I make this post only because I’m intrigued that as I get up early (6:00 a.m.) to catch the train from Albenga to Genoa, it’s still only 9:00 p.m. yesterday in California. Surely this time difference could be used to predict the future?

Yesterday was the “mandatory olive harvest recovery day.” Having been out of the manual labour-force for so long, I’d forgotten that one of the side-effects of manual labour is the post-labouring muscle creaking. So I spent much of the day laying about.

While the vrai Collettiani went off to have their annual meeting, I had the rainy village all to myself. After lunch I realized that my food supplies were again running low and if was to escape the fate of eating moldy broccoli for supper, I needed to run into Albenga for a refill. Fortunately by the time I set out the worst of the rain had subsided, and it was an easy drive; indeed now that I’ve done it three or four times, the “Italian roundabout experience” seems almost natural.

During December the COOP is open all day on Sundays, and it was bustling. From the various special flowers on offer, and “feste” signs around the town, I think yesterday was either a holiday, or perhaps simply a step on the road to Christmas.

It being Sunday and rainy, I toyed with the idea of going to the movies after shopping: Albenga is well-outfitted with cinemas, and there’s a 6-screen multiplex on the way back to [[Colletta]]. Alas although I was primed for La mia super ex-ragazza dubbed in Italian it was not meant to be: everyone else in the Albenga region decided that a rainy Sunday was a good day to go to the movies too, and as I drove by it was obvious that there wasn’t a parking place within 2 miles of the theatre. Another time.

So I reconciled myself to some late-nite Javascript hacking and Harper’s reading instead.

Woke up this morning with my muscles back in form and to a beautiful sunny day. After a morning cappuccino and a walk around the village, I’m back in the e-dungeon at work. If I get accomplished what I hope to get accomplished today, I’m thinking of taking the train into Genoa tomorrow for a brief respite from the “working” part of the “working vacation.”

Today was the close of the Festival dell Olio di Colletta di Castelbianco. We began with a final sweep of the parking lot olive trees, and a few of those up in the hills above the church. Then at 1:00 p.m. we gathered at Frantoio da Olive Armando Garello up the road in Nasino, across the street from Ristorante Costa where we ate last night.

It was at Garello’s mill where the olives would be magically turned into olive oil. But first, we ate. The production room was temporarily converted into a dining hall: long tables were set out, and a variety of foods were laid out on paper plates (what exactly the foods were I cannot tell you, but they were all very tasty, albeit more deep-fried than fresh). There was plenty of wine, cake and coffee for dessert, more wine, and then, after two hours, the tables were cleared away and the milling began.

Rather than trying to describe the process by which olives became olive oil, I made a movie:

Part two of today’s portion of the Festival dell’Olio di Colletta di Castelbianco agenda began at 8:30 p.m. with a general rendezvous in the piazza in preparation for a convoy to Ristorante Costa. I was kindly offered a ride by Jack from California, and so Jack and his wife and daughter and I piled into his van. On our way out of the parking lot, Francesco (he of the bon ami from this morning) shouted after us: he had, it seems, been accidentally left in the parking lot by his wife (or perhaps it wasn’t an accident?). In any case, Francesco piled in too, and 10 minutes later we all piled out in front of the restaurant.

By dinner time the size of the traveling olive picking roadshow had grown much larger, as predicted, and we consumed all available tables and chairs, which in Ristoranta Costa means both sides of a very large old building (creata nel 1913).

By fortunate coincidence we entered the restaurant just as the family of il mio patrono, the “very nice Italian man” of this morning, was arranging seating for his daughter (or perhaps arranging seating for me), and I was ushered into a place of privilege right beside her. Across the table was Francesco’s wife, on the other side of me was an Italian rice merchant who spoke passable French, kitty corner was Jane from London (originally from Boston) and Jack and his family shored up the end of the table.

Because of my position, I was in the vortex of a swirling mass of English and Italian, sometimes alternating in the same sentence. Oddly, the more red wine I consumed, the more I seemed to understand Italian.

