Balls Away, Balls Away, Time to Put the Balls Away

At the start of Oliver’s Kindermusik classes there’s a short time of free play with squnchy inflated balls. The end of this period is signified by the singing of the song “Balls Away,” the words to which are as above. It is Oliver’s favourite song (before I took him to Kindermusik myself, I was convinced that he wrote it himself) and is flexible enough to be used for many tasks (“Toys Away,” “Dishes Away,” and so on). Earlier this week I transcribed the melody into GarageBand and emailed the result to my mother; by now I’m sure she’s built a symphony around it.

All of which is a tangential route into a pointer to the newly-redesigned Province of PEI website. This is the first iteration of that site since 1994 that doesn’t bear my design stamp (you can take an archeological dig through earlier designs here, back to 1996).

I feel like a father whose son has gone off to college for the first time: part of me wants to go fetch him right back home; part of me realizes he’s got to fly on his own.

We had a good nine-year run working with the Province, and left the project on good terms (my old YMCA leader Bill Difrancesco told us to “always stop the game when everybody’s still having fun”); the project is now in the hands of a great team working inside Government, and I wish them well as the new design evolves and matures. Having gone through this same process five or six times, I know what a Herculean task it is to redesign such a large and complex site; it’s like repainting an ocean liner while it’s sailing across the Atlantic.

Balls away, Balls Away, Time to Put the Balls Away.