’re spending the night of March 22 in Paris at Standard Design Hotel. We’ll be in Paris for about 24 hours. That hardly seems like enough time.
• We’re taking the Eurostar through the Chunnel to get from Paris to London.
• On our last night in Europe before flying home we’re overnight at YOTEL, right at Heathrow. I’m intrigued both by its microscopicness, and also by the pleasant thought of not having to battle our way to the airport from elsewhere for an 11:00 a.m. flight.

I love this video, shot from a sushi conveyor belt in Japan. Thanks to Til for the pointer.

I realize it’s probably been a long time since you walked down a sidewalk. And it’s probably been longer still since you walked down a sidewalk on a slushy and/or rainy day. But surely your basic physics knowledge should inform you that when you drive your automobile into a slushy and/or water-filled hollow at the side of the road it will cause the slush and/or water to be projected onto the sidewalk that abuts the road and, if there are pedestrians — me, for example — walking down that sidewalk, then those pedestrians will become covered in slush and/or water.

I think I speak for all of my fellow pedestrians when I beseech you to use more care on days like today as you make your way around town: we will be forever in your debt.

The East Coast Music Awards returned to CBC Television this year, with the four East Coast provinces picking up the tab through tourism advertising. How is this year’s tourism marketing line-up?

• Newfoundland and Labrador is back with witty, compelling, colour-saturated, ads that have me thinking we should be going there soon.
• Nova Scotia has lost the Bruce Guthro Come to Life jingle, which is a shame, but they still do a pretty good job on the stunning scenic shots.
• New Brunswick didn’t market tourism at all, but choose simply to run those annoying “I moved back home because New Brunswick is so awesome” commercials make me want to avoid the province at all costs.
• Prince Edward Island ran dreadful Canada Games-focused ads that looked like they were produced by the Grade 6 “Introduction to iMovie” class. It was not this province’s finest marketing hour.

We watched the awards broadcast on CBC’s Bold digital channel, which limited its coverage to just an hour, and cut to a commercial halfway through Meaghan Blanchard’s performance and then just disappeared, replaced by an opera broadcast. Weird.

So it’s the deadline date for filing last year’s corporate payroll remittance information — the T4 Summary — to Revenue Canada. Fortunately they make this easy by providing a web-based gateway for filing, and they sent me out a letter with a special “web access code” in January (red arrow emphasis mine):

Now you might think that, given the fact that T4 appears on this letter six times, that the “web access code” on the letter would be the one that I would use to file my T4 summary. But it’s not:

I tried several times to get the code to work on their T4 sign-in page, but to no avail. Finally in frustration I called their support line (helpfully open on a Sunday afternoon) only to be told that this letter was giving me a “web access code” to file my T5, not my T4.

Was I supposed to be able to figure that out somehow on my own?

We hear so often about how our healthcare system is falling apart, it’s important to report on instances where it actually works pretty well. For the last week my right ear has felt a little funky, and today it started to feel even funkier and, although I’ve never had an ear infection before, it felt sort of what I thought an ear infection might feel like.

So I called up the Friendly Pharmacy to see if their walk-in clinic was open today. It was, and the person on the phone said it was “very light today.” So I called myself a cab and was there in 10 minutes.

There was nobody else in the waiting room, and the clerk took my details and showed me right into an exam room. Five minutes later the doctor was looking in my ears, and five minutes after that I was at the pharmacy counter filling a prescription for Nasonex which, the doctor says, should clear up my not-too-infected-yet ear.

I was back in a cab and at home within an hour of this all starting.

Speaking of Rob MacDonald, Island Eye for the From Away Guy is a classic Sketch-22 video made more interesting still by the opportunity to see Matt Rainnie before he made the transition from a Jack Black body to an Adrian Brody body (giving hope to all we schlumpy men).

Good news from Rob MacDonald as the Eastern School District consultation process marches on.

Reading aloud chapter 17 of The Prophet of Yonwood to Oliver tonight I realized that my reading-aloud-to-children voice is patterned on Stuart McLean’s storytelling style. It was all rather disconcerting. Try listening to this Vinyl Café episode to get an idea of what I’m talking about. It’s all about the breathing.

I was up on the University of PEI campus this morning for my regular philosophy with a dash of fitness, and then adjourned from those pursuits to share lunch with Don Moses, chief engineer of the Island Lives project.

Having experienced the cafeterias in the Student Centre and in the Vet College already, I insisted that we eat at the Wanda Wyatt Dining Hall. Although Don hadn’t been there before, he insisted that it was a clone of the other cafeterias, and that there’d be nothing new to see there. He was wrong.

While the other cafeterias are standard old “order from the menu, pay for what you order” style, the Wanda Wyatt is a full-on “meal plan”-style dining hall: you pay one price — $10.80 with tax — and then go to town, ordering anything and everything you’d like: salad, soup, main, dessert, coffee, and so on.

And the food wasn’t bad: I had a tasty pasta salad with raisins, apples and feta cheese to start, followed by a passable apple-lentil curry and then a chocolate square and a dish of mandarin oranges for dessert.

I shall return.