The 2017 Ed Sheeran track New Man showed up on my playlist this morning. It’s sung from the perspective of the old boyfriend, ruminating on the new boyfriend: I heard he spent five hundred pounds on jeans Goes to the gym at least six times a week Wears boat shoes with no socks on … | Continue reading
Lisa and I are plotting to install a life preserver at the unsupervised beach nearest to where we’re spending time this summer. We’ve got the container and the device, and now turn our attention to mounting the container on a pole on the beach, a job that’s required us to level u … | Continue reading
Olivia and I had a quick pop-in to Starbucks by the mall while we were out and about this afternoon. I ordered a cold brew, and she ordered a Frappuccino. My drink came out almost immediately, but Olivia’s was nowhere to be seen after 10 minutes, so I asked the staff if her order … | Continue reading
I find cars notoriously difficult to sketch: something about all those angles. And the confounding roundness of the tires. Something inevitably ends up being not quite right. An automotive uncanny valley. Sketching my car this morning was instructive, in part because I realized t … | Continue reading
A long week, punctuated by a bicicletta under the gazebo by the shore. | Continue reading
The personal blog of Peter Rukavina. | Continue reading
My grandfather Dane Rukavina, who we called Papa Dan, had his 15 minutes of fame sometime in the 1970s, via the cover of the Brantford Expositor. My father must have requested a print of the photo, as I have this copy. Somehow the word got out that he had the best beans in town i … | Continue reading
I was looking up a reference to the Frankfurt Protocols1 in my book this morning—I knew I’d written something there—and I came across this passage, written October 14, 2014, just after Catherine was diagnosed with incurable cancer: I had a good talk with the psychotherapist yeste … | Continue reading
Our neighbours (and print shop landholders) at St. Paul’s Anglican Church have outdone themselves with this year’s Pride staircase. | Continue reading
It’s remarkable how difficult it is to find a simple cherry pie recipe, especially in this age of “Jump to Recipe” followed by 3,000 words of meaningless SEO bait. But I found one: 4 cups cherries, one cup sugar, 10 tsp of corn starch, and (my addition) a splash of lime juice. , | Continue reading
Sitting on the deck having breakfast one morning last week, I remarked, looking from afar at our small urban orchard in the back yard, ”wow, that apple tree suddenly has lots of apples!” Closer inspection revealed these “apples” to not be apples at all, but rather cherries. As fa … | Continue reading
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary gives a concise explanation of why Ryanair doesn’t fly transatlantic, and in doing so also explains the transatlantic business model for carriers that do. | Continue reading
Some renovation in the print shop meant there was a mess to clean up. After all the sorting and sweeping, I updated the bulletin board with new creations and acquisitions. | Continue reading
Rebecca Toh, on libraries: I’ve always loved libraries. They are a glimpse of the kind of ‘better world’ we all want to live in. That’s because by their very nature they are inclusive and welcoming. Anyone who walks through the doors of a library is reminded, just by inhaling the … | Continue reading
Over on the This Box is for Good site, I just posted a detailed description of the box we designed and printed in Serrazzano, Italy in late April. | Continue reading
I had a swimming lesson for the first time in 42 years today. Lisa reasoned, rightly so, that as we’re living in an ocean province, on the beach a lot, we should top up our swimming and water safety skills, so we booked a week at the Mr. Bill Swim School in North River and today … | Continue reading
Prompted by Wouter’s own count, I did a rough count of the number of words I’ve written here since 1999: SELECT sum(LENGTH(field_body_value) - LENGTH(REPLACE(field_body_value, ' ', '')) + 1) as wordcount FROM field_data_field_body; The total: 2,487,999 words, or an average of ju … | Continue reading
Annie Mueller, in I am adamantly opposed to urgency: I need to shower, start laundry, do chores, start work, get the day moving forward. Where is the pause button? I’m competent and I can do so much but I don’t want so much to do. I want to sit here longer, to move unhurried, to … | Continue reading
Manuel Moreale writes about accepting success: I find it interesting that the pursuit of endless growth is something we despise when corporations are doing it but it’s not something that bothers us too much when it’s done by “content creators”. And yet, after a certain scale, it … | Continue reading
When Lisa proposed buying four folding chairs with gold velvet covering last summer, I didn’t immediately buy in. But I suspended my disbelief, and we drove to Borden-Carleton for a chair transfer with a very helpful Summerside cousin intermediary. The chairs have been a part of … | Continue reading
Cowboys Cry Too, a ballad by Kelsea Ballerini, with Noah Kahan: I grew up wishing I could close off the way my dad did ‘Cause that man never felt a damn thing he didn’t wanna feel But I’ve burned too many miles tryna ride out all the sadness But you can’t outdrive pain, someday i … | Continue reading
I’ve watched curiously over the past few years as my friend Hai, at The Shed, has developed, fine-tuned, and found markets for canned Kool Brew coffee. This summer she’s celebrating distribution through Sobeys, but I snagged a can the other day from the Morell Coop. It’s high-tes … | Continue reading
I accompanied Olivia to the Access PEI office in the Charlottetown Mall this afternoon to submit the paperwork of her official change of name. The process went extremely smoothly: we were in and out in 15 minutes. I want to highlight the professionalism of the clerk who processed … | Continue reading
For our June edition of This Box is for Good we created a 24 page zine to tell the story of the project, and to nudge box receivers to register and pass along their boxes. (The project is as much about this act of passing-along-generosity, and many people who are receiving don’t … | Continue reading
I took the lights in our back yard to a whole new level yesterday, stringing wire cable between trees to make everything more solid. (Last year we just strung the lights under their own weight). The wires are from $19 kits from Home Hardware (they are in the hardware section near … | Continue reading
