Note to self: On March 15, 2004, a Google search for “Oliver Rukavina” results in three hits. Check back in ten years.

We are on the cusp of that season, known well to those of us who call the northeastern seaboard home, where morning can feel like the fullest bloomiest time of spring only to have a full-fledged blizzard hit by afternoon.

This is what happened in Dublin, New Hampshire this afternoon.

Witness the following shots from The Old Farmer’s Almanac Webcam:

The top shot is from 9:55 a.m. this morning, the bottom one was taken seven hours later at 4:55 p.m.

As reported in this space earlier, I engaged in “extreme packing” for my trip to San Francisco earlier this month.

The untold story behind this (and, to be honest, unrealized truth for me until I arrived there) is that when I was 14 and traveled around the U.S.A. with my father by Greyhound Bus, I overpacked, and was forced to lug way, way too much luggage around the country. For example, I carried not one, but two transistor radios with me. It was the latent memory of this lugging, I think, that got me on the extreme packing plan.

And, of course, there was no small amount of street cred establishing at stake, what given that I was traveling aside my young compatriots/landlords from upstairs.

My usual traveling kit is an American Tourister soft-sided briefcase that holds my laptop, assorted chargers and papers, passport, etc. along with a Jack Wolfskin pack that we purchased to go to Thailand that carries everything else.

For this extreme packing trip, I slimmed down to fit everything inside a smallish Targus knapsack/laptop case. Here’s what I did to shrink down:

• In in addition to the clothes on my back, I carried only two additional changes of clothes, and arranged to do a laundry midway through the trip. I had clean clothes every day, but only needed to carry half as many as I usually do.
• I took lightweight clothes, and I rolled them up tightly to pack them in the least amount of space.
• Rather than carrying a complete toilet kit, filled with every possible toiletry need, I carried a small collection of essential items in the pockets of the knapsack.
• I didn’t carry any bulky books, presents, or other space-sucking items.
• I restricted my gift purchases to small items only.

As a result, I was able to handily fit everything inside the knapsack, which I carried on rather than checking.

While things were still perhaps 2-3 pounds heavier than I would have liked, the effect was rather dramatic: I felt much more mobile, much less tied to my luggage. While I did leave my knapsack at my hotel after checking out on the last day, I could have easily carried it with me.

Here’s a complete list of the contents of my knapsack:

• Two each of shirts, socks, underwear.
• One pair of pyjamas.
• Toothbrush, mini-toothpaste, mini-deodorant, comb, electric shaver.
• Apple iBook, with charger.
• Canon PowerShot S100 digital camera, with charger.
• Nokia 3285 cell phone, with charger.
• 4 feet of telephone cord.
• One copy of Harper’s, one copy of The New Yorker
• Two pens.
• Passport.

Compare this to what Tom Peters carries in his luggage, which includes an eighteen-pound bolt-cutter, and an Australian cricket ball but, oddly, only T-shirts and ball caps for clothing. Hmmmm.

I’m off again in April for another bizarre trip (Charlottetown - Montreal - New York - Boston - New Hampshire - Boston - Phoenix - Denver - Boston - Charlottetown), and I’m going to take another crack at this. Stay tuned.

The CBC is reporting that “Native activist John Joe Sark wants to change Founders’ Hall to reflect the Island’s Miꞌkmaq heritage.” The response from the Capital Commission, through their Executive Director, is:

“Unfortunately, history is such that Aboriginal people were not invited to the table,” she says. “Founders’ Hall acknowledges that, acknowledges the fact that they were not invited, nor were women invited. You know, that’s history and we can’t rewrite history.”

While I agreed with the substance of what Green says, it does beg the question: why have we built a monument that pays homage to a racist, sexist event in our history?

Indeed perhaps we would learn more about ourselves as a society if Founders’ Hall abandoned its rather pointless elevation of the “Fathers” (do rich white men from two centuries ago really need more deification?) and rather concentrated exclusively on that selfsame exclusion of women and aboriginals from the process. I think that the social, cultural, and political forces that allowed for that exclusion are far more worthy of examination, discussion, and public display.

Of course that wouldn’t “sell well” to the bus tours.

And that’s the problem when tourism, rather than building a civil society, is the guiding force behind institutions like this.

I spent two days last week in the pleasant company of my old friend Oliver and his fiance Sophie. Sophie is a vet student; in mere weeks she will be a bona fide veterinarian.

I, on the other hand, am not a veterinarian.

The reason for this is as follows: when it came time to apply for university, I found that the application process to enter the “veterinarian track” involved the composition of an essay along the lines of “why I want to be a veterinarian.”

I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what I would write.

Partly I believe this to be a result of have little interest in animals or veterinary science.

But also, even if I was interested in being a veterinarian, I can’t imagine how, at 18, I would have possessed enough self-confidence to state, emphatically, “why I want to be a veterinarian,” in a manner that would be at all believable to anyone.

