A year ago today, Catherine and Oliver and I were wandering around Bilbao, Spain, and The Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire fell off the mountain.

Eddie’s Lunch, which played a starring role in Oliver’s uterine life and has been mentioned in these pages more times than I can recall, left our radar for a year. A combination of things led to this, mostly that our city orientation shifted north (note, I use that in the strange Charlottetown use of the world; in the rest of the world you can read “south”) when I moved my office out of the house.

On Friday night, though, Catherine and Oliver were still in the thick of colds, and I wanted to eat out, so I took my bike on a long swing through Victoria Park, down Pownall and Rochford to Water, along Water to Prince and up Prince to the corner of King, where Eddie’s sits.

Calling it Eddie’s Lunch is Wrong, of course, as it hasn’t been Eddie’s Lunch for a long time: it was Viva’s for a while, then it was Viva’s in sign only, and then it went unnamed for a while. Now it’s the Marina Grill (or is it MarinaGrill, with no space?).

And it’s fantastic. In one fell swoop the “who serves the best chicken shawarma in town?” question has been rendered moot: you can get it there. Unable to believe that Friday night’s chicken shawarma was so good, I forced Catherine and Oliver to accompany me back for dinner tonight. It was that good.

More interestingly, the Lebanese rice has reached heights it’s never reached for me: it’s tasty, crunchy, warm and wonderful. And the shawarma comes with a nice side-salad, with a very nice Italian dressing to boot.

Catherine and Oliver shared the F.R.T.H., which is a combination platter of fatire, tabouli, rice, amd hummous. Catherine said it was the best tabouli she’s ever had.

If life has led you away from Eddie’s of late, it’s time to go back. You’ll see us there.

Here are the technology-related expenditure motions at the April City of Charlottetown Council meeting:

Moved by Councillor Stu MacFadyen; Seconded by Councillor Kim Devine:

That the City of Charlottetown enter into a contract with ESRI Canada to provide software, installation and support associated with the Complaint Tracking Project in the amount of $51,295.00 plus taxes. Further that this purchase will be expensed out of the 2004 Operational Budget within the Smart Communities Account.

Moved by Councillor Stu MacFadyen; Seconded by Councillor Kim Devine:

That the City of Charlottetown accept the quotation of $19,872.00 plus taxes from Xwave to purchase twelve handheld computers and software associated with the Complaint Tracking Project. Further that this purchase will be expensed out of the 2004 Operational Budget within the Smart Communities Account.

Moved by Councillor Stu MacFadyen; Seconded by Councillor Ken Gillis:

That the City of Charlottetown agrees to enter into a four year lease purchase arrangement with DeltaWare Systems Inc to provide the Oracle 11i Upgrade and hosting services as per the following cost schedule:

• 2004 $35,072.50
• 2005 $35,072.50
• 2006 $35,072.50
• 2007 $15,000.00

All of the motions carried unanimously.

Wily brother Mike spotted the following. Here’s the Canadian logo:

And here’s the U.S. logo:

For some reason, they drop “The” in Canada.

I answered a political poll for the first time today; I’d been called before, but this was the first time I had the patience to sit through the ten minute grilling. It wasn’t clear who was doing the polling, but whoever it was, they were obviously looking to gauge public opinion on the Tory government here on the Island, especially on matters of public trust. There were a lot of questions like “on a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate your trust for the following: Robert Ghiz, Pat Binns, Mike Currie, Mitch Murphy?” and “how would you rate the Government’s handling of industrial policy and job creation?”

Obviously the answers to a poll like this could be used by the government to defend itself, or by the opposition to find weakness.

The most interesting aspect of the poll was when I answered “Green Party” to “which party would you most likely support in a federal election?” As a result, Green Party had to be added by the computer to the list of eligible parties for every other question in the poll. I’m sorry now I didn’t say “particle beam weapon party” because that would have been kind of fun to hear over and over.

The CBC reports today:

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital needs up to $22 million in repairs according to a report tabled in the P.E.I. legislature on Friday. It says the hospital is in critical need of improvement, that it is outdated, and unable to deliver core services according to national standards… Doctors who work at the hospital conducted the study.

Later in the same story comes Health Minister Chester Gillan’s response:

Health minister Chester Gillan said the report doesn’t go far enough. He said Friday that his department will try to find out exactly what work needs to done.

“Our next step is to put a functional committee together to take a look at how are we going to do this.”

Anyone with any experience at all with bureacracy, especially the extra-special variety of health bureacracy, knows that “put a functional committee together” means “we’re going to have lots of pointless meetings for three years before we do anything.”

Frankly, I fully prepared to take the word of the doctors at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital about what needs to be done; if you need to raise my taxes to do the work, go ahead. Just do it, and stop the obfuscating.

In 1976 I was 10 years old. Here’s the prime time schedule for the 1976 television season. It makes me feel vaguely ill to have lived through that.

For comparison, here are the prime time schedules in 1986, when I was 20, and in 1996, when I was 30.

