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.

My friend Stephen Good took a trip to Winnipeg once many years ago. His return trip, on the now-defunct Canadian Airlines, was cancelled or delayed or over-subscribed. I can’t remember which — but something went wrong and Stephen couldn’t take the flight.

This would be a “bad customer service” story but for the fact that the airline bent over backwards to make up for the problem. If memory serves, they communicated well about the problem, put those affected up in a very nice hotel, fed them, and generally made them feel extremely well cared for. They also offered everyone some sort of “free flight anywhere we travel.”

So rather than returning home to tell a “that Canadian Airlines is horrible” story, Stephen told a “wow, Canadian Airlines is amazing!” story. And I expect that, if those he told are anything like me, the story got repeated many times over. Canadian Airlines came off looking like a generous, caring company.

Indeed they probably came off better than if there had been no problem to begin with.

Of course this sort of “turning lemons into lemonade” story doesn’t happen all the time: my friend Oliver Baker has been experiencing problems with several HP computers over the year to the extent that I expect he could now write a book on how bad HP’s customer “support” is. He’s certainly convinced me to never consider buying HP products in the future.

Happily I had a “lemons into lemonade” experience myself this week.

Catherine and Oliver and I went out to dinner at Just Us Girls last night. While the food was excellent, and it was nice to sit outside on the patio, the service at the beginning and end of the meal was, well, non-existent.

Nothing bothers me more than a restaurant that doesn’t properly manage the “bookends” of the eating experience: I hate it when I have to search out a server to get a menu, and I hate it when I have to try really really hard to pay the bill.

Last night we suffered both problems: we waited out on the deck for 10 minutes before we were served, and when it was time to pay we had to jump through several hoops. It cast a bad light on what was otherwise a good meal.

Mindful as I am of brother Johnny’s insistence that we customers have a responsibility to let restaurant management know about bad service, I sent off an email about the problem this morning. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a well-worded personal email back from the chef at Just Us Girls apologizing for the lapse. The email said, in part:

I was greatly dismayed to hear of the poor service you and your family received at my establishment yesterday evening. Oliver has become a well known face around the café this summer, I remember him enjoying my desserts at Mavor’s in the Confederation Centre of the Arts last year and was very tickled when I started seeing him appear in the Café this summer. Although Jodi, Susan and I always take customer criticism very seriously, we were doubly disappointed to hear that one of our favorite little customers had encountered poor service.

It’s easy to win me over with kind words; add in some kind words about my son, and you’ve got a customer for life. So here I am writing a “wow, Just Us Girls is great” post rather than a “wow did we ever get bad service last night” post.

There are at least two or three other Island restauranteurs that know the importance of customer service follow-up. As I recalled in this post back in 2002, Bruce MacNaughton at the PEI Preserve Company. And my friend Scott Linkletter at COWS has always been quick to react to concerns I’ve raised with him — for a while there last year I felt as though I was leading the “Iced Cowpuccino” R&D team for him. And I heard from several members of the Zakem family when I raised concerns about Angels back in 2003 (and then followed up later that fall with what I think is my best post title ever).

Every time I get a personal response to a customer service problem, I inevitably tell others, and I inevitably forgive and forget the details of the “bad service.”

Which prompts me to wonder whether it’s as important — maybe even more important — if you’re in the customer service business to concentrate on good, personal communication with customers. After all, no business is going to bat 100% all the time — things go wrong that you can’t control. But you can explain what went wrong, and in doing so demonstrate that you care about your customers. Doing that, I think, can mitigate almost any evil.

As you might expect, we’ll eat again at Just Us Girls.

This quote, taken from a letter sent by CFCY radio to local funeral homes and quoted in the CBC story Death notices cancelled after 70 years, about the decision by CFCY to stop broadcasting daily funeral announcements, is a brilliant example of heartless corporate-speak:

The letter said the station’s new format would be “looking to the positives we can point out in our community.” It went on to say “the unfortunate event of someone’s passing” would no longer be possible in this format.

Look for the upbeat new daily 12:30 feature “Islanders who didn’t die today.”

A question sent to Industry Canada’s Saint John office elicited a pointer to a very useful resource I’d not seen before: Spectrum Direct, a sort of “one stop shop” for spectrum management-related data in Canada.

The most interesting resource for me is the Geographical Area Search: you can enter a latitude and longitude and get information on licensed uses of radio spectrum in that area. This means you can get information on the location of mobile phone towers, radio broadcast towers, and so on. And it outputs HTML, ASCII and XML!

For example, I grabbed an ASCII file of “PCS/cellular stations” for 50km around Charlottetown, did a little regular expression magic in BBEdit to reformat and filter out all but the Rogers’ ones and, with the help of GPSVisualizer, created a map showing their location: