If you’re using a Mac and want to watch live video from the Liberal Convention in Montreal, you’ll find the video at CTV isn’t watchable — it complains about an incorrect version of Windows Media Player. If you’ve got Flip4Mac installed on your machine, however this direct link should work, at least for Friday, Dec. 1 (this link might work Saturday, but I’m just guessing).

Warning: today, at least, it’s like watching paint dry. Right now they’re debating Amendment 12, to add the position of National Membership Secretary to the national Liberal executive.

This morning my alarm went off at 8:00 a.m. and I was out the door just before 9:00 a.m. hunting around for my olive harvesting compagni. They were nowhere to be found. After a few minutes of milling about, a very nice Italian man came around the corner and we managed to agree, he in Italian and me in English, that things were running late and we should just sit tight.

So that’s what we did, engaging in little snippets of conversation like “I have a place between Como and Milan and another place in Sardinia” (him) and “Prince Edward Island — yes, piccola isola… piccola isola” (me). By the time the rest of the crew converged 10 minutes later we were at the stage where I’d earned an introduction all-round as Peter dal Canada.

Although there are threats of 70 for the big harvest dinner tonight at Ristoranta Costa up the road in Nasino, the core olive picking crew numbered about two dozen. By 9:30 a.m. we had all re-rendezvoused near the pool, been assigned wicker baskets and yellow rakes, and the harvest had begun.

There are, it seems, three ways to harvest olives.

The first, and, to my mind, most kind to the olives, is to simply pick them as you would, say apples. They’re smaller than apples, of course, so you can often grab a whole handful in one go. In contrast to raspberry bushes, nettles and other things-you-can-pick, olive trees are pleasant to be around, you don’t need any gloves, and you appear to be able to pick for hours without suffering any great damage to the hands.

Competing with the hand-picking method is the “yellow rake” technique. These little rakes are made of plastic, and are about twice as big as a common garden trowel with tines spaced about an inch apart. The idea is that you brush said rakes through the branches of the trees, pluck off the olives, and leave them either in your basket (if you’re good) or on the ground, where they fall onto a net and can be gathered up later.

While theoretically more advanced, the yellow rake seems mostly to pluck off branches and leaves, with the olives remaining on the trees. While they have a unique ability, when stuck on the end of a bamboo pole, to reach otherwise unreachable olives, I quickly jettisoned mine.

The final technique could best be called “bashing high branches with a bamboo pole so that the olives fall off.” Several veterans of earlier olive harvests were very wedded to this approach, and very good at pulling it off. Success demands a rather frenzied bashing style, and good netting coverage down below so your efforts aren’t for nought.

Early off the mark I was identified as one of the hallowed alto (tall) pickers, and was given special assignments and a ladder and sent to places others dare not tread. I attached myself to the Italian friend I’d met earlier, and his wife and daughter, and we worked the same trees throughout the morning. By mid-morning we were humming along at a very comfortable pace.

Now as my brothers and parents will tell you (to say nothing of Catherine), I’m not a big one for the “manual labour” and will generally shirk any opportunity for same if I can finagle a way. So you’d think that volunteering for labour would be the last thing I’d do.

But I soon found that labour that is, as I wrote yesterday, sforzo collettivo per compiere un’opera di interesse comune — “collective effort in order to complete a work of common interest” has its perks. There’s the whole “camaraderie” thing, something made more piquante by the multinational nature of our force — Italians, Irish, Americans, English and me, the sole Canadian. And then there’s the eating.

If today’s experience can be used as a gauge, it’s important to spend an equal amount of time during the olive harvest eating and drinking and chatting as it is actually up in the trees. Around noon, after a good two hours of picking, we gathered up the nets and the rakes and the olives and loaded them into the truck and convened on the pool deck for an excellent buffet of salami and cheese sandwiches, spaghetti with garlic and oil, wine, bread and ice cream.

There’s nothing like a good bowl of spaghetti by the pool in the crisp fall air after you’ve been up in trees all morning.

Over lunch I got to meet Coleman and Katie from Ireland, Colin from Brighton, Jack from San Diego and Francesco from Italy. Francesco speaks about three words of English, but he has bon ami that more than compensates, and made a point of making sure that I understood the heavy schedule of eating and drinking that is to follow (it’s not only dinner to night, but lunch tomorrow and dinner again tomorrow night).

