Fish tacos are $6 at Fin Folk Food in Tracadie every Tuesday. 

They are very good.

And very popular; here’s the parking lot at supper time yesterday:

Not only are the tacos very good, but the view is even better:

Lord knows I’ve had my disagreements with Mr. Banks, the proprietor, over the years. But it’s hard to argue with what he’s created here.

Justin Vernon and Jim-E Stack dig in deep on the Bon Iver album SABLE fABLE for BBC6. It’s a masterclass in modern music producing.

Sometimes blogging feels like a solo act.

Sometimes it feels like you’re in a band.

I now have an owner’s manual for a part of my body.

I made an access request for the surgical notes from my radial head replacement operation in August. It was from these notes that I learned what had been installed in my elbow:

On the back table, we assembled the Wright Medical Evolve 24 mm standard head and the 7.5 mm standard neck. 

Wright Medical was founded in 1950:

Started in 1950 by orthopaedic salesman and innovator Frank O. Wright, our first product was an “all-rubber walking heel” for leg casts – an original conception of the founder. From there, the product offering was quickly expanded to include orthopaedic implants and instrumentation as well as soft goods, like arm slings and splints.

By the time of Frank Wright’s death in 1975, orthopaedic implants and instrumentation had been firmly established as the foundation of the business. Within a few short years, our soft goods lines slowly disappeared and we were ready to forge ahead as a dedicated provider of orthopaedic surgical solutions.

After Wright died, the company was acquired by Dow Corning in 1977; it went through a series of ownership changes over the decades until its acquisition by Stryker in 2020.

You may recognize the name “Stryker” from the adjustable beds in hospitals, although that’s but a slice of its business, a business that includes pretty well everything medical (Catherine died in a Stryker bed, so it’s a brand name seared into my brain).

The Wright Medical Evolve that was installed in my right arm has an installation manual for surgeons, something I like to think of as an “owner’s manual” for this new part of my body:

The Evolve Radial Head prosthesis was designed to reduce abnormal kinematics and therefore problems with articular wear and pain and utilizes a spacer concept with a smooth stem. The smooth stem can move slightly in the proximal radius so that the radial head tracks with the articular surfaces, reducing abnormal kinematics and therefore problems with articular wear and pain.

The manual has a chart of the sizes of radial head available; I’ve highlighted mine:

I wear (embed?) a mid-range head and stem.

There is a very detailed description for surgeons on how to install the new head and stem, filled with language like:

Grasp the trial stem with the trial stem handle so that the handle sits below the trial head. Insert the trial stem into the medullary canal. Screw the trial head onto the trial head handle. Holding the trial head handle in line with the trial stem handle, slide the trial head over the trial stem platform.

That page has a diagram that illustrates the procedure:

It’s weird to consider that was all being done to my elbow while I was under anaesthetic.

The most bracing parts of the owner’s manual come at the introduction:

• The patient should be advised that the device cannot and does not replicate a normal healthy bone, that the device can break or become damaged as a result of strenuous activity or trauma and that the device has a finite expected service life.
• Removal or revision of the device may be required sometime in the future.

Time will tell whether I’ll wear this radial head out, or whether it will get me through the rest of my life.

I went into The Bookmark this afternoon for one last look around before they close their Queen Street location this weekend in preparation for their move around the corner to Kent Street.

Realizing this would be my last visit to the place I’d visited hundreds of times (and spent thousands of dollars), I felt a need to capture some images of the old place.

During my tour, I got to have a delightful chat with longtime store manager Lori Cheverie, after which she and with co-owner Dan MacDonald took me on a tour of the new location, set to open on October 14.

The new space, at 111 Kent Street, is, they told me, 50% bigger. It’s also their opportunity to reimagine how the store is laid out. Though it’s absent stock at the moment, signs are that they crafted something lovely.

I can’t wait to see it when it’s full of books and pens and notebooks!

Later in the afternoon, the shop posted a photo of its new sign to Facebook:

Looking at that new sign I realized something that I hadn’t realized in all my years as a patron: it’s not The Bookmark, it’s just Bookmark.

At first I thought there was no way I could have been getting this wrong all these years. 

But I checked the store’s website (emphasis mine):

At Bookmark, we strive to contribute to our local arts and culture scene by hosting events with local, national, and international authors. 
…
Top selling recent releases available at Bookmark.
…
Here are our picks for what’s coming soon! Shop local and pre-order your copy at Bookmark!

It’s true. No The.

It’s going to take some retraining for me to say “Meet me at Bookmark” or “Maybe they have it at Bookmark,” but I’ll get there. 

