It’s Art in the Open tomorrow, the one day of the year where all is truly right with the world. And Olivia and I are cooking up a skunkworks not-art-in-the-open project for the hours leading up to the 4:00 p.m. start. In the front yard of 100 Prince Street. Involving, in part, the letters R and M. And also the letters Z, L, O, A, M and the numbers 9, 6, 5, and 2. And magical forest creatures.

Watch this space for details.

I believe the collective noun for roundabouts is orgy.

And there certain is an orgy of roundabouts on St. Peters Road: in East Royalty from Riverside Drive to the Route 25 there are now four of them. I updated OpenStreetMap today with the latest.

Since my mother stepped on a plane to go home in January 2020 we’ve FaceTimed every day or two; I owe her a great debt for helping me keep my head above water through grief and COVID.

Tomorrow my mother again steps on a plane to come home, but this time home is (her new home on) Prince Edward Island.

Tonight we FaceTimed for the last time. Tomorrow we can give each other a hug. For the first time in a very very very long time.

With apologies for the spelling of javellisant, for which my only excuse is a career made on the back of typing javascript.

Tip of the hat to Krista-Lee.

I’ve been making my way around the menu at The Shed, and I’ve settled on their espresso macchiato as the best experience of their coffee and their talents.

From today’s Corrections and clarifications in The Guardian:

It is tautologous to refer to “Mount Snowdon” as we did in panel text (Snowdon strike, 30 July, page 18). The English name Snowdon is derived from the Old English snaw dun meaning “snow hill”; in Welsh the peak is Yr Wyddfa.

I didn’t know what “tautologous” meant, so I looked it up:

the saying of the same thing twice in different words, generally considered to be a fault of style (e.g., they arrived one after the other in succession).

So “Mount Snowdon” is tautologous because it’s saying, in essence, “Mount Snow Mount.”

As it happens, Olivia and I were searching for just that word earlier in the year when discussing phrases like “PIN number” and “ATM machine.”

The first record of my Sunday waffle-making practice is from a very snowy day in 2015, but it’s a ritual that got started many years before then.

In the beginning, Catherine made the tactical error of making pancakes one Sunday morning. They were very good, and so we clearly expected her to make them every Sunday after that.

She was, rightfully, having none of that, the accumulated tasks of the patriarchy already consuming more than her waking hours. So she cleverly engineered the gift of a waffle-maker for me for Christmas, from her mother, and thus achieved a clean transition from “Catherine’s Sunday Pancakes” to “Pete’s Sunday Waffles.”

And once you make waffles a half-dozen times for a child who revels in routine, it’s basically a lifetime weekly commitment. (To the point where when on vacation in Amersfoort in 2018 we ended up with stroopwafel for breakfast, after which Olivia famously threw up in my shoe; stroopwafel are many things, but they ain’t waffles).

Waffle-maker number one eventually broke; Catherine hurried her mother into the gift of a replacement, lest the expectation of patriarchal pancakes return.

Over the years I’ve stuck to the basic waffle recipe in the manual: 2 cups flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder, salt, 2 cups milk, ¼ cup melted butter, 2 eggs. After Catherine died, and I stopped keeping eggs in the house, I switched to Bob’s Red Mill egg replacer, which results in even better waffles; I should have switched years ago.

For the last month, though, there’s been trouble in waffle city: the waffles started to stick to the waffle-maker. At first I thought I was leaving out an important part of the recipe, but I triple-checked and I wasn’t, yet week after week I was having to scrape ur-waffles from the maker.

I finally realized that time had worn the non-stick coating off the pans, perhaps aided by the unfortunate “Pete mistakenly buys baking soda instead of powder” incident.

There was nothing to be done, given the centrality of the waffle-making operation to the smooth running of the household, but to replace the waffle-maker. Which is what we did yesterday, finding the same model—the Cuisinart WAF350C—in stock at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Tonight I arrived home at 6:30 p.m. after work having neglected to plan for supper; spotting the waffle-maker in the counter, I reasoned that if I switched out the cinnamon and replaced it with some savoury spices, I could make supper waffles.

The waffles turned out perfectly—perhaps my best ever—and were complemented by a cheese sauce that I whipped up while they were cooking.

We’re set for Sunday waffles with this maker for another decade at least. And perhaps—no commitments—the occasional midweek ones too.

It’s been 584 days since Catherine died, 569 days since the last family from away left our house, and 154 days since anyone other than Olivia and I set foot in here.

Which is to say: the place needs a good scrub.

Especially since my mother, who I haven’t seen in the aforementioned 569 days, will be moving in next week, a way station en route to her new home just up the street.

My mother is a kind and forgiving person. And it’s not like there are squirrels living in the house (I restrict the squirrels to the office). So it’s not so much stanching the squalor as it is cleaning the things I’ve trained my eyes not to see.

We paid a visit to Canadian Tire this afternoon, stocked up on various cleaning aids, and I will spend the week casually cleaning.

So far I’ve cleaned the shower, two toilets, three sinks, and the guest bedroom. The to-do list goes: wash bathroom floor, sweep living room, vacuum library, clean out fridge, mop hallway, buy new pillows. And on from there.

The bonus of all this is that a clean house is a nicer house to live in.