Italians, I was told, like to “sit at the table for a long time,” thus making the Italian eating-out experience not hospitable to restless children. This proved very true: we arrived just short of 9:00 p.m., and did not exit until just before midnight.

Along the way a dizzying array of courses arrived; I’m not sure I remember them all. There were breaded zucchini flowers served with goat cheese, a cheese fondue infused with truffles, a flaky meat-potato tart, ravioli with tomato sauce, potatoes with mushroom sauce, mushroom with mushroom sauce, and nicely prepared artichoke hearts. Each of these was served independently as a course of its own. And there was something I characterized as a “poached egg without the egg” for dessert — it turned out to be “poached cream” and it was very good.

Punctuating all of this eating was much chatting about Canada and Colletta and San Diego, and the hassles of renting out a home, and how crazy the Ikea store in Genoa is (and how nice Genoa is to visit otherwise). I understood the English bits, inferred (or had helpfully translated for me) the Italian bits. And I think I even agreed to buy three [[Colletta]] fundraising calendars at one point in the proceedings when Francesco was hawking them.

My neighbour Monica (the “very nice Italian man’s daughter”) was a very pleasant table-mate, and we turned out to have much in common. Jack’s wife (again, alas, I am not one for many names) was the Rosetta Stone of the table: being Italian by birth and raised in Brooklyn, and thus English-Italian bilingual, she translated into English for me, and into Italian for others. And, of course, there was “an Island connection” — her daughter’s boyfriend has always wanted to visit Prince Edward Island.

By the way, speaking of Prince Edward Island: we’ve got a very low international name recognition if this crowd was typical of a multi-national audience. About half of the group had heard of Nova Scotia, most others knew about Montreal or Toronto, and only one person of all those that I talked about “home” to had ever heard of PEI at all. If we’re ever going to pull off this whole “leveraging a small economy into a major world power” thing we’re going to have to work on this.

By the time we arrived back in Colletta at midnight, I’d eaten a lot of food, shared in much good conversation, been halfway convinced that I should buy an apartment here, and primed for the culinary wonders that are coming tomorrow.

Must sleep now.

My friend [[Stephen Southall]] called me today from Ontario. He called me by ringing my office number in Charlottetown, which is patched through, on the voice-over-IP (i.e. “the Internet”), to my apartment here in Italy. We talked for 22 minutes. Beyond the cost of a normal call from Ontario to PEI, the jump over to Italy cost me 37 cents. Not 37 cents per minute, 37 cents total.

Remarkably, given all the hocus-pocus involved, the voice quality was great. Not quite “in the next room,” and a little shy of “a local call,” but very little interference or delay.

By comparison, the standard Aliant rate for a call to more than 37 kilometers away is 36 cents a minute. In other words, calling Summerside from Charlottetown with Aliant costs 22 times more as calling Italy from Charlottetown using VOIP.

If you’re using a Mac and want to watch live video from the Liberal Convention in Montreal, you’ll find the video at CTV isn’t watchable — it complains about an incorrect version of Windows Media Player. If you’ve got Flip4Mac installed on your machine, however this direct link should work, at least for Friday, Dec. 1 (this link might work Saturday, but I’m just guessing).

Warning: today, at least, it’s like watching paint dry. Right now they’re debating Amendment 12, to add the position of National Membership Secretary to the national Liberal executive.

This morning my alarm went off at 8:00 a.m. and I was out the door just before 9:00 a.m. hunting around for my olive harvesting compagni. They were nowhere to be found. After a few minutes of milling about, a very nice Italian man came around the corner and we managed to agree, he in Italian and me in English, that things were running late and we should just sit tight.

So that’s what we did, engaging in little snippets of conversation like “I have a place between Como and Milan and another place in Sardinia” (him) and “Prince Edward Island — yes, piccola isola… piccola isola” (me). By the time the rest of the crew converged 10 minutes later we were at the stage where I’d earned an introduction all-round as Peter dal Canada.

