From a conversation between Rick Rubin of the poet David Whyte on Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast: And then the last step I call harvest, and that’s the ability to bring in the harvest of everything you’ve been working towards. Both in the sense of, it might be harvesting a profit … | Continue reading

Earlier this month Harry Holman posted A Whale of a Tale, an account of the 1857 discovery of a whale carcass in Tracadie Harbour, first published in The Islander: At the present time a novel spectacle, an enormous Whale – 75 feet in length – is to be seen at the entrance of Trac … | Continue reading

Lisa and I have been taking weekly theater courses, with the estimable Becca Griffin, at the old schoolhouse in Victoria. It’s fun, and enlivening, and we’ve chosen a scene to work up that’s going to stretch us. While we were there last night, I found myself looking at the displa … | Continue reading

Lucy Dacus has a new album dropping on March 28, 2025. You can listen to select tracks on her Bandcamp page. I particularly like Ankles. See also The Subversive Love Songs of Lucy Dacus, a New Yorker profile by Amanda Petrusich. See also Love, Loss and Parenting, an interview wit … | Continue reading

I’m a regular customer as The Gallery: it’s the closest coffee shop to our house, the coffee and food are good, and the staff are friendly. The Gallery uses Square as its point of sale terminal. They use it more vigorously that most restaurants, in that they use the “scan this QR … | Continue reading

The Moon was almost full tonight—97%—and the sky was crystal clear, so we went on an evening photo walk, looking for views of St. Dunstan’s Basilica to feed Lisa’s series of relief prints from different angles. Along the way I captured this view of Province House in under the Moo … | Continue reading

This is A Month of Days, a project I’ve been working on for the last month: Buy A Month of Days It’s the simplest of all date books: a page per day, numbered in the corner in big bold red Akzidenz Grotesk: The books are simple; the printing, assembly, and binding were simple step … | Continue reading

I came to the print shop this afternoon to, well, print something. But in cleaning up around the press I encountered a sheaf of 11”x17” scrap paper, previously used for packing on the press, that cried out for upcycling. So I launched into an epic procrastination. I started by tr … | Continue reading

Harry Holman recently published an account of a wintertime journey from Charlottetown to Halifax in 1867, over two posts: one, two. While the tale of the journey across the Northumberland Strait is itself harrowing, Harry reminds us that travellers first had to get from Charlotte … | Continue reading

Looking for the extension ladder to help deal with ice dams on the back roof. It wasn’t there. I’m not actually sure we own an an extension ladder. But it was a nice snowshoe. See also this summertime photo of the same view. | Continue reading

Our printshop has ended up, for reasons neither Lisa nor I can remember, with an uncommon amount of yellow ink. Some of this yellow in is Akua Diarylide Yellow, which is a rich, lovely yellow that cries out to be used. I took advantage of this yellow-glut yesterday, carving a lin … | Continue reading

Ten years ago, at pei.consuming.ca, I released a web app that displayed the current Prince Edward Island electricity load, and the proportion of that load being met by wind energy generation. Ten years later, the app is still there, recently updated to include generation from loc … | Continue reading

Remember that cold I alluded to back in early January, the one I claimed had “broken”? Well, 24 days later, illness holds onto me with its steely claws. Sore throat. Cough. Congestion. An evolving variant of what hit me earlier. The earliest I could get an appointment with the nu … | Continue reading

Five years ago January I spent every day for two weeks at Catherine’s side in the Provincial Palliative Care Centre. My time there, though filled with anxiety and anguish, also feels like a magical bubble of wrap-around support after a six years of caregiving, and I hold a soft s … | Continue reading

Here’s the Apple Maps view of the corner of Kent and Great George from the summertime: And here’s a photo that Lisa took while walking by the same corner earlier this week: It’s a remarkable change to the neighbourhood, and one that seemingly happened in the blink of an eye: one … | Continue reading

Here’s what I try to do every night, just before bed: Empty the automatic coffee maker, and set it up for the morning to brew coffee at 6:30 a.m., Empty the dishwasher. Clean off the countertops. I do not bat 1000 on this effort, but when I do it, it’s very satisfying, both in th … | Continue reading

The photographer and impresario Oliviero Toscani died earlier this month. Toscani was a co-creator of Colors magazine, a brazen, colourful, quarterly, published between 1991 and 2014 by Benetton, the Italian clothing brand. I loved Colors, and always bought it when I came across … | Continue reading

Receiver Coffee opened a new treehouse location, a labyrinth of levels set into the branches of a banyan forest located, oddly, in central Charlottetown. One afternoon, Tim Chaisson and I were sharing a coffee at the highest level of the forest-café when we both leaned back over … | Continue reading

Through a circuitous yet delightful series of travel planning events, Lisa and I spent seven nights in Tallinn, Estonia last month. It was a truly lovely time: we enjoyed the art, design, architecture, and food of the city, and explored some fascinating nooks and crannies. Two we … | Continue reading

One of the things I’ve missed since acquiring my Brompton bicycle a few years ago is a way to carry a water bottle: there’s no standard water bottle, mounting bracket, and, because the bicycle folds, any solution, ideally, can remain in place when the bicycle is folded. I’d read … | Continue reading

The EP The Chronicles of Gerald Womack, from The Man The Myth The Meatslab is some kind of wonderful. From a TikTok about the album: Hey I’m The Man The Myth The Meatslab I wrote this ep over the last few months and now it’s out there in the world. I made it with an old microphon … | Continue reading

I love this paragraph from the CBC story Vet college suggests its MRI could shrink the wait times for P.E.I.’s human patients: Griffon said the AVC needs to build a reception area for human patients, so that they don’t have to use the same entrance as dogs or horses. | Continue reading

In a recent episode of The Knowledge Project, storyteller Matthew Dicks was asked “What’s the difference between a good story and a bad story?”. Part of his reply: So a story is about change over time. Usually, it’s sort of a realization. Like, I used to think one thing, and now … | Continue reading

Last month I took at Nonviolent Crisis Intervention course at Holland College. It was training I’d wanted for more than a decade; this was the first chance I’d had to take it locally, and it proved invaluable. I grieve the years I was without it, and handled crises ham-fistedly. … | Continue reading