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.

When we left our story, I was tucking in for the night at the Pan Pacific Hotel in San Francisco.

The Pan Pacific is an expensive hotel — rooms are regularly in the $200+ range per night. I found a $149/night rate through their website, and this was my impetus for staying. The hotel’s expense, however, isn’t in things that I value: a stunning atrium, a television in the bathroom, with marble on the floors, a two-line speakerphone. In other words, it’s all about prestige and feeling important, rather than utility. The bed was vaguely uncomfortable. The staff, while capable, didn’t exceed my expectations. The soap was mediocre.

All of which suggests to me that vacuous “business class” hotels are best avoided, in favour of smaller, cheaper, more lively hotels. Ironically, like the King George down the hill where I spent the first two nights, and where my happy colleagues at silverorange remained. Live and learn.

Tuesday morning was consumed with various in-room business activities — a spot on the CBC with Matt about Super Tuesday, a conference call with Yankee, answering some email — after which I checked my bag and headed out into The City for my last day in the sun.

Tuesday was an amazing day, weather-wise. Probably 18 degrees at its best, sunny and cloudless.

I caught the Muni Metro (San Francisco’s other subway, the one that’s not BART) down to Irving Street and, by complete coincidence, ended up across the street from the oddly-named Tart to Tart, the place where Oliver and Sophie and I had cake and WiFi on Monday. I grabbed a bagel at Noah’s, a juice at Jamba Juice and then walked around the neighbourhood, which was a nice mix of business and residential, much in the same style as Mont Royal in brother Steve’s Montreal neighbourhood. I grabbed a quick (and delicious) burger at Darla’s (with very good iced tea, and world class service) and then walked up through Golden Gate Park to the Haight.

Walking up Haight to Ashbury, I encountered a peculiar sort of cabal: groups of young people, many with tough looking dogs at their side, roamed the streets. My assumption was that many of these kids stepped on a bus in Boise or Butte or Burlington with a one way ticket to the San Francisco, headed to Haight and Ashbury, and, once there, had no idea what to do other than wander around looking for enlightenment. I wish them luck.

I walked along Haight to Castro, down to Market, and then stopped in at Flax for a refill of superfluous art and design gear. While I was checking out, Daniel, broken off from the silverorange pack during their driving tour of the rich and famous of Sunnyvale, phoned to invite me to dinner, and we rendezvoused shortly thereafter for another try at Thai Ginger.

A short final wander around the Apple Store and environs, a walk down Market to the Ferry Terminal Building and a trolley ride back, a quick glass of wine and we headed down to the BART to ride to the airport.

As timing had it, taking BART would have seen us arriving in the suburbs of the airport at 10:00 p.m. for a 10:20 p.m. flight, so we hightailed it out of the BART station and hailed a taxi, which got us there in under 20 minutes.

We tracked down the silverorange mother ship, checked through security, and then settled in for a long night of air travel.

As luck would have it, I was assigned a seat with no neighbours, so I was able to stretch out and almost sleep (it’s hard to sleep on three uneven and vaguely objectionable seat cushions, but I did a pretty good job nonetheless). We arrived in Toronto at 6:01 a.m. (planes aren’t allowed to land there before 6:00 a.m., which forced us to delay departure in San Francisco), wandered around catatonic until our flight to Charlottetown and arrived, beaten down and sleepy, around noon.

I spent the following 18 hours in variations of sleepiness, and now, two days later, appear to have fully recovered from jet lag.

End analysis: warm is better than cold; snow has no redeeming qualities; San Francisco is a nice, comfortable, manageable city; I need more Thai food in my life; the silverorange boys are good travel mates. It was good to spend time with Johnny and Jodi (soon to be Islanders) and with Oliver and Sophie (soon to be North Carolinians). And it’s good to be home.

I’m due in New York City in April to do some RedHat Linux juggling; we’re planning a family convoy to Yankee in July; and, with luck, by fall we will have passports again, and will head off somewhere for more maximum fun.

My how I do love to travel.

Okay, I’m willing to accept the whole “Magic Ninety Three dot One” thing. I don’t like it, but it’s hard to be critical of a techo-posturing when it’s happening inside the soul-free puffery that is “Great Lite Rock Hits.”

But it appears, at least from the evidence presented on a brief listen to the Halifax CBC afternoon show, that there might be a movement afoot to rebrand CBC Radio One as “CBC Radio Dot One.”

I’m hoping against hope that this was a momentary slip or two by a green host, and not an across-the-board change.

Last night on Compass, Hon. Mitch Murphy, the Provincial Treasurer, engaged in open speculation about his plans for dealing with the provincial deficit. One of the trial balloons he sent up was a new health care premium. Used in some other provinces already, this is a monthly or yearly fee, sometimes income-geared, that is charged as a separate fee to every citizen in return for health care privileges.

I don’t think this is a good idea.

I’m all for paying for health care, and perhaps more than most families, I’m in a position, after the birth of a child, and three major operations for our family in two years, to appreciate the value of having high quality, well-funded health care at our disposal.

I don’t have any problem paying more for health care. As long as the system is well-regulated, available to all, and is client-centred, I’ll contribute happily.

But introducing a health care premium is going to complicate my life, and the lives of my fellow citizens. Needlessly. It’s going to require an entirely new bureaucracy to maintain. We’re all going to have to remember to pay our premiums, and staff will have to be in place to send out invoices, process payments, chase down non-payers. There are going to have to be systems in place at the doctor’s office to handle people who haven’t paid their premiums: do they get denied access? And so on.

All of this seems like a waste when we already have an effective, well-maintained system of filing, collection, and enforcement through the income tax system. A simple administrative change to the provincial income tax rate could achieve the same increase in revenue, without the need to introduce an entirely new level of bureaucracy.

So, Minister Murphy, please consider this as feedback to your trial balloon: charge me more for health care, but do it simply by increasing my taxes. Please.

Edward Hasbrouck provides a helpful update on Amazing Race 5. I can’t wait.