The first crocuses of the year appeared in the front garden at 100 Prince Street on Thursday, March 26, later than they have in the past 5 years.

See also 2020 (March 24), 2021 (March 12), 2022 (March 18), 2023 (March 20), 2024 (March 14), and 2025 (March 14).

The track Coma / Smoke, from Hailaker’s 2019 self-titled album, has been on frequent rotation here since I discovered it a few weeks ago.

On first listening I texted Lisa:

There’s a lot to love about this song. It’s a journey. 

And it is: up and down and around, intense and sparse. I love it.

I once sent Annie Mueller a note about how it seemed like she was listening to our lives and writing helpful essays to support us. It’s happened many times.

This morning on our British Summer Time walk, Lisa was leaning hard into ignoring traffic lights. I accused her of being a rule-follower, except in this glaring case.

(I am a rule follower; in this particular case I have Olle’s words to me in mind, about Copenhagen traffic, from years ago: “When the rules are ignored, people die.” I realize as I write this that I may have conflated Olle and Jack Nicholson.)

Coming back home, I found this in my feeds:

Break dumb rules. Break arbitrary small rules (or don’t). Break rules that exist only to create convenience for one group of people. Break rules that are immoral even if they’re not illegal. Whenever you can, break rules that exist only to uphold a system. It’s important.

Don’t break the rules that define who you are…

…Unless that’s not who you want to be anymore.

In addition to marking Lisa in the right (traffic lights sacrifice pedestrians for the convenience of cars), Mueller’s words are helpful in a larger therapeutic way: they hit me square in the middle of a “maybe this isn’t who I want to be anymore” phase. 

Keep listening, please.

I spent a good part of the day in the print shop working on a two-colour job, the second colour being Flame Red. It’s an ornery ink that’s hard to clean, so I don’t use it often. 

Having finished the 9 copies of the main job, I decided to blow off some steam by using the ink I was about to have to clean. Turns out I needed a good dose of transgression today, and this helped.

The letters are from the “odd wood type” drawer and have come to me in different ways. It’s not like me to embrace such “chaos,” but when you’re printing fuck, well, fuck.

Lisa and I just returned from spending three days in the Annapolis Valley. While we got storm-stayed in Amherst on the way home, the weather otherwise was sunny and warm, a welcome shift from boots weather to shoes weather.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• Maritime Express Cider in Kentville, in the former Cornwallis Inn, was a great meal. Olympic-level service for a tasty supper of Honey & Harissa Sausage Dumplings and Scallop & Squash Risotto.
• The Noodle Guy in Port Williams was an unexpected treat. We split the Cajun Shells with Sausage special and the Chicken Bacon Salad, which were both out of this world. An unexpected bonus: running into old friends from Saskatoon I hadn’t seen since the before times.
• The Bee’s Knees in Lawrencetown was a coffee stop in a place we didn’t expect to find more than gas station coffee. Rumpled vibe, stellar Chocolate-Tahini Brownie, great coffee.
• ArtCan Kitchen and Studios in Canning we found only because a clerk at the Acadia University Bookstore referred us there for art supplies. But there’s a gallery there too, and a colourful lunch spot where we enjoyed salad and sandwich.
• The Village Coffeehouse, next door to ArtCan, serves good coffee from Sissiboo Coffee.
• The owner of Port Royal Cheese in Annapolis Royal saw us looking through his window, sad that we’d missed closing time by 30 minutes. He let us in and then spent half an hour with us talking cheese, ultimately leading to a purchase of two types to take home for grilled cheese. That man knows cheese.
• We made the aforementioned grilled cheese with sourdough from the roadside Belle Isle Market, which operates on the honour system and sells a variety of breads, desserts, and seeds. The Olive Oil Sourdough lasted us only two days. So good, with the cheese, that we had grilled cheese for supper two nights in a row.
• We went to Valley Stove & Cycle because Lisa’s brother Tim told us to. We are in the market for neither stove nor cycle, but we learned more about woodburning stoves from Frank than I thought it possible to know. If you need a stove, go there. Probably true of bicycles too.
• An impromptu stop at Elephant Grass Printmakers Society in Annapolis Royal introduced us to Lorna Mulligan, an inventive creative, and to the work of the non-profit printmaking space. I hope we will go back and print sometime.
• Chatting to Lorna we learned about Andrew Steeves’ new adventure, Press of the Varying Hare. A quick email to Andrew, and he generously extended an invitation to visit the next day. Oh my: a custom-crafted temple of letterpress printing and bookbinding, forged by a man after my own heart, aesthetically and philosophically. 

