What news to come home to: the CBC is reporting that Charlottetown to warn about lead in water. While the City of Charlottetown appears to be taking some responsibility for the problem, the article closes with what appears, on first blush, to be a shocking abrogation of duty:

But the city says it simply can’t afford to replace all lead pipes. It recommends that if people have concerns, they should take other precautions, such as buying a water filter or running the water for a few minutes first thing in the morning before they drink it.

If the city is running water through its own lead pipes, and if that is posing a health risk, then the city simply must do what’s required. Water is a basic necessity; we all have a right to a clean, healthy source of it.

When I saw the headline Nominations for new Primate open in my newsreader this afternoon I got really excited — a new primate! Then I realized it was an Anglican Church of Canada primate, not a new variation on the monkey, ape, chimp circuit.

One last café com leite here in the Lisbon Airport before we board our flight to London. Overnight in London tonight, then back to Prince Edward Island tomorrow.

We had lunch with Dan and Becky today, converging in Lisbon for a brief moment. We ate at the same place that Pedro and I ate on Friday, a buffet where they weigh your food. Ate outside on the patio one last time.

My love affair with Portugal has only deepened this trip; after chatting with Pedro at lunch I’m convinced anew that there are important similarities between the Island experience and the Portuguese one, and I’m already plotting ways of bringing our two worlds together.

Catch you on the other side of the ocean.

Okay, let’s see if I can post from my mobile phone. If you can read this then I guess I can. I’m writing this in the Notes application on my Nokia N70, then cutting and pasting into Opera.

A brief wifi window here in Lisbon at the tail end of our vacation — we leave for Canada, via London, on Monday afternoon.

We’ve been spending the week exploring the city. It’s very different than Porto, where we spent two weeks last year — much more spread out, much more “modern” and with a different sensibility. And the cake shops — they are everywhere! Coffee is universally excellent.

We are museum junkies this trip. Yesterday Oliver and I visited the Public Transit Museum and the Electricity Museum and we were the only visitors to each (they actually had to turn the lights on in the Transit Museum, and fire up the trolley to take us on the ride through the transit yard). We finished the day at the Oceanarium:

Day before was the Communications Museum and the Coach Museum. All are interesting, have excellent cafeterias, and mannequins that are frighteningly lifelike.

Mom, Dad, Catherine and Oliver are off to Sintra today while I spend some time alone and get together with Pedro for lunch. Dan and Becky are in town on Monday so we’ll have lunch with them before heading up to London.

Having a great time here in Lisbon. Not blogging so as to spend time with family, have actual vacation, and be away from keyboard (except for right now, of course). Weather is sunny and fine. Apartment is excellent. Wonderful city.

My paternal grandmother — Nana to us boys — died 8 years ago today, a day shy of her 84th birthday. I remember clearly getting the news from my Mom while driving home late in the evening along the Kingston Road; tears streamed down my face and suddenly I couldn’t see where I was going. A few days later we were all in her home in Brantford at a bizarre yet delightful memorial event attended by a motley collection of her friends, neighbours and family.

Chief in my memory among the mourners were the father and son duo of Metro and Petro, who lived in the neighbourhood and had benefited from the kindness of my grandmother many times. Nana wasn’t one for ceremony or religion of any sort and she was cremated shortly after she died. Her “memorial” was held in her living room, and at some point in the proceedings Petro (or it may have been Metro) became quite distressed because he suddenly realized that there was no body present for the wake.

There was also the mysterious man with the goatee who had conversations with almost everyone present where his side consisted almost entirely of him stroking his beard and saying “ah yes, I see.” Nobody knew his name, or where he came from. I suspect he was another person who’d benefited from Nana’s help over the years — whether it was translating documents or dealing with the local MLA or talking to the Russian embassy.

A few years before she died, Nana was diagnosed with cancer, and her doctors wanted to perform something called the Whipple Procedure. Because there was a fair chance she would die on the operating table, she decided that she should come and visit us on PEI before the surgery. And so she got on the bus in Brantford and arrived in Charlottetown a few days later.

We spent a great week together, Nana, Catherine and I: we took her to a drive-thru donut shop for the first time, went to the movies (to see Hackers of all things), had a lobster supper and saw a lot of the Island.

As it turned out, she didn’t need the Whipple Procedure after all, and although her final years were fraught with various medical challenges, she lived long enough to come back to the Island for Christmas the year before she died.

My strongest last memory of her is when she was decided to check herself out of the hospital while my parents were away for a week. By the time they got back and realized what had happened she was ensconced at home, had home care set up, and was, I think, reinvigorated by being able to take back control of her life a little.

Nana was a strong-willed, independent woman. And although I probably didn’t know it at the time, I learned a lot from her, and a lot of who I am comes from her influences. It’s a great shame that she never got to meet Oliver — he didn’t come along for another year and a half — as I’m sure she would have loved him.

Even though you’re not in heaven with the angels or anything whimsical like that, Nana, I’m thinking of you today.

Air Canada doesn’t make it easy to link directly to flight status information on their website, hiding the information in a pop-up window behind a complex URL that looks like this:

http://book.aircanada.com/pl/AConline/en/OverrideServlet
?USERID=GUEST
&EXTERNAL_ID=GUEST
&EMBEDDED_TRANSACTION=FlifoInfoServlet
&SO_SITE_OFFICE_ID=YULAC18AB
&LANGUAGE=US
&COUNTRY=CA
&SITE=SAADSAAD
&TRIP_FLOW=YES
&BOOKING_FLOW=NONE
&PRIVATE_LABEL=ACO_AC_AIR
&MARKET=CA
&AIRLINE_CODE=AC
&FLIGHT_NUMBER=7489
&B_DATE=200703180900

To avoid either having to visit the Air Canada website or entering a long URL like this, I hacked together a little PHP redirecting magic to enable the following:

• http://ruk.ca/ac
• http://ruk.ca/ac/FLIGHTNUMBER
• http://ruk.ca/ac/FLIGHTNUMBER/DATE

The default date, if you don’t specify, is the current one; otherwise use YYYYMMDD. For example, to get the status of today’s flight 7489 from Charlottetown to Halifax:

• http://ruk.ca/ac/7489

Or to get the status of flight 861 on March 27th:

• http://ruk.ca/ac/861/20070327

Omit both the date and the flight number, and you’ll get a form where you can fill both in. You’re welcome to use this for your own personal convenience (with the proviso that it make break or disappear at some future date).

It is Sunday. The Post Office is closed. I have just used Ship-in-a-click on the Canada Post website to purchase a shipping label for a parcel I need to mail: I simply print out the label on my printer, tape it to my item, and slip in the mailbox across the street. It took 4 minutes. Amazing.