From Locking Type by Carl Middleton:

Anyone who is lucky enough to own type and a printing press by default is a custodian of the heritage of letterpress printing, and in turn holds artefacts which have helped inform the evolution of communication. The newest elements housed in any letterpress workshop would have been manufactured around forty years ago and the oldest can be one, two or even three hundred years old! As time passes it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find replacement parts and even to cast new letters – therefore it is very important that what each of us own, is taken care of.

Wise words. I feel it.

We’re closing in on a month away from home, give or take, as our Summer of Nova Scotia, catalysed by L.’s need to be relieved from summer camp CIT duties on the weekends, continues. We were a week near Inverness, Cape Breton, a week in Port Wade, in the Annapolis Valley, and we’re midway through a rainy week here in Bedford.

This morning I came across this, by Maggie Martens, in How Much Work Will I Do On My Summer Vacation?:

It’s not awful, though, working on vacations. I know I’m not supposed to say that. I know we all need more rest. But I’m also a working parent. And a freelance working parent of young children. Which means, everything I do is taking time from something else. And the work I do is because I need to pay my credit card bill, yes, but also because I feel called to do it. I enjoy writing about women athletes, and doing interviews, and digging deep on book research that I don’t think anyone else will do. Le sigh. Also, sometimes I need a little vacation from family on these trips (remember, I did not grow up doing this) and having an excuse to hole up in a coffee shop early one morning by myself to send a few emails, or draft up a story, isn’t the worst thing ever. Is that healthy? Probably not. But I’ll take some time to reassess that next year  — maybe on my family vacation.

During my intense working life—which is to say, “while I was working”, which is to say “while I was working, and had built a system that was entirely dependent on my hyper-vigilance”—I was no stranger to working while on vacation. Summer vacation. Winter vacation. All the vacations.

Like Martens I turned this into a lifestyle rather than an inconvenient intrusion. I coded websites in the attic of an ancient house near Montpelier, I managed servers on a makeshift desk in a reimagined medieval village in Italy, I scratched my solo travel itch by building adventures into work trips to New England. With the exception of some almost-completely-work-free travel with Olivia during school breaks, when work would have simply been untenable, I took my work on the road with me.

Like Martens wrote, “It’s not awful, though, working on vacations.” 

Being able to climb down a flight of stone steps to the village café, in view of the mountains, beats going to the same old same old coffee shop yet again. 

An excuse to retreat from family caregiving duties and self-isolate in a work bunker (or, in the early days, stumbling around an ancient city looking for open wifi) was a needed and welcome pressure-release.

Taking my work on the road was a cornerstone of being able to maintain my lifestyle as a well-paid one-man operation responsible for the hardware and the software from underground to the surface.

The lifestyle, which I lived for more than 25 years, had great benefits. It also rendered me unused to the idea of a vacation with idle time: on the working road all the idle moments got swept up in escape to the work bunker, so the days were, in essence, fun family activity, work, eat, sleep. The idea of rest didn’t really enter into it. Neither did the idea of rest with a partner, in particular with a partner who herself is challenged by the very idea of deserving rest, let alone how to take it.

I’d like to say that, absent the pressures of day-to-day digital work, I’ve learned how to rest, but I’m still figuring it out. The idle still seems too idle. I feel the pressure to write something. Or make sure my webserver is up to date. Or to plan something. Or just to fidget and spin time away. Or to endlessly introspect. None of which is restful nor relaxing.

I do not begrudge the years I spent working-on-vacation, vacationing-while-working: I got to see some fascinating places, to live as a local, to imagine living otherwise, elsewhere. But I did rob myself of the opportunity to learn how to stop. I’m grateful for the chance to learn it now.

In search of a relatively flat cycling route that would show us an interesting cross-section of Halifax, we found our way to the Chain of Lakes Trail this afternoon. The trail runs 7¼ km, starting on Joseph Howe Boulevard and ending on Beechville Park Drive. It’s a completely separated-from-car-traffic paved trail that starts off urban, becomes park-and-lake intensive, and ends up in an industrial area.

We had out bikes loaded into the car, and parked at the Atlantic Superstore on Joseph Howe; the trail starts right across the street.