CBC reports that the Ontario Science Centre, where I spent my final year of high school, has suddenly closed: The Ontario Science Centre is shutting down immediately due to the risk that the building’s roof could collapse, due to the use of a type of lightweight concrete that has … | Continue reading
From Scottish designer Morag Seaton, Making Zero Waste, a real project: As a collective, MZW is committed to eliminating waste in the design process by inspiring tailors, upcyclers, brands and designers to re-think their waste strategies and re-imagine waste as an opportunity, as … | Continue reading
My late father never understood blogging. Or really any sort of public-facing non-scientific personal reflection. Even the words he wrote to himself in his journal were anodyne. Regardless, those words served for him, and now for me, as a logbook, and one that, on this Father’s D … | Continue reading
My friend Thelma picked up her trumpet again: I’ve been practicing a half hour most days of the week and guess what I discovered? Practicing consistently improves your playing. Who knew? I’ve discovered a similar thing: daily practice leads to improvement, whether it’s physiother … | Continue reading
I have such a soft spot in my heart for Swenn, the clothing and stationery store in downtown Charlottetown. It’s the kind of store you want in your remote coastal city, along with good coffee, a good bookstore, a good library, and good bicycle shops, if you pine for a hedge again … | Continue reading
Jenny Nicholson’s The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel is an epic 4 hour video that I came to via the side door of a leadership coaching firm, which used it to frame a business allegory: Jenny Nicholson’s epic “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” … breaks d … | Continue reading
In support of our June This Box is for Good, Lisa and I created a grid of overlapping inks yesterday, to see how different ink colours, at different transparencies, interact with each other. I liked the result so much, I turned it into the wallpaper for my iPhone. Here’s the orig … | Continue reading
Readwise, the startup that makes both my snippet-remembering and RSS-reading apps of choice, took itself to Norway for an offsite at the Juvet Landskapshotell. From the section How much do we spend on offsites: Candidly, we hesitated to write this retrospective because we feared … | Continue reading
Ranjan Roy in The Sweetgreen-ification of Society: There has always been prevalent class stratification and social signaling. But we’re in this weird space where a confluence of user data, targeted marketing, labor trends and even supply chain innovation all work together to cre … | Continue reading
From The Brooks Review, Elevate Your Travel: Why Checked Bags Are the Way to Go: So I checked my bag. And then I did it again. And then again. Checking a bag is travel magic. You get the best of both worlds: the ability to pack nearly everything you want to pack while still only … | Continue reading
As you know, this month is National Zine > PowerPoint Month in Canada1, the month every year where we replace PowerPoint presentations with handcrafted zines. Tonight I’m presenting a show-and-tell about our printing and paper adventures in Europe in April and May, and it only ma … | Continue reading
I have been alternating between reading two books this week, Robin Sloan’s Moonbound and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Both, as it happens, feature bees. From Moonbound: The elk turned and walked into the trees. The bees swirled around his antlers, and Ariel … | Continue reading
Yesterday I was on the phone with Clar. He was calling to update me on some developments in the Parish Hall (where my print shop sits in the basement). At the end of the call Clar asked “How’s Olivia?” What he was asking me was to bring him up to date, with an amount of detail th … | Continue reading
Yes, thank you iPhone, I do want to delete this memory of a bedraggled version of myself, with horrible hair, and rumbled shirt, from the hard summer of 2016. | Continue reading
The people who are interested in talking about my challenging workout this morning: my coach; M. and S., who did the workout beside me; Lisa (because we tell each other about our workouts). The people who are not interested: everyone else. Like hearing how awesome the Gate of Hea … | Continue reading
Thank you to everyone who ordered Offcut notebooks: they sold out in three days. Here’s a stack of envelopes ready for posting to Charlottetown, Stratford, Halifax, Toronto, Calgary, and The Netherlands. They were a delight to produce, and I’m proud to have them fly away. | Continue reading
Part of our monthlong trip to Europe this spring was a five day printmaking residency at Two Cents Press in the small Tuscan village of Serrazzano. We stayed in an apartment above the printshop, and, with the help of Two Cents’ proprietor Franco Mainai, threw ourselves into produ … | Continue reading
Seven years ago my friend Judy pointed me to Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore: “I just read a book that made me think of you, in a bunch of ways,” she wrote. Judy was right. I bought the book, and the next, and became, in so doing, a card-carrying Robin Sloan fan. … | Continue reading
Here’s a photo I took on this day, five years ago, May 31, 2019, at Dharma Sushi in Halifax. We’d just rendezvoused with Olle and Luisa, freshly arrived from Sweden, in advance of the Crafting {:} a Life unconference. Five years is recently enough that it seems just like yesterda … | Continue reading
Found poetry at the corner of Great George and Kent in Charlottetown. | Continue reading
Brooklyn Bridge is the first track on Anaïs Mitchell’s self-titled 2022 album. You can listen to it here. I’ve listened to the song a dozen times today, since it algorithmically showed up in Spotify’s Discover Weekly, sandwiched between In Your Circle (by Aaron Percy and judah ma … | Continue reading
After putting out the patio furniture yesterday, this morning was our first opportunity to eat breakfast outside on the deck. It was chilly, and the gathering storm clouds suggested rain, so we moved inside for quiet reading time, but it was delightful nonetheless. The new Salma … | Continue reading
This conversation between Mike Birbiglia and Judd Apatow is fascinating: I leaned a lot about the creative process, how movies get produced (and what a producer does). and about how much effort creating a compelling movie takes. ”Every script needs a friend,” is a line I will rem … | Continue reading