(And I apologize to the shop for getting it wrong all these years!)

If you want to make your own last pilgrimage to Queen Street, you’ve got this weekend to do it.

Two years ago, I wrote about a wish-list of 9 magazine shops to visit in Europe that I’d collected from the stockist list for Robida magazine.

The was a really helpful list: it led us to visit both Edicola 518 and Frab’s while we were in Italy last year. I aspire to visit the other seven.

Four years ago I wrote about GeoJSON Collectibles:

I like the idea of GeoJSON Collectibles: digital artifacts that can be shared around like we used to share cassette tapes, with no websites or apps or dependencies on proprietary formats or services required. You can take my GeoJSON, and turn it into your GeoJSON, adding your own route variations and annotations.

Gluing those two ideas together, here’s a collectible GeoJSON file of those 9 magazine shops (see them on a map).

I thought about all of this again because I was reading the Coffee issue of F magazine this afternoon, and found a list of coffee shops in the index that I wanted to be able to “collect” in the same way:

Here’s the GeoJSON file of those coffee shops (and here’s a map).

I’ve been to two of those shops, both in Oslo during our trip there 10 years ago: Fuglen and Tim Wendelboe. Just 11 more to visit.

When my physiotherapist measured my elbow extension two weeks ago, it was at -20º. This morning’s measurement was -6º.

I’m really happy about that.

As Lisa will attest, I’ve been annoyingly religious about doing my physio three times a day.

With my eye on the 0° prize, this hasn’t been as difficult as I thought it would be. This means that, more often than not, if you were to pop into our house by surprise, you’d find me lying on the couch with a 5 pound weight hanging off the end of my right arm. 

My physio program got updated again today, and for the next two weeks, here’s what I’ll be doing:

• Forearm Pronation and Supination with Dumbbell
• Supine Elbow Extension with wrist in neutral
• Putty Squeezes
• Supine Elbow Flexion
• Elbow Extension Mobilization
• Seated Wrist Radial Deviation with Dumbbell
• Standing Single Arm Bicep Curls Supinated with Dumbbell
• Seated Wrist Flexion with Dumbbell
• Wrist Extension with Dumbbell
• Standing Alternating Triceps Extension with Dumbbells

To think that, just three months ago, I would’ve had no idea what pronation and supination were. Now I live and breathe them.

It’s been 10 weeks since I fell off the box and injured my elbow an 8½ weeks since my surgery. My arm is still uncomfortable, at least a little, most of the time. I can’t reach as far as I’m used to, and I certainly can’t lift what I used to. But doing the physiotherapy, and seeing it demonstrably pay off, helps bolster my faith that, eventually, this will all be a satisfying memory.

Those “putty squeezes” you see in the list of physio exercises are done with a ball of goo called “therapy putty” that looks and behaves a lot like the Silly Putty of my childhood. It comes in different colours, each denoting a different amount of resistance it offers. I started with yellow, and have levelled up to pink.

One of the interesting characteristics of therapy putty is that the harder you squeeze it, the more resistance it offers. 

This is because it’s what’s called a non-Newtonian fluid:

In physical chemistry and fluid mechanics, a non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that does not follow Newton’s law of viscosity, that is, it has variable viscosity dependent on stress. In particular, the viscosity of non-Newtonian fluids can change when subjected to force. Ketchup, for example, becomes runnier when shaken and is thus a non-Newtonian fluid.

I prefer to think of it is simply being kind of freaky, slightly outside nature.

Here’s a time-lapse video I shot showing it slumping slowly, over several minutes, from a ball into a lump:

Earlier in the month, in anticipation of mounting Lisa’s exhibition at The Gallery, we went in search of a way of creating removable vinyl letters for the show’s signage. We were happy to discover that, at the Charlottetown Library Makerspace, there is a Cricut machine that’s free to use. 

You can think of a Cricut machine as a kind of computer controlled X-Acto knife; at least that’s what we were using it for: you load a blank sheet of self-adhesive vinyl, use Cricut’s software to come up with a design, send the design to the machine, and the machine cuts the design into the vinyl. It’s really quite magical.

To start the process, I created the lettering for the design in Cricut Design Space,  on my laptop at home:

We picked up a roll of removable vinyl sheet at Michael’s in Charlottetown, and headed to the library.

The software  stores the designs “in the cloud,” so we were able to go to the library and sign in under our account once we were ready to “print.” The cutting process was remarkably fast: it took about two minutes.