Our home for the three nights we were in the Valley was a Home Exchange in Coldbrook that was just what we needed: clean, well-equipped, central.

The Al Purdy A-Frame Association just released its 2025 Annual Report.

It contains both a review of the organization’s work to nurture the country’s poets, and also sentences like “Geotechnical and hydrological studies revealed that the existing
crawlspace floor was below the water table.”

I recommend reading it while listening to The Al Purdy Songbook, a 2018 album featuring tracks from Bruce Cockburn, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and Gord Downie among others. It may be the most poetically Canadian thing ever.

You can contribute to the Al Purdy A-Frame Association on CanadaHelps.org.

A group of Europeans, flowing from the same bundle of Danish energy that begat Reboot all those years ago, gathered in Cophenhagen recently for Rebuild:

20 years ago, Europe had a thriving generation of social platforms and the entrepreneurs, designers, and programmers building them. A capability and an industry that have been lost.

Rebuild is a catalyst to support and serve the new generation of European social platforms. Gathering the people in Europe who can make it happen. The entrepreneurs, the pioneers, the investors, the digital leaders.

The gathering resulted in the drafting of a letter, which finishes with this call to action:

To the builders of the critical social platforms where we connect, forge friendships, share resources, knowledge and hope, you are building more than products. You are building for our culture. Our values. Our democracies. You are building for Europe, and our collective self-confidence. Change has never been more needed. But we know change is possible.

Now let’s build it.

Linda Liukas has more.

From University of Winds I learned about British Summer Time Walks, instigated by Blake Morris:

Replace your morning scroll with a morning stroll.

British Summer Time is a series of short sunrise walks in consideration of the time change. Over fourteen seasons, walkers from across Europe, Asia and the Americas have walked the dawn with me. You can join from anywhere in the world for one walk, all of them, or anywhere in between.

Its a simple process:

1. Go for a walk from fifteen minutes before sunrise until fifteen minutes after.

2. Share your sunrise through email or social media.  

This ticked a bunch of boxes for Lisa and me, so we committed (to ourselves, really). Today was day 7 of 22. Lisa’s heroically roused herself from her sickbed all but 2 mornings; somehow, against all odds, I’ve managed all 7.

Here’s the proof of life:

And here are the sunrise photos. Some days the sun was awfully elusive (the pouring rain on day 1 almost did us in).

There are still 15 British Summer Time Walks to go: join in!

Henry Jamison released Big Flower Light Go Boom yesterday. It’s a balm for what ails. From his Instagram:

Big Flower Light Go Boom, my fourth record, is out today. It’s been a long time coming and my life has changed quite a lot since I wrote it, but I stand behind it more than ever somehow. I said “big flower light go boom” when I saw fireworks for the first time and it’s that same response to the beauty and terror of the world that makes me keep writing songs. Other than that, it isn’t “about” anything. It isn’t a “project” and there’s no overarching concept. It’s just friendship and solitude all mixed together. It’s just…seeking.

I found a collection of school photos in an album at my mother’s house. We’ll come back to these later. 

One evening, a decade ago, I was looking down at my phone that was resting on a table below me. Suddenly I got dizzy. Very dizzy: the kind of dizzy where I had to hold onto the table to keep myself from falling over. 

The worst of it passed in a few minutes, but, give or take, I’ve had a persistent vague feeling of, well, something not being quite right ever since. Not dizziness, really. Not vertigo. But something just being off. Visual dissonance.

In the intervening ten years, I’ve sought help for understanding what’s going on. I talked to my family doctor, my optometrist, a physiotherapist specializing in vertigo, a physiotherapist specializing in concussions. 

