Olivia and I have been in the habit of going to Starbucks every Sunday afternoon for the last year. Starbucks offers some advantages that trump the moribund coffee and aggressive capitalism:

First, we can order online, from the car, through its well-designed app (which Olivia can use without a credit card, as Starbucks essentially has its own currency). The app mitigates the usual choice-making cauldron that brews up when waiting in line, and Olivia has used this to good effect and has broadened out her order and tried a lot of new things (including that time she added every syrup and sprinkle and topping on the menu to her order, and almost exceeded the length of the cup-sticker printer).

Second, Olivia, over time, has gained the confidence to go in and pick up our orders by herself, which is a huge deal, inasmuch as it involves wading across a tricky line of caffeine-deprived drivers, going into the store, lining up, communicating with the staff, and making her way back.

Today, though, things went off the rails.

We found the app wouldn’t allow us to place an online order, meaning Olivia had to go inside and place the order face to face. That she was willing to level up to this new challenge is a credit to her burgeoning bravery and skills.

So far so good.

Except that when she got to the door, she found it locked, with a sign saying the store was closed for renovation, and directing customers to order at the drive-thru.

So that’s what she did: she walked over to the drive-thru speaker and placed her order. Without any problem.

Then she came to fetch me, as the logistics of making it to the pickup window were too much for her.

We made it around to the back together, wading through puddles and avoiding cars, only to be told that they couldn’t hand Olivia her order because she wasn’t in a vehicle. “It’s a liability issue,” the manager told us. While we were standing 3 feet away. To pick up an order. That Olivia had placed. At the drive-thru speaker. As the sign on the door instructed.

We were in no position to argue, as the manager was just following orders. So we bounced back through the cars and the puddles.

And drove down the street to the Atlantic Superstore. Where brave Olivia, undeterred, went in, placed her order at the in-store Starbucks, successfully, emerged to find us MIA, hidden in the parking lot, and persevered until we appeared.

We drank our coffee.

Olivia 3. Starbucks 0.

My friend Peter is Dancing With the Stars this month in support of Hospice PEI, an organization that’s been of great support to our family over the last two years.

Peter has a demanding day job; taking this on in the heart of his busy season is an act of great service and generosity.

Won’t you consider making a donation to “vote” for him!

Megan Hallinan has mushrooms nailed to her head:

You know how either as an adult, you see something dangled in front of you but you decide that it is not needed in the moment. So you carry on with your day assuming that this moment will be gone forever. But then it’s not. You have a un chiodo fisso—a single thought fixed in your mind.

Un chiodo fisso is such a lovely Italian idiom: there’s rarely a time I don’t have a single thought fixed in my head. Sometimes it’s a design for something, and the thought cannot be staunched until I make the thing, sometimes it’s a less helpful “if only X happens, everything will be better.”

Mindfulness is all the rage these days, enough to risk triggering my aversion-to-things-all-the-rage switch, had I not found it so darned helpful in navigating the emotional seas. Having a slight mindful remove from an unhelpful notion nailed to my head has proved a useful device for dislodging it.

As the instigator of the renaming of Pen Night to The Pen and Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island, I felt a certain obligation to create the first membership cards for the newly-named group.

As I was talking to myself about different ideas, it dawned on me that pen being embedded in pencil might be an interesting starting point.

I took P E N C I L out of the Akzidenz Grotesk drawer and played around with various arrangements.

What cemented things was remembering that I had a large ampersand, a wood type orphan that I acquired along the way. Sliding it into place as the glue, with its jaunty leg that sorta looks like a pen (or a pencil), I knew I had my design.

I decided to print two-colour, black for the letters, yellow for the ampersand. Things got really interesting when, after printing a run on white card stock, I experimented with some different colours: this opened up a whole new world of unexpected interactions between the yellow ink and the paper colour, pink being my favourite result, mostly because, well, who-woulda-thunk.

The cards are, of course, bigger than a typical membership card: that was intentional, as I planned for them to both stand alone and to work well as the cover for a pamphlet-stitched sketch or ink sample booklet.

I distributed the finished products tonight at the September meeting of the P&PCoPEI and they appeared to have been be well-received. I look forward to seeing how the members remix them.

My favourite woollen mill is hiring.

The straw that broke the camel’s back of getting Catherine and I together was that Catherine offered my grandmother the use of her bed.

Nana was in town for the occasion of my little brothers’ 19th birthdays, 30 years ago next month. She brought her mandolin. She was staying the weekend. She needed a place to sleep. I was living in an attic hovel in the house next door to Catherine at the time, accessed by a ladder, and was in no position to offer her my bed.