Once the cutting was completed, came the fiddly process of “weeding” the vinyl to remove the parts that aren’t letters. Lisa  proved very good at doing this:

Once the weeding was done, we lay a piece of transfer paper over the letters, and then used that to transfer the letters to the wall of The  Gallery:

The weeding and transferring parts were a little fiddly, but, once we got the hang of it, it all worked pretty well. We are both very happy with the results on the wall.

The Cricut system, especially for those of us used to the openness of the 3D printing world and its tools, is regrettably closed and proprietary: it feels kind of like the Sodastream of digital tools. The only way to send designs to the machine is using Cricut Design Space, and while it’s quite capable, it’s also an advertising machine for all things Cricut: supplies, clipart, fonts, etc.

Of course what Cricut lacks in openness, it benefits from in ubiquity: a lot of people know how to use Cricut machines, the machines are widely available at hobby stores, as are the materials. 

Using the Cricut was our first real introduction to the library’s makerspace, a space that holds a bunch of really useful machines and tools. There’s a 3D printer, a machine to digitize VHS videotapes, a heat press for T-shirts, a bunch of sewing machines, a laminating machine, a drawing tablet, a button maker, and soldering stations.

The makerspace is open seven days a week, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Use of the tools and machines is free; you just pay for the materials. What a great resource for our city this is.

My friend Nick was just in Berlin for the first time. From afar, I made some connections with Berlin friends for him, and was happy to receive a set of selfies, over the following two weeks, of Nick and friends.

This got me thinking about how long it’s been since I was in Berlin. I didn’t know, so I looked it up: it was 7 years ago, which seems like an eternity relative to my love for the city.

This got me thinking: how long has it been since I was in… So I made a list:

• Amsterdam: September 2018
• Barcelona: May 2003
• Berlin: August 2018
• Copenhagen: May 2024
• Helsinki: December 2024
• Ljubljana: December 2010
• London: December 2024
• Munich: November 2010
• Oslo: October 2015
• Paris: April 2023
• Tallinn: December 2024
• Vienna: March 2009

I’ll add to this list as remember places I’ve been (and places I want to return to).

I learned the other day that the home game for Definition, the TV game show that ran in Canada in the 1970s and 80s, used the same game pieces as the Milton Bradley home game for Wheel of Fortune.

The idiomatic power of the “home game” sits in such a small demographic niche— those of us born in the 1960s, who spent our formative years watching TV game shows with our aunts— that it’s a turn of phrase I should stop using. But I won’t.

So, for those of you playing Radial Head Fracture: The Home Game,  you’ll be excited to learn that yesterday, at my third physiotherapy appointment, I found that my elbow extension has increased from -42° on the first appointment, to -35° on the second appointment, to this week’s -20°.

That’s not 0°—the perhaps-unattainable dream—but it’s progress.

To risk introducing another perhaps-obscure idiom, it feels like I’m now in the deepest depths of the uncanny valley of right arm function: my arm looks like a regular everyday arm, and it can do many of the things that regular everyday arms do. There are, however, cracks and edges and exceptions, the existence of which is eerie.

I can drive a car, turn a door handle, put on a shirt, carry my laptop, drink coffee, shake hands with a friend, and hold a hamburger. But I cannot use nail clippers, nor press in that button on the kitchen faucet to switch to “spray” mode, nor open a stuck jar lid.

This too shall pass: the next phase of my rehab, started tentatively this week, is “progressive strength building.” I’m starting with wrist strength, the building of which should help with all of the above limitations.

Meanwhile, in list of movements for my gym workout this past Tuesday I spotted:

Glute Dominent Step Ups 3x8-10/8-10

That meant working with a box for the first time in the two months since I fell off a box (which is how we got here in the first place). 

The daunt was lower: I was set up with a lower, softer box than the killer attack box of yore, and “step ups” are a much gentler exercise than “box jumps.”  I did okay, experienced no discernible triggers, and so I feel like I’ve levelled up in the mental game of the recovery-in-the-gym.

Lisa’s coach Matt, who has some experience with fractures, messaged me last week that “studies show a surprising amount of carry over when doing all-unilateral work while injured.” Which is to say: even if I’m just working out one side of my upper body in the gym, the other side benefits somewhat too. I was chuffed to learn that.

The most helpful effect of going back to the gym has not, in fact, been in the physical part of it, it’s the feeling of capability that comes from realizing that my body still, fundamentally, works really well. Being reminded of that twice a week, at some intensity, has been a great boon to my mood.

The next checkpoints in my recovery will come in another two weeks, for my next physiotherapy appointment, and, the week after that, a follow up with my orthopædic surgeon. I’m hoping that, by that point, I will have hiked a fair distance out of the uncanny valley.