I’ve surfaced here in Montréal after a very short weekend in Napanee, Ontario visiting with [[Catherine]]’s family.

My Air Canada experience up was phenomenal — flight attendant Dale should win Employee of the Year for his grace and humour — and arrived 7 minutes later after departing 32 minutes late (I didn’t know you could “make it up in the air” in a Dash 8).

Once I hit the ground things took a slight turn for the worse: luggage took 30 minutes to make its way to the carousel, and I got an extremely high pressure insurance up-sell from the Thrifty clerk (including all sorts of “you know that if you get into an accident you’ll have to buy the car from us right away” and so on). I made my way through all that unscathed, although I noticed that he “helpfully” included a fuel pre-sale on my invoice for me.

The rental car — a brand new Toyota Yaris hatchback — is a thing of beauty and I zipped down the 401 to Napanee and back on one tank of gas exactly, which means I got about 6 litre/100 km.

It was about 3 and a half hours to Napanee from Dorval, getting me there just after 11:00 p.m. [[Oliver]] was surprised, to say the least, to see me there when he woke up in the morning.

Sunday night in Napanee we were off to Catherine’s grandparents’ 40th wedding anniversary, a celebration all the more celebratory as it is the second marriage for both.

And then, almost before I arrived I was back on the 401. Arrived here in Montreal at Noon exactly, and have spent the afternoon fomenting organizational revolution with [[Bill]].

Back to the Island Wednesday; more revolution tomorrow.

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything good about [[Aliant]]. Have I ever? But today I had a very good Aliant customer service experience, so it’s only fair and just that I relate it.

I’m going away for a few days, and I wanted to forward all the incoming calls to our home phone over to the business line so that my messages would go to my email, not to the standalone answering machine we have at home. But we didn’t have “call forwarding” on our line.

So I called Aliant (on a Saturday, no less) and ended up speaking to a woman who was, without a doubt, one of the best customer service people I’ve ever spoken to. Not only was she extremely helpful, with no trace whatsoever of the old school Island Tel “we’re the phone company” attitude, but she also figured out a way of putting the feature on our line for free.

The only quirk in the system was that once she’d done the programming required all she could tell me was that the change might take place immediately, or it might take up to 24 hours. Which is a pretty big window. As it happens, it did take place immediately, and so if you call me at home, you’ll get my robotic agent at the office answering your call.

Oh, and one more thing: if you haven’t taken a look at Aliant’s website recently, and you’re a customer, it’s worth a visit: they’ve got tools in place now to let you do everything from paying your bill to adding new features to previewing what your white pages listing is going to look like. Perhaps this is standard-issue stuff in the telephone company world these days, but for Aliant it seems quite novel given their history of a curmudgeonly attitude towards the web.

So here’s the problem: [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] are away in [[Ontario]]. I’m expecting an eBay shipment via Canada Post Xpresspost sometime today. At home. I hung around the house until 1:00 p.m., but eventually I had to get some work done, meaning that if the package comes I won’t be there to greet it, and I’ll have to go to the Post Office after 5:00 p.m. to pick it up.

But how will I know if delivery actually gets attempted?

Download SecuritySpy, install on Catherine’s iMac, point her iSight camera out the front window at the vestibule, and configure to send me email when the camera detects motion.

Here’s me, detected leaving the house:

I’ll let you know if this actually works out in the end.

Anais Mitchell plays Club Passim on June 17th (with Anne Heaton). From her bio:

Part dustbowl rabble-rouser, part Cosmic American poet, Anais remains passionate about the music of her forefathers while growing inspired by fellow rising indie artists. Mitchell fuses a classic, world-weary folk troubadour’s experience of the human condition with postmodern charm and finesse, then wraps it in a sweet lilting timbre and releases it like a mourning dove sent to stir the sound waves and pluck the heartstrings of people halfway around the world.

Year-old vacation-oriented airline Sunwing Airlines is offering twice-weekly flights from Toronto to Charlottetown this summer, with one-way prices in the $120-$130 range. Flights run from June through September. Wikipedia has more information on the airline.

I must admit to being lax in the “maintaining machines” part of my life. The worst example of this was when I ignored the brake light’s constant illumination in my 1980 Honda Civic for 2 months (I figured the light itself was broken), an episode that ended when I pulled up to an intersection out in North River, went to apply the brakes, and found nothing to apply (fortunately the car had a manual transmission and I wasn’t traveling too fast, so I was able to gear down to a stop without killing myself or others).

It’s this same natural disinclination that gets me into trouble with Revenue Canada all the time; I can never seem to remember when to send in the brown envelopes with payroll remittances.

And so it was that I left my bicycle unmaintained for three years. Over that period it gradually accumulated various layers of guck, the brakes didn’t work very well. And so on.

While I usually find the “make an appointment, then wait two weeks” way of working problematic, this year I stormed through my lethargy, called up [[Smooth Cycle]] and made a date. I brought the bicycle in yesterday, left it overnight for treatment, and picked it up just now.

They don’t lie with they call themselves smooth, them Smooth Cycle folks: the bike runs like a top now. Even just walking it along the street it seems to roll like butter. It’s like a brand new bike.

The best $29.99 I’ll spend this year.

Well, I survived an iced tea-free weekend. Actually, it wasn’t completely iced tea-free: the [[Formosa Tea House]] downtown was open on Saturday, so I had a lemon iced tea there, and I whipped up a nice batch of homemade rooibos on Sunday to tide me over.