I may be only realizing tonight that Catherine set up the entire pageant: offer Nana her bed, then, once the night had worn on, ask if I’d like to kiss her, and then, oh, look, she had no place to sleep.

She anticipated my chivalry. Up the ladder she climbed

I was so pleasantly naive.

Despite the conniving build-up, it was a chaste coupling that night, in part because the conditions in the attic hovel caused Catherine to have an severe allergic reaction, in part because I was shy. Or chivalrous. Or chivalrous and shy.

But, from that night onward, we were seldom apart in the overnight hours, relocating from the hovel to Catherine’s considerably more comfortable, accessible, and hypoallergenic bedroom next door. The chastening lessened.

We slept on futons during the early years; it wasn’t until we relocated to Prince Edward Island, and my selfsame grandmother was coming to visit, that we secured, at her insistence, an actual bed. It’s the bed that, 25 years later, Olivia is sleeping on tonight. It’s the bed Olivia was conceived on, New Years Eve 1999.

Shortly after she was diagnosed with incurable cancer in 2014, Catherine moved from the bed we’d shared for many years into the bed in the spare bedroom: her sleep was fitful, she was often in pain, she’d started to use a CPAP machine, and the last thing either of us needed was our moving about the bed to wake up the other.

I don’t think we ever admitted honestly how much an effect that move had on our relationship. We are the generation that grew up with Rob and Laura Petrie sleeping in separate beds on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and evolved to Bob and Emily Hartley sleeping in the same bed on The Bob Newhart Show. Sleeping in the same bed was our cultural birthright, willed to us by the sexual revolution, and not doing so seemed like the end of something vital.

And it was.

But sleeping in my own bed is what kept me going, all the years Catherine was in bed across the hall: being able to get a good night’s sleep, every night, and, almost as important, being able to shut the bedroom door, every night, and create a (thin) airlock between me and the roiling, gave me just enough rest and peace to keep me going.

Across the hall, Catherine could gather herself in her infinite palace of pillows, sleep when she could sleep, get up when she needed, and have no worry that she’d keep me awake.

It’s strange how, even having lived the benefits of having my own bed through those years, it still seems divergent when I hear of other couples who sleep apart. “I wonder what’s wrong?!”, I silently whisper to myself, assuming there must be trouble in their coupling. Sleeping in the same bed has become a semaphore for relationship health. And that is a shame, as I think it’s possible to have a perfectly healthy, deep, and committed loving relationship with someone, and still maintain two beds. Indeed I think for many, cancer or not, it may be preferred by one or the other or both.

I wrote to a friend the other day that I wasn’t looking to get “redomesticated” as my life evolves into its next chapters. It was a blunt way of expressing that there are a bunch of habits and practices that I lived inside for almost 30 years, some of them active expressions of patriarchy, some of them simply generally accepted relationship principles, that I’m reluctant to swallow whole again.

I don’t mean to suggest that I’m moving into the Burning Man phase of my life, simply that I’m better positioned to recognize and do what’s actually healthy for both parties to a couple, and not just what’s expected by others, or intuited from inherited semaphores.

Which is all to say that should I, at some point, enter into a less chaste friendship with someone, it will take a lot to separate me from the pleasures of retiring for the night to a bed all my own.

You also can’t name it Pete. Or Brighteyes. Or Pickle. Those names are taken.

To find out what unique horse names are available, use the British Horse Racing Horse Name Availability Tool

Rhik Samadder tried horseback riding, and wrote about it in The Guardian:

I tell the brown-and-white beast to walk, and miraculously, it does. I’m riding! A horse! It’s more comfortable than I’d imagined. Bumble has a broad back, a slow wave of a gait. I hadn’t anticipated this, the easy rise and fall, the sleepy smell of sweaty flank. It should be alarming to be up this high, but it’s weirdly calming. Does being lifted from ground level elevate your attention, to a stratum where larger thoughts reside? I smell clean air. I whisper into Bumble’s fluffy forelock: “I don’t know if I want children.”

This paragraph represents a correction from the original:

A feature on horseriding evoked an improbable scene when it referred to the rider whispering into a “fluffy fetlock” (‘I pretend I am in control. I feel like the Marlboro man’, 13 September, G2, page 2). A fetlock is part of a horse’s leg, and therefore not near its ears.

Samadder has discovered, as I have, that horseworld involves learning an entirely new vocabulary. And sometimes you get it wrong.

Ride on, kindred spirit!

Craigie Hill is a track from Karine Polwart, from her upcoming album Still As Your Sleeping. I’ve listened to it about 100 times today.

When you run out of things to sketch¹, sketch your pencil.

1. I haven’t run out of things to sketch.