After a brief post-lunch break, we reassembled in the piazza at 2:00 p.m. (a due, as Francesco emphatically told me) — our numbers now cut down by about a half — and walked over by the Colleta church where we harvested a group of a dozen trees on the terraces there. Some of these trees were hanging out over the terraces and so the aforementioned “crazy bashing” technique was called into action while Francesco and I scurried about in the mud below spreading out a net.

By 3:30 p.m. we were done, the olives, nets and rakes in the truck, with plans to gather again at 8:00 p.m. for the convoy up to Nasino for dinner.

On the agenda for tomorrow, if I understood correctly, is some additional olive picking followed by a trip back to Nasino to Frantoio da Olive Armando Garello to turn olives into olive oil. Which, goes the theory, they should be by this time tomorrow.

More eating apparently planned for Sunday.

What a wonderful day.

PEI Health Minister Hon. Chester Gillian is reported as suggesting that “there just isn’t enough demand to bring midwives into the health-care system” in Prince Edward Island and that “It would be adding another service to one that is already provided.” This in reaction to news that Nova Scotia will soon introduce legislation to regulate midwifery there.

There may be valid reasons for keeping midwives out of the province — I don’t know of any, but I’m open to hearing them — but Gillan’s logic is simpleminded.

I spent five years in the midwifery milieu in Ontario. I have several friends who are fully-healthcare-funded professional midwives in Ontario, and several other friends here in PEI who, given the chance, would likely work for similar qualifications. I spent 3 months in El Paso, Texas while a friend was training to be a midwife, and I learned more about preeclampsia and forceps than you can possibly imagine. Many of our friends have children who have come into the world with a midwife guiding the way. In short, I’ve seen midwifery up close as a valid and important part of childbirth, and I’ve seen how midwives can work hand-in-hand with doctors and nurses as part of the healthcare system.

I’m certain we would have profited from the services of a midwife if we’d had the option — certainly having Sylvie Arsenault as our doula was an invaluable resource before and during Oliver’s birth.

But apparently, according to Minister Gillan, “there just isn’t enough demand.” How does he know this? And, indeed, how can one gauge demand for a practice that has not existed in PEI for several generations. Midwifery is an important and valued art around the world; indeed at one point it was a valued and important art in Prince Edward Island. Just because childbirth has, in recent decades, been centralized and hospitalized and taken over by physicians, is no reason to think that, with promotion and education and funding there might not be incredible demand for the service.

And Mr. Gillan’s assertion that midwifery would represent “adding another service to one that is already provided.” Leaving out the fact that midwifery-attended births, whether in hospital or at home, can be entirely different from operating room hospital births (where birth seems to be treated more as a “condition” than an important life event), Mr. Gillian is correct in this assertion. So what? Why not give Islanders more birthcare options? Why not work to enrich the variety of services available to prospective parents?

I have no doubt that introducing midwifery legislation and funding in Prince Edward Island would improve the lives of Islanders and Islanders-to-be. It is simply irresponsible not to at least open ourselves to this potential because there’s “no demand” or because “that whole birthing thing’s already being taken care of.”

Bruce Rainnie announced on Compass tonight that the program will be moving back to a locally produced full-hour format starting in February 2007, with national and international news integrated in.

I imagine they will also use the opportunity to change the name of the show back to Compass (from the ghastly “cbc news at six” it has called itself lately) at the same time. Why not take this opportunity to advertise your support for the repatriation of the name with a class Canada Now. Compass Forever. T-Shirt. They make great Christmas gifts!

For some reason I keep watching the CBS show Jericho, even though it has an implausible plot, a Love Boat-like cast and continuity problems. As I’ve read on others’ blog, it’s the idea of Jericho that’s interesting (what happens to a remote American town when the rest of the country is destroyed by nuclear bombs?); I simply keep hoping for the execution to catch up.

There are a couple of saving graces: the Jericho Wiki is an interesting experiment by CBS in “user-contributed content.” They’ve got a nice wiki engine and what seems to be an engaged fan-based. And, mercifully, there’s no trace of product placement on the show (I suppose nuclear bomb affiliation isn’t an attractive candidate for advertisers?).

Produce placement, which used to be limited to a can of Pepsi on the counter, or an Apple logo on the Sex in the City laptop, has reached new lows this season: we now have “witty and ironic” product placement. Both Studio 60 and 30 Rock have had plot threads that have revolved around the “evil network” wanting to introduce product placement into their “shows with shows.” The brash iconoclasts running the shows resist this, of course. But along the way lots of product mentions get dropped in, and in our ironic rebel “stick it to the man” haze, we slurp them all in while thinking that we’re watching edgy rebellious TV.