Although there are threats of 70 for the big harvest dinner tonight at Ristoranta Costa up the road in Nasino, the core olive picking crew numbered about two dozen. By 9:30 a.m. we had all re-rendezvoused near the pool, been assigned wicker baskets and yellow rakes, and the harvest had begun.

There are, it seems, three ways to harvest olives.

The first, and, to my mind, most kind to the olives, is to simply pick them as you would, say apples. They’re smaller than apples, of course, so you can often grab a whole handful in one go. In contrast to raspberry bushes, nettles and other things-you-can-pick, olive trees are pleasant to be around, you don’t need any gloves, and you appear to be able to pick for hours without suffering any great damage to the hands.

Competing with the hand-picking method is the “yellow rake” technique. These little rakes are made of plastic, and are about twice as big as a common garden trowel with tines spaced about an inch apart. The idea is that you brush said rakes through the branches of the trees, pluck off the olives, and leave them either in your basket (if you’re good) or on the ground, where they fall onto a net and can be gathered up later.

While theoretically more advanced, the yellow rake seems mostly to pluck off branches and leaves, with the olives remaining on the trees. While they have a unique ability, when stuck on the end of a bamboo pole, to reach otherwise unreachable olives, I quickly jettisoned mine.

The final technique could best be called “bashing high branches with a bamboo pole so that the olives fall off.” Several veterans of earlier olive harvests were very wedded to this approach, and very good at pulling it off. Success demands a rather frenzied bashing style, and good netting coverage down below so your efforts aren’t for nought.

Early off the mark I was identified as one of the hallowed alto (tall) pickers, and was given special assignments and a ladder and sent to places others dare not tread. I attached myself to the Italian friend I’d met earlier, and his wife and daughter, and we worked the same trees throughout the morning. By mid-morning we were humming along at a very comfortable pace.

Now as my brothers and parents will tell you (to say nothing of [[Catherine]]), I’m not a big one for the “manual labour” and will generally shirk any opportunity for same if I can finagle a way. So you’d think that volunteering for labour would be the last thing I’d do.

But I soon found that labour that is, as I wrote yesterday, sforzo collettivo per compiere un’opera di interesse comune — “collective effort in order to complete a work of common interest” has its perks. There’s the whole “camaraderie” thing, something made more piquante by the multinational nature of our force — Italians, Irish, Americans, English and me, the sole Canadian. And then there’s the eating.

If today’s experience can be used as a gauge, it’s important to spend an equal amount of time during the olive harvest eating and drinking and chatting as it is actually up in the trees. Around noon, after a good two hours of picking, we gathered up the nets and the rakes and the olives and loaded them into the truck and convened on the pool deck for an excellent buffet of salami and cheese sandwiches, spaghetti with garlic and oil, wine, bread and ice cream.

There’s nothing like a good bowl of spaghetti by the pool in the crisp fall air after you’ve been up in trees all morning.

Over lunch I got to meet Coleman and Katie from Ireland, Colin from Brighton, Jack from San Diego and Francesco from Italy. Francesco speaks about three words of English, but he has bon ami that more than compensates, and made a point of making sure that I understood the heavy schedule of eating and drinking that is to follow (it’s not only dinner to night, but lunch tomorrow and dinner again tomorrow night).

After a brief post-lunch break, we reassembled in the piazza at 2:00 p.m. (a due, as Francesco emphatically told me) — our numbers now cut down by about a half — and walked over by the Colleta church where we harvested a group of a dozen trees on the terraces there. Some of these trees were hanging out over the terraces and so the aforementioned “crazy bashing” technique was called into action while Francesco and I scurried about in the mud below spreading out a net.

By 3:30 p.m. we were done, the olives, nets and rakes in the truck, with plans to gather again at 8:00 p.m. for the convoy up to Nasino for dinner.

On the agenda for tomorrow, if I understood correctly, is some additional olive picking followed by a trip back to Nasino to Frantoio da Olive Armando Garello to turn olives into olive oil. Which, goes the theory, they should be by this time tomorrow.

