No Levee
Suffice to say, there are no levees in Charlottetown this morning, what with the blizzard and all.
Suffice to say, there are no levees in Charlottetown this morning, what with the blizzard and all.
Taylor’s Taters at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market. You’ll never find a nicer couple of people to buy your potatoes and carrots from, and they have been unfailingly kind to Oliver over the years. This is their last year at the Market, so visit while you still can.
It’s gotta be Leonhard’s Café and Bakery in Charlottetown: excellent service, very good soups, and real bread. It seems that, if anything, they dramatically underestimated how popular they would become and as a result it’s almost impossible to find a table for lunch.
Riding the water slide at the Laugardalslaug public pool in Reykjavik. Perhaps the funnest thing I’ve done this decade. (Is funnest actually a word?)
Reading Oliver a bedtime story. We started the year by finishing off the Narnia books and are now making our way through the City of Ember series, with Inkheart queued up behind.
last.fm. It’s completely changed my relationship to music.
The only drama I consistently look forward to is The Unit on CBS. It’s about guns and wars and bravado, which wouldn’t usually pull me in. But it was created and is executive produced by David Mamet and its dialogue is very much in the rapid-fire poetry Mamet style. Honourable mentions for Law & Order and ER, both tired old series that have had new life breathed into them this year.
The Office. Honourable mention for 30 Rock. Are there other sitcoms?
My good friend John Pierce’s untimely death in April. I still think of him every day.
Cities where I spent at least one night: Berlin, Copenhagen, Halifax, Boston, Peterborough (both Ontario and New Hampshire), Thunder Bay, Reykjavik, Hveragerdi, Borgarbyggð, Napanee, Montreal, Carlisle.
Midsommarafton in Malmö with Olle and Luisa and friends. A great night, fuelled by schnapps and pickled herring and much merriment. First time in a long time that I went to sleep after the sunrise.
Zap Your PRAM was amazing. Honourable mention for reboot.
Dinner at Lot 30 with Olle, Luisa and Catherine in October.
Chicken shawarma at Boys Shawarma og Isbar in Copenhagen.
Other than my discovery that (good) coffee is a lot better if you leave out the sugar, Club-Mate was an unexpected discovery, thanks to Tils in Berlin. It’s hard to describe, but I acquired the acquired taste.
Plazes Poetry still delights me. Oh, and the OpenCorporations experience was fun.
Flourless Chocolate Cake at Just Us Girls in Charlottetown.
Istanbul (now that I’ve found you can take the train from London), Bangkok (to catch up with my friend Steve), Norway (because my friend Henriette says I should and because I’m not entirely sure it actually exists). Tajikistan. The Faroe Islands. And maybe parts of Africa and India, because I’m afraid to visit them, and you should always visit the places you’re most afraid to visit.
According to Dopplr, I was responsible for 3,000 kg of carbon dioxide as a result of travel in 2008, exactly the same as the 3,000 kg in 2007.
Walking Oliver to school every morning, then walking to Casa Mia for coffee, to the office for work, and then back home at the end of the day saw me walking 500 km in total over the year, give or take.
In late September we spent a week in Iceland. Late one afternoon we drove into Þingvellir, the site of the Icelandic parliament from 930 until 1798, and also the site of a rather dramatic geologic rift. The sky was overcast. We parked the car and walked up the path to the Law Rock; halfway there the heavens opened up with rain and in 5 minutes we were all soaked to the skin. As quickly as it started the rain passed, and everywhere you looked there were rainbows. A magical happenstance in a magical place.
After watching Charley Boorman, partnered with Ewan McGregor, travel around the world in the television series Long Way Round, and from the tip of Scotland to the tip of Africa in Long Way Down, I wasn’t sure what to expect from By Any Means, where a McGregorless Boorman makes his way from Ireland to Australia using a wide variety of means of transport.