Speaking of tea, I’ve discovered a money-saving chai trick that would make my grandmother proud. Here at [[Mavor’s]] at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, a “chai latte” in a big bowl costs $4.50. If you order a “chai tea,” however, and then add milk yourself, you end up with a reasonable approximation of same for only $2.35, with the added bonus of being able to sweeten to taste.

On the food front, I’ve become addicted to the Food Network. I never thought it could happen — it’s a rare day when I darken the kitchen’s door at home — but it has. Three shows have dragged me in.

Chef At Large, hosted by local chef Michael Smith, moves out of the kitchen set and into the real world of “food logistics.” My favourite episode looked at how much profit Earl’s in Vancouver makes on a $27.99 steak dinner (it’s less than $1.00).

Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is a British show hosted by uber-chef Gordon Ramsay. The show is like “Dr. Laura for failing Restaurants.” Each week Gordon visits a restaurant on the brink, and over the course of 7 days, through “tough love” and lots of swearing, works to right them. Ramsay is bombastic, but in a completely compelling way. And his medicine actually seems to work. Besides the drama, the show provides an interesting look into what the real challenges of running a restaurant are (food and labour costs, discipline, cooking).

My unlikeliest Food Network passion of all is Jamie’s Great Italian Escape, hosted by British food phenom Jamie Oliver. It’s hard not to think of Jamie Oliver as a lightweight “TV chef” in the same vein as Emeril, Nigella and company. But this new program, wherein Oliver travels to Italy in a VW camper van to “get away from it all” demonstrates a creativity and wit, to say nothing of an excellent command of Italian, that I never expected was there. Yesterday’s episode saw him visit The Abbey at Farfa hoping to dip into a thousand year old cooking tradition. What he found was fish fingers and boiled vegetables. His reaction is to try to enliven the place with fresh food: he replants the dormant herb garden, gets the monks cooking, and it’s all very comical. It’s good entertainment.

Otherwise in the food world, Oliver (my Oliver, not Jamie) and I took the bus to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday: the chill was gone out of the air enough to allow outdoor wandering. The Sherwood route stops right at the door, and you can catch the bus back from the Superstore about an hour later, so the timing is perfect. Roy tells me that the buses will come alive with the sound of music this weekend in a big Earth Day promotion put together by the eco people; thebus.ca can get your where you want to go.

Oliver and Catherine are off to Ontario for two weeks starting Wednesday, so I’m either going to have to learn to darken the kitchen door or go hungry. I may have to call on [[Catherine Hennessey]] to whip up a batch of macaroni and cheese.

Let me take a brief moment to sing the praises of OmniOutliner, iCal and the AppleScript that allows them to easily be glued together.

In a drive to get our travel plans for the next while organized, I created a simple outline in OmniOutliner:

OmniOutliner is a good tool for this, in part, because it’s very smart about understanding dates — I can enter “June 12 at 8:00 a.m. EDT” and it will understand what I mean, and do all the time zone conversion required (it also understands shorthand like “next week” too).

Once I had my itinerary organized, it seemed like a good idea to somehow automagically get the events from OmniOutliner into iCal. Fortunately, there’s a collection of handy AppleScripts available to make this sort of thing easy to do: a few modifications to the Export to iCal sample script, and I had myself an iCal:

A few more clicks, and the iCal calendar became a Google Calendar:

It’s so nice when everything just flows together so seamlessly; makes those old “trying to load WordStar 2000 documents into WordPerfect” days seem like a distant memory.

Here is the description from the Empire Theatres website of the new Disney movie The Wild, now playing here in Charlottetown:

An odd assortment of animals from the New York Zoo — including a lion, a giraffe, an anaconda, a koala, and a squirrel — discover what a jungle the city can be when one of their own is mistakenly shipped to the wild and they embark on a dangerous mission to rescue him.

Note that this isn’t the movie Madagascar that played in Charlottetown last year. That was a Dreamworks movie released in 2005. With the same plot. Fortunately the posters for the two movies look nothing at all alike:

[[Oliver]] and I dropped [[Catherine]] up in Cavendish on Friday morning, and then stopped in at the old Rainbow Valley site on our way back to town. You will recall that after we spent several happy summers basking in Rainbow Valley’s wonders, the park closed for good last summer.

Parks Canada, the new owners of the property, have been hard at work erasing all trace of Rainbow Valley: with the exception of a few picnic tables, and a couple of remaining buildings, everything else is gone. The castle at the entrance. The swimming pool. The water slides. The talking owl. All the rides. The old fire truck. The vegetable garden, with it’s concrete mushrooms. Even the statue of Anne of Green Gables.

We took the opportunity to record a short memorial podcast from the car after a walk through. As we used my [[T610]] mobile phone to do the recording, it sounds a lot like we recorded it under a pile of wool blankets.

I also took some photos of the destruction (the photos were taken on the same phone, with camera that takes photos that match the sound quality of the podcast).

It was a very odd feeling to walk the grounds: it was like walking through a colour photograph from which all the colour had been draining. It made me very conscious of the magical artifice that was Rainbow Valley: how a ragtag collection of people, structures and mythology could amount to so much fun.

We drove by the “replacement” theme park, up the road and across the street. Frankly, it looks depressing. Of course it’s under construction. And it’s still winter. And we had pathos in our hearts. So we’ll see what happens this summer. But Rainbow Valley is definitely, obviously, gone forever.