The first “appointment viewing” I can remember was Wonder Woman, on Friday nights in the 70s, and Hill Street Blues, on Thursday nights in the 80s. And of course the endless reruns of WKRP that we watched every night at supper, twice (once of CKCO Kitchener and then 1/2 hour later on CFTO Toronto).

I missed most of the television between 1986 and 1992 because I didn’t have a TV where I was living. From 1992 to 1998 I watched a lot of CTV and CBC because we had a TV, but no cable. When we got cable in 1998 (they finally agreed to string the wire up 200 feet from the corner), there was no looking back.

After running the Yankee webservers on variants of Apache version 1 for many, many years, we finally made the leap to Apache version 2 today. The transition was seamless, and the load on the system is significantly less post-upgrade.

My anarchist landlords upstairs have launched a project to consolidate their individual DVD libraries into a central DVD archive, from which they each may borrow freely. And they’ve invited me to participate.

This meant that I had to actually look at what DVDs I own.

To begin with, as the son of a librarian, I am genetically not predisposed towards media asset ownership: the idea of buying a DVD is foreign to me, and so it’s only in the rarest of cases that I do so.

What I’ve found, alas, might be too embarassing to contribute to the hipster archive upstairs:

• Heaven Can Wait
• Roman Holiday
• Sabrina
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s
• Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me
• Utopia

Not exactly chocked full of hard-edged hipsterism, although you must say there is interesting variety, albeit with an emphasis on Audrey Hepburn films.

Now that my colleagues upstairs have gone reviewing crazy, I’m feeling the pressure to keep up. As such, reading this stroller review prompts me to sing the praises of the Maclaren Volo, a very portable travel stroller.

A travel stroller is one of the most valuable pieces of equipment you can take with you when travelling with young children. When we were in Thailand two years ago, we took a Kelty backpack to carry Oliver on our backs, a selection based on our assumption that a stroller wouldn’t work well in the rough and tumble world of Bangkok and environs. It was a bad choice: we completely underestimated the effect that the heat of Bangkok (30 degrees C when it was cool) would have on us (carrying) and Oliver (confined inside a hot backpack). Within a couple of days we had set the Kelty carrier aside, and traded it in for a travel stroller borrowed from a friend.

When we returned home, we realized that we needed a travel stroller of our own. The problem with most travel or “umbrella” strollers — i.e. the kind that it’s easy to find locally at Zellers or Walmart — is that although they fold up to be quite small, they’re very uncomfortable for the kid that has to sit in them because the unfolded seat is too small, and too low-slung. This type of stroller doesn’t tend to hold up well either, especially when travelling hard (i.e. being flung into airplane holds, etc.).

After doing a lot of web research, it seemed that the Maclaren Volo was what we were looking for, and when we were in Seattle on the way to Johnny and Jodi’s wedding, we found a dealer with a good selection, and bought one.

We have not been disappointed. The Volo has served us well, both on local car trips to Halifax and Moncton, where it folds up nicely into the car’s trunk, and on a three week trip to Europe last spring.

Good points:

• It’s very tough: we’ve flung it around all over the place, and it has never suffered for it. The wheels haven’t worn out or broken off, which is something that’s happened to every other stroller we’ve owned.
• It’s very light: as light or lighter as a cheaper umbrella strollers, and easy to sling over your back with the included carrying strap, when you need to lug it folded up.
• It’s comfortable: perhaps most important! The unfolding mechanism creates a seat that’s much less “sunken,” so the child’s bum doesn’t contort downwards. Oliver has happily spent many hours in the Volo, and has never complained. The mesh fabric breathes well, so there’s less opportunity for kids to get hot and sweaty.
• Over the lap and over the shoulder straps means kid is less likely to fall out, even when going up and down escalators, or being carried up stairs.
• It folds up quickly, and you only need one hand to do so: see this video on Maclaren’s website for a demonstration.
• Lots of underseat storage: when we were in Spain, lugging two large backpacks, a car seat, and Oliver, we could stick Oliver in the stroller, one of the backpacks under Oliver, the car seat on one of our backs and the big backpack on the other’s back. We weren’t nimble, but we could navigate. You can stash an incredible amount of stuff there.

The only downside we’ve found is that it’s not a cheap purchase. With accessories (a rain cover, a shade cover, and a padded seat, all removeable), we paid about $175 Canadian for stroller; you can buy a cheap umbrella stroller for $30 at Walmart. That said, you’ll probably have to buy 3 or 4 cheap umbrella strollers to equal the lifetime of the Volo, and you’ll have a much less comfortable kid if you go that route.

You probably wouldn’t want to use the Volo as your around-town everyday stroller (unless you’re an always-traveling nomad family): it’s missing cup holders, you can’t recline the seat to let your kid sleep, and it doesn’t have any sort of shock-absorbers, so kids feel every bump in the sidewalk. It’s also not well-suited to winter use because of the mesh seat (although you can mitigate this somewhat with the padded seat accessory).

But if you’re looking for a rugged, compact, comfortable stroller to tour the world with, this is the best we’ve found.