Or, in English, “collective effort in order to complete a work of common interest.” Which is what’s happening here in Colletta starting tomorrow morning with the annual Festival dell’Olio. Here’s how it was described in 2005.

Although the weather here in Colletta has been fine since I arrived (especially compared to PEI, where it’s been snow flurrying), there’s been a mist in the mountains that has cast a shadow on everything below. As a result most of my photos look more “gloomy London” than “sunny Italy.” All that changed today:

I shot a whole bunch more photos this morning; it’s remarkable how much different Colletta and the mountains that surround it look in the sunshine:

I really wanted to be a customer of GloboTech, a New Brunswick-based VOIP company. When I switched my VOIP services (DID numbers in Boston and Montreal and outbound long distance) to them from VoicePulse back in April I was impressed with GloboTech’s back-end system, and their quick turnaround to technical support questions. And their services were well-priced and the voice quality reasonable.

Until last month.

First the Boston DID number stopped working. After a delay, their technical support folks got back to me to tell me that there was no solution to the Boston DID problem other than to get another number; I gave them the go-ahead on October 25th and still haven’t heard back, despite numerous emails and trouble ticket follow-ups. They appear to not respond to customer service inquires at all.

Next the Montreal DID number stopped working. No reply to a technical support request. Finally — and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back — last month’s bill arrived by email, and I was charged for both non-working DID numbers. As you might expect, I received no reply to my inquiry about that either.

So I went shopping. And ended up at Vitelity, another Canadian VOIP provider.

Their rates are attractive, especially for DIDs. And they were even able (with a 10-day delay, which they were up front about) to source me a DID in the local Dublin, NH exchange where Yankee is based. So far I haven’t had any technical support issues, so I can’t compare that end of the business to GloboTech — but if their service just works I’ll be a step ahead.

Here are some things I noticed when shopping for food at the COOP in Albenga, Italy; they may or may not be representative of food shopping in Albenga (or in Italy) in general. And I’m comparing to the usual state of affairs back home in Prince Edward Island.

• The fresh blueberries come from Argentina, just like they do (off-season) at home. And the cost is exactly the same here as in PEI.
• Yoghurt is much more like water here than like gloop.
• There’s a stunning lack of bread variety: basically it was baguette or crusty white.
• They have green cauliflower.
• The eggplants are much, much bigger. And less tubular.
• There are two full aisles of dried pasta. Many brands. Many shapes. Many grades. Many I’ve never seen before.
• There’s a very small area devoted to “pop and chips.” About 1/8th the space you would find at the Superstore in Charlottetown.
• Lots and lots of wine. And liquor.
• No canned chick peas (although I did find dried ones).
• Many more varieties of olives.
• Very little fresh milk; most of it is UHT.
• Ethernet and USB extension cables available, along with 10 times as many magazine titles as you’d find at home.
• COOP members get outfitted with some special paperback-book-sized e-gizmo that lets them add up their bill as they’re walking around the store and get priority check-out privileges as a result.
• You pay for every plastic bag you use. As a result, most people seem to bring their own recycled ones. This is a very good idea.
• Organic options are available, on the same shelves in the same section, for almost everything, from pasta to juice.
• No pie.

The simplest recipe I know is for Aglio E Olio — pasta with garlic and oil. I base mine on the recipe I found in The Best Recipe, an excellent cookbook.

It really is just pasta with garlic and oil. If I’m cooking for myself, I take three cloves of garlic and shop them finely. I slowly cook the garlic in 4 or 5 tablespoons of olive oil over a very low heat. The very low heat is important: there’s nothing worse than burnt garlic. You want to give the garlic a chance to mellow out and infuse itself into the olive oil. This takes about 25 minutes, and you will be impatient and turn up the heat the first time: don’t. Give it time.

Halfway through the garlic simmering, put some pasta on to boil (following appropriate water-salting guidelines; if you’re not salting your water you haven’t lived yet). You may also want to place a large bowl in the oven on low heat to warm up: nothing like a warm pasta bowl.

Once the garlic has turned a lovely shade of yellow-brown — the specific colour you’re looking for is tawny (which makes cub scouts extra especially qualified to judge) — remove it from the heat, drizzle all the oil and garlic over your drained pasta in a (perhaps heated) bowl.

Eat quickly, as it’s best very, very hot.

If you’ve done it right, it will be the best thing on earth. If something’s gone wrong, you will regret you ever tried. Don’t. Try again next time, making subtle adjustments (you probably overcooked or undercooked the garlic).

Works very well with crusty bread and hearty red wine.