There were two highlights along the way:

• The 5K Cafe—yes, it’s almost exactly 5 km from the start of the trail—serves coffee and pastries, has a pleasant outdoor patio, and shares a space with 3 Mile Outfitters, which sells shoes, stoves, packs, and other outdoor gear.
• Lee Valley Tools, just a few hundred metres off the trail, is, well, Lee Valley Tools, selling all manner of interesting things. Who knew you could cycle there!?

It’s remarkable that such a well-maintained, separated, well-signed active transportation trail can wend its way through a cross-section of the Halifax landscape that you would never imagine would include such a thing. It’s a model for how things will be in the future.

John McPhee, writing in 2015 in The New Yorker, about the process of being edited at Time magazine:

After four days of preparation and writing—after routinely staying up almost all night on the fourth night—and after tailoring your stories past the requests, demands, fine tips, and incomprehensible suggestions of the M.E. and your senior editor, you came in on Day 5 and were greeted by galleys from Makeup with notes on them that said “Green 5” or “Green 8” or “Green 15” or some such, telling you to condense the text by that number of lines or the piece would not fit in the magazine. You were supposed to use a green pencil so Makeup would know what could be put back, if it came to that. I can’t remember it coming to that.

McPhee quotes Calvin Trillin—a colleague at both Time and The New Yorker—on this process of “greening”:

I don’t have any interest in word games—I don’t think I’ve ever done a crossword or played Scrabble—but I found greening a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle. I was surprised that what I had thought of as a tightly constructed seventy-line story—a story so tightly constructed that it had resisted the inclusion of that maddening leftover fact—was unharmed, or even improved, by greening ten per cent of it. The greening I did in Time Edit convinced me that just about any piece I write could be improved if, when it was supposedly ready to hand in, I looked in the mirror and said sternly to myself “Green fourteen” or “Green eight.” And one of these days I’m going to begin doing that.

When I worked in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner in the early 1990s, the author was cut right out of this process of trimming articles for space: it happened as the newspaper was being made up, in a dialog between an editor and a printer, standing in front of the full page in question, as it was being assembled.

Stories typed by writers into old-style terminals in the newsroom came out of the Compugraphic typesetting machine in the composing room on long strips of photographic paper. We printers waxed the backs of these strips—using a clever machine that applied hot wax to one side and not the other—and then sliced them up into newspaper-column-sized chunks. 

With an editor by our side, working from a rough sketch of the page they brought out with them, we’d start to assemble the editorial copy around the ads that had previously been placed. Headline first, sometimes a subhead, and then the copy for each story.

The copy-fitting process was inexact enough—more of a “this many words takes up roughly this much space”—that, inevitably, either parts of the story would need to be trimmed (literally: we’d cut out sentences with a knife), or space added by increasing the line spacing in later paragraphs (again with a knife).

Compared to the precision of today’s digital tools, this “real time greening” process makes it seem wondrous that this is how newspapers were made up well into my adulthood.

Calvin Trillin, in the introduction to 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering, by Alice Waters:

I tend to eat in the upstairs café at Chez Panisse rather than in the more formal dining room downstairs, but I find it comforting to know that the dining room is there. Why? Because for fifteen years, beginning in the late sixties, I was in a strange town every three weeks for a series of New Yorker pieces, and my last resort for finding something decent to eat was to approach the motel clerk and say, “Not the restaurant you took your parents to on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary; the restaurant you went to the night you got home after thirteen months in Korea.” In Berkeley, I’m pleased to say, those are the same restaurant.

This is so inventive!

I’m reading a book in the Crosspoint e-reader:

I pop up the settings, select “Show page as QR,” scan the QR code with my phone, and now I have the text to do with as I please:

Like this:

Scheme stood, offering her hand. “It’s the most powerful weapon of all.” She waggled her fingers and, reluctantly, Quintessandra allowed herself to be hoisted up. “It’s a story!”

We were pleasantly surprised to hear the musical stylings of the incomparable Nick Doneff during lunch on the MV Northumberland crossing from Wood Islands to Caribou this morning. He really is a musical treasure.

“It’s times like this that I’m proud to be an Islander,” Lisa said. Agreed.