All of which leads me to this brief essay, formulated at 3:00 a.m. this morning while in bed, not sleeping, wondering if Oliver was okay. It is my admission essay to enter training as an expositor. I have confidence, though no evidence, that such training is available: I imagine it to be located at an educational mid-point between creative writing and journalism.

I like to write. The process of writing gives me great pleasure and helps keep me sane. Sometimes I write well; mostly I write voluminously, which is sometimes good and sometimes funny.

My problem, though, and my chief reason for seeking training: I feel like the words I write, especially those involved in the description of people, places and things, are too blunt an instrument. My writing lacks nuance.

While I can sometimes insert a “stunning” or a “compelling” or a “vile” or a “crappy” into the mix, much of my descriptive writing falls back on the twin crutches of “wonderful” and “horrible.”

“The sushi was wonderful, but the atmosphere was horrible.” There’s a compelling sentence for you.

I know that language is far more powerful and subtle a tool, and I’d like to become proficient at using it that way.

I know enough to know that. That seems like a good starting point.

Now, are their actually schools of expository writing?

Our family has been cloaked in various sicknesses for the last week, from coast to coast. Most appear to be variations of the flu, or infections of the viral kind.

This all culminated in a visit tonight to the Emergency Room at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Oliver. Not because there was an emergency, mind you, but simply because our family doctor was too busy to see Oliver today, and he has been running a fever of 103 for a couple of days. We’re still in the “overly cautious, better safe than sorry” phase of parenting, where the downsides of the eternal waiting room visit don’t yet trump the upsides of a professional diagnosis. So off we went.

I’d be willing to bet that the QEH Emergency Room is the consistently most stressful place on Prince Edward Island. Everyone there is sick or injured. And they’re all being made to wait a lot longer than they think they should, rightly or wrongly (yes, triage is triage, but that doesn’t matter much when you’re in pain).

Like most emergency rooms I’ve seen the inside of, the QEH’s version is decorated in a fashion best decribed as “prison modern.” There are generic, uncomfortable chairs. Old, moldy magazines. A television playing some innocuous channel that nobody is interested in watching. And the room is plastered with various warning signs from floor to ceiling: don’t smoke, don’t use your cell phone, wait your turn, cover your mouth when you sneeze, take a number, stay out of here, and so on.

It is not, let’s just say, a very welcoming place. Add to that the pall of sickness, injury and death that permeates, and the result is a place that serves only to make those forced to wait there more stressed than they started out.

I’m no doctor, but I’ll willing to bet that’s not a good thing, “wellness” wise.

What would it take to turn the QEH Emergency Room from a health gulag into something more welcoming, and, dare I say, pleasant to wait in? It’s never going to be perfect, because people waiting there are still going to be sick and injured. But surely with the investment of a small amount of money and effort, the environment could be significantly improved, couldn’t it?

Surely the benefits — less stress for patients (meaning less stress for staff) and less of a problem with long waits (because they’re not so painful) — would be worth it.

My friend Harold Stephens has a new travel column on the Thai Airways International website.

Ever since I took the Greyhound bus across America with my father in 1980, I’ve been unable to stand the smell of diesel in the morning. Although our trip was wonderful, there’s something very depressing about the smell of the idling bus. That smoking was allowed back in those days (except in Utah) didn’t improve the onboard situation.

Which makes this new luxury bus between New York and Boston very interesting. It’s just $69 each way, includes television, WiFi/Ethernet Internet connection, and snacks. Takes 4 hours. I can’t imagine that you could get downtown to downtown by plane any faster.

I’m going to be in New York in April, and I’ll need to get to Boston, so I may give this a try. I wonder if the inside opulence will mask the diesel.

Here’s a classic photo, from the collection of Steven Garrity, taken in San Francsico:

It could be a promotion slick for a new wacky sitcom, a sort of “dot com Odd Couple.”

Notice the similarity to this classic photo of George Burns and Gracie Allen:

The Formosa Tea House is open in their new location at 186 Prince Street (making Prince St. into a sort of “Eddie’s Lunch-Formosa Corridor”). Rumours are that the old location, on University Ave., will become a new sushi place, run by the same sushi chef that serves the Atlantic Superstore.

I’ve had lunch twice at the new Formosa. The space is big and bright and very nicely laid out; the decor is sort of “hunting lodge meets Taiwan” which is better than it sounds. There’s a new page of non-snacks on the menu, of which the “Rice Topping” is my favourite: it’s a melange of vegetables and mushrooms over rice. Very tasty, and very, very filling (you don’t need to order anything else). The Lemon Ice Tea is as good as ever.

More and more we are living in a very culinarily well-served city here in Charlottetown. It’s especially heartening to see businesses like the Formosa and Interlude base their operations on full-time residents rather than the tourist trade; it means they’re around for the long haul.