What gradually emerged is that my eyes are misaligned. Rather than working smoothly together in a ballet of synchronized binocular vision, one eye is going off half-cocked some of the time, and everything that I have been feeling is a result, directly or indireclty, of that fact.

I found some relief from my symptoms by having my eyeglasses prescription adjusted, adding a prism, and using dedicated “computer glasses.” Then, last year, I had a pair of Neurolens eyeglasses prescribed, with a graduated prism, and they’ve made a noticeable improvement.

Despite these gains, which have helped enough to make daily life reasonable, I’ve remained curious about the underlying physiology behind my problem. Had a suffered a concussion that I somehow missed? Is it inherited? Something else? Is there anything else that can be done?

Last year, I stumbled, almost accidentially, upon the practice of orthoptics:

Orthoptists are the experts in diagnosing and treating defects in eye movements and problems with how the eyes work together, called binocular vision. 

I was excited to learn that there is an entire profession dedicated to the exact issue I was living with, and then even more excited to find out that Prince Edward Island has its very own publically funded orthoptics clinic.

Orthoptists investigate, diagnose, and treat abnormalities in eye alignment, eye movement, and binocular vision. A variety of treatments may help patients, including glasses, prisms, eye patching, eye exercises, etc.

I asked my optometrist to refer me to the clinic, in March of 2025. 

I had my appointment last week, a year later.

At that appointment, the provincial orthoptist, Mariah Hogan, spent about an hour with me, going through a series of tests and observations that bore something in common with an everyrday regular eye exam, of the sort of had dozens of times, but then extending into new territory focused on alignment, double vision, and the muscles of my eyes.

What emerged she described, in her report, as “likely congenital longstanding right cranial nerve 4 palsy.” More fully:

On full measures, his RHT increases on opposite (left) gaze and ipsilateral (right) tilt, in keeping w ith a Right CN4 palsy. As such, I also notice a marked right superior oblique underaction of -2.5, w ith corresponding right inferior oblique overaction of +3.

I have a Superior Oblique Palsy, also known as a Congenital Fourth Nerve Palsy:

Congenital fourth nerve palsy is a condition present at birth characterized by a vertical misalignment of the eyes due to a weakness or paralysis of the superior oblique muscle.

One amazing aspect of this is that I don’t experience double vision, something that affects many people with this issue. The orthoptist concluded that this was something I’ve likely lived with all my life, and that my brain has learned, essentially, how to turn off inputs from one eye when I’m looking at at distance—“suppression ability” is what she wrote. 

She went as far as to stimulate double vision in me through a series of lenses and gazes. 

Ack! 

Trust me, you don’t want double visiion. 

I don’t want double vision.

Fortunately, I don’t have it.

Because my brain is so good a supressing double vision “at the CPU level,” I’ve never known that it was doing this. And for it to have become so good means, she told me, that it was likely something my brain learned before I was 7 years old.

That I’ve only noticed residual side-effects of this palsy in my 50s isn’t unusual, and, indeed, looking at my father’s medical history, I found this:

Occasional problems with double vision started about 1995 but were not successfully resolved till 1997 when they were corrected with prisms in the glasses. Later detailed examination showed an imbalance in eye muscles which appeared to be stable. 

My father was 60 years old in 1997. 

I turn 60 next month. 

So, yes, congenital and likely inherited.

Now, pop back up and look at that collection of school photos. One of the symptoms of a superioe oblique palsy is a “characteristic head tilt” that “is usually away from the affected side to reduce eye strain and prevent double vision.” 

It’s there. In almost every photo:

I’ve never noticed this head tilt, and it’s never been pointed out to me, but I know it well, because I’ve lived with persistent neck strain that I imagine goes hand in hand with it.

After living with this so far in life, I’ll live with this for the rest of my life (there are surgical interventions possible, but not universally recommended; maybe an option for the future).

Beyond the relief I feel at having what I’ve been living with ascribed to an actual physiological condition (as opposed to say, being cursed), I’ve found the metaphor of my brain swooping in to protect me from double vision, without me even knowing this was happening, as a very helpful metaphor in my work with a therapist. 

Our brains are amazing. And plastic. And tricky.