More eating apparently planned for Sunday.

What a wonderful day.

PEI Health Minister Hon. Chester Gillian is reported as suggesting that “there just isn’t enough demand to bring midwives into the health-care system” in Prince Edward Island and that “It would be adding another service to one that is already provided.” This in reaction to news that Nova Scotia will soon introduce legislation to regulate midwifery there.

There may be valid reasons for keeping midwives out of the province — I don’t know of any, but I’m open to hearing them — but Gillan’s logic is simpleminded.

I spent five years in the midwifery milieu in Ontario. I have several friends who are fully-healthcare-funded professional midwives in Ontario, and several other friends here in PEI who, given the chance, would likely work for similar qualifications. I spent 3 months in El Paso, Texas while a friend was training to be a midwife, and I learned more about preeclampsia and forceps than you can possibly imagine. Many of our friends have children who have come into the world with a midwife guiding the way. In short, I’ve seen midwifery up close as a valid and important part of childbirth, and I’ve seen how midwives can work hand-in-hand with doctors and nurses as part of the healthcare system.

I’m certain we would have profited from the services of a midwife if we’d had the option — certainly having Sylvie Arsenault as our doula was an invaluable resource before and during [[Oliver]]’s birth.

But apparently, according to Minister Gillan, “there just isn’t enough demand.” How does he know this? And, indeed, how can one gauge demand for a practice that has not existed in PEI for several generations. Midwifery is an important and valued art around the world; indeed at one point it was a valued and important art in Prince Edward Island. Just because childbirth has, in recent decades, been centralized and hospitalized and taken over by physicians, is no reason to think that, with promotion and education and funding there might not be incredible demand for the service.

And Mr. Gillan’s assertion that midwifery would represent “adding another service to one that is already provided.” Leaving out the fact that midwifery-attended births, whether in hospital or at home, can be entirely different from operating room hospital births (where birth seems to be treated more as a “condition” than an important life event), Mr. Gillian is correct in this assertion. So what? Why not give Islanders more birthcare options? Why not work to enrich the variety of services available to prospective parents?

I have no doubt that introducing midwifery legislation and funding in Prince Edward Island would improve the lives of Islanders and Islanders-to-be. It is simply irresponsible not to at least open ourselves to this potential because there’s “no demand” or because “that whole birthing thing’s already being taken care of.”

[[Bruce Rainnie]] announced on [[Compass]] tonight that the program will be moving back to a locally produced full-hour format starting in February 2007, with national and international news integrated in.

I imagine they will also use the opportunity to change the name of the show back to [[Compass]] (from the ghastly “cbc news at six” it has called itself lately) at the same time. Why not take this opportunity to advertise your support for the repatriation of the name with a class Canada Now. Compass Forever. T-Shirt. They make great Christmas gifts!

For some reason I keep watching the CBS show Jericho, even though it has an implausible plot, a Love Boat-like cast and continuity problems. As I’ve read on others’ blog, it’s the idea of Jericho that’s interesting (what happens to a remote American town when the rest of the country is destroyed by nuclear bombs?); I simply keep hoping for the execution to catch up.

There are a couple of saving graces: the Jericho Wiki is an interesting experiment by CBS in “user-contributed content.” They’ve got a nice wiki engine and what seems to be an engaged fan-based. And, mercifully, there’s no trace of product placement on the show (I suppose nuclear bomb affiliation isn’t an attractive candidate for advertisers?).

Produce placement, which used to be limited to a can of Pepsi on the counter, or an Apple logo on the Sex in the City laptop, has reached new lows this season: we now have “witty and ironic” product placement. Both Studio 60 and 30 Rock have had plot threads that have revolved around the “evil network” wanting to introduce product placement into their “shows with shows.” The brash iconoclasts running the shows resist this, of course. But along the way lots of product mentions get dropped in, and in our ironic rebel “stick it to the man” haze, we slurp them all in while thinking that we’re watching edgy rebellious TV.