And after watching the first episode, where Boorman, his director Russ Malkin and camera operator Paul Mungeam, make their way from Wicklow to the English Channel, I was prepared to give the series a pass: Boorman without McGregor was a little bit like Hardy without Laurel, and I found myself missing the partnership. Something that wasn’t made any better by a cameo by McGregor early in the episode just as the team heads out.
But I decided to give another episode a go, and they’ve managed to bring me around. While billed as a three-man trip, By Any Means is really a solo adventure with a smaller support team: Malkin and Mungeam make occasional appearances, but they’re a supporting cast at best with the focus strongly on Boorman.
And perhaps it just took an episode for Boorman to get the confidence needed to host alone; while the first episode was scattered and Boorman appeared distracted, once things got seriously underway he seemed to perk up, and the trip, and the program, became far more compelling.
I’ll have more to say once they’ve made it all the way to Australia, but if you’re interested in journey-oriented travel television, you might want to check out By Any Means for yourself.
It took me 10 years of living on Prince Edward Island before I felt capable of attending New Years Day levees here in Charlottetown. Initially I was confused about the whole idea (we never had levees in Ontario, at least not in my social class), and then later I was confused by the confounding requirement for a “calling card”:
I was afraid to ask anyone what a “calling card” was for fear of being called out as a neophyte — “Why good sir, have you not a goodly supply of calling cards in your saddle bag? Forsooth every noble Islander has always one at the ready!”
It took my brave friend G., back in 2004, to get me over the hump: he convinced me that I didn’t actually need a calling card at all. And so off we went.
If you are a levee virgin, here’s a set of pointers that you might find useful to get you over your own fears and into the levee habit:
Here is the schedule for the levees in and around Charlottetown for January 1, 2009. The only event that hasn’t been verified yet is HMCS Queen Charlotte. Note the changes in venue for the Diocese of Charlottetown, and the change in venue and time for University of PEI. Please alert me to changes or additions.
THE LEVEE OF… | HELD AT… | STARTS | ENDS |
---|---|---|---|
Campbell Webster | Timothy’s World Coffee | 9:00 a.m. | 10:00 a.m. |
Lieutenant Governor | Fanningbank (Government House) | 10:00 a.m. | 11:30 a.m. |
Polar Bear Swim | Foot of Pownal Street | 10:30 a.m. | 11:00 a.m. |
City of Charlottetown | Charlottetown City Hall | 10:30 a.m. | 12:00 Noon |
Canoe Cove Community Association | Old Canoe Cove Schoolhouse | 11:00 a.m. | 1:00 p.m. |
HMCS Queen Charlotte | 10 Water Street Parkway | 11:30 p.m. | 1:00 p.m. |
Haviland Club | 2 Haviland Street | 12:00 Noon | 1:00 p.m. |
Town of Stratford | Stratford Town Centre | 12:00 Noon | 1:30 p.m. |
University of PEI | McDougall Hall (at UPEI) | 12:00 Noon | 2:00 p.m. |
Queen Charlotte Armouries | Foot of Haviland | 12:30 p.m. | 1:30 p.m. |
Seniors Active Living Centre | CARI Pool Building | 12:30 p.m. | 2:00 p.m. |
Masonic Temple | 204 Hillsborough St. | 1:00 p.m. | 3:00 p.m. |
Diocese of Charlottetown | Holy Redeemer Parish Centre | 1:30 p.m. | 2:30 p.m. |
Town of Cornwall | Cornwall Town Hall | 1:30 p.m. | 3:00 p.m. |
Royal Canadian Legion | 99 Pownal Street | 2:00 p.m. | 3:00 p.m. |
Benevolent Irish Society | 582 North River Road | 3:00 p.m. | 4:00 p.m. |
Premier Robert Ghiz | Confederation Centre of the Arts | 3:00 p.m. | 5:00 p.m. |
Charlottetown Curling Club | 241 Euston Street | 4:00 p.m. | 6:00 p.m. |
Charlottetown Firemen’s Club | Charlottetown Fire Hall | 6:00 p.m. | onwards |
You can also grab an iCalendar file of the levees, suitable for import into iCal, Google Calendar, etc., