If you live on [[Prince Edward Island]], you may have wondered what the official way to send queries to the provincial government is. Turns out that the official PEI “question box” is located deep in the woods at the Brookvale Demonstration Woodlot:

There weren’t any pending questions at the time the photo was taken, so obviously provincial officials are on the job.

If you’re trying to phone me in the office, you can’t. At least not for the moment. My old Nortel desk phone, filched from [[silverorange]] several years ago, has taken on the odd characteristic of ringing all the time. Which is very, very distracting. Simultaneously my mobile phone needs a recharge. So if you need me by voice, try Skype. Or send email. I’ll get a new phone installed here by morning.

Last night [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] and I decided to go up to [[The Noodle House]] for dinner, taking advantage of it being open on Sundays now. Upon arrival we were surprised to see the parking lot almost full, which is rare; we wondered whether we’d be able to get a table.

Once we got inside we found one big long table set up along the back of the restaurant surrounded by about 30 people. Our waitress explained that “the Chinese community” had gone up to Summerside for the big air show, and had come back to The Noodle House for dinner. She apologized for “all the noise.”

And there certainly was noise. And laughter. And kids running around the tables while simultaneously eating bowls of noodles. And babies crying. And a general sense of a lot of happy people eating together and thoroughly enjoying the experience.

And so we weren’t bothered by the noise, but rather enlivened by it. It was so nice to be eating with Oliver at a restaurant where “being on best behaviour” wasn’t the order of the day.

Which made me think: when we go “out to eat” we often cast the experience as “getting away from the kids,” and, perhaps as a result, the environment of many restaurants here in Charlottetown is quiet and sedate — more like a funeral home than a carnival. Everyone’s supposed to keep to their own table, look straight ahead, and not cause a stir.

I expect that the police would be called if, say, a bunch of kids went running around Sirenella with bowls of spaghetti in tow.

Now I’m not knocking the value of “getting away from the kids,” and I don’t think we need to transform our restaurants into hedonistic free-for-alls. But it was nice to eat in, or at least beside, a raucous community bubbling over with energy; brought back memories of our better meals in Spain and Portugal. And reminded me that eating out is as much or more about the experience, the theatre, as the food.

The Think Organically, Eat Locally episode of the YANKEE Magazine New England Travel, Food, and Home podcast is an excellent primer for understanding why it was probably not so wise to be eating organic spinach from California in the first place. YANKEE’s Food Editor Annie B. Copps has a background in both public health and food, and she’s got a good take on the food system and how to make best use of it.

See FDA to consumers: Don’t eat ANY fresh spinach if you’re outside of North America and wondering what I’m talking about.

The CBC is reporting that “Cadet leaders are heading into Charlottetown’s junior high school classrooms on a recruitment drive that coincides with one underway for the Canadian Armed Forces in Atlantic Canada.”

It’s one thing to make me pay for your senseless wars, another thing entirely to try to recruit my child into your war machine behind my back (their next stop is kindergarten, presumably).

The mind boggles reading quotes like this, from Capt. Hope Carr:

“Are they made aware of the Canadian Forces? Absolutely. Do we utilize some of the same things that the Canadian Forces do — such as uniforms, the rank structure? Absolutely. What our goal is is to teach young people to be good citizens, to be good members of the community, contributing members of their community, and to take with them skills such as leadership, teamwork, learning to deal with difficult situations and making the right choices.”

Sheesh.

According to the American Lung Association:

Until 1936, pneumonia was the No.1 cause of death in the U.S. Since then, the use of antibiotics brought it under control. In 2003, pneumonia and influenza combined ranked as the seventh leading cause of death.

Remember that annoying deep, throaty cough from two weeks ago? Well it never got better, [[Oliver]] got it too, and so on Wednesday we went to the doctor together to see what was up.

Turns out that while Oliver was suffering from a relatively minor throat or sinus infection, I have pneumonia. Which is a first for me — I’ve never had an “illness of the lungs” before.

I appear to have a relatively “low grade” type of pneumonia, as, beyond the cough, my only symptoms are a general malaise; I’ve got none of the other possible symptoms, like “pleuritic chest pain” or “blueness of the skin.”

The doctor ordered up a course of Azithromycin, which currently courses through our veins and seems to have cured Oliver almost completely and has me on the slow road to health.

It turns out that Azithromycin was discovered by researchers at Pliva, a Croatian pharmaceutical company. I should have known that Croatian ingenuity would be ready to cure my ails when required. Fountain pens, neck ties, torpedos — there’s a Croatian invention for almost any need!

Well, it was blue before. But now it’s Blue:

Here’s what it looked like when it was halfway to full Blueness:

Now we don’t have to walk around the neighbourhood in shame because of our peeling paint! All credit goes to [[Catherine]] for the excellent colour scheme; I don’t have the “imagining little paint chips painted over an entire house” gene, so we had to do this on faith. It worked out (was there ever any doubt?).

An important trip north to the new Old Navy store in [[Charlottetown]] (kids’ Hallowe’en costumes 25% — tell all your friends) left us driving by [[The Noodle House]] at supper time tonight, and we couldn’t resist its spicy allure.

We’re getting to know the new staff, and so some of the old familiarity is returning to the place, which is nice. I think it will take the rest of the year to make our way through the many delights offered by the new menu: tonight we tried the Shrimp Rolls (think “spring roll, but with shrimp inside”; very nice), I had the Kung Pao Gar Ding, a friendly standby from the old days, and [[Catherine]] had the Spicy Beef with Ginger, which she enjoyed. Catherine almost opted for the Tingly Beef, but because she was sharing with [[Oliver]] she decided to leave that for the next time. What’s Tingly Beef? We have no idea, but it sounds exciting.

By far the most important news of all, though, is that they deliver. Suddenly visions of having all of our meals from The Noodle House danced in our head: we could throw away the plates, forget about getting the dishwasher fixed, and just lounge in front of the TV for breakfast noodles, lunch noodles and dinner noodles.

When we regained consciousness, we took one of the takeout menus home; if we can find 3 friends to tantalize sometime soon we’re going to put together a “meal for 5 - $47.99” deal, egg rolls and chicken fried rice included.

I was talking with a friend earlier in the week, idly musing about chucking all this web work out the door and taking up the life of an itinerant travel writer.

“But I’ve no experience as a writer,” I thought to myself.

Then I realized that I actually do write a little from time to time, in this space. I’d no idea how much though, so I decided to check.

Turns out that in the 6 years and a bit since the first post back in May of 1999, I’ve written 724,006 words here. Which seems like a lot. By way of comparison, Anne of Green Gables contains 103,261 words (download them here if you like).

Of course this doesn’t a candle to all of you: in your more than 13,000 comments in this space, you’ve contributed almost a million words of your own — 912,615 to be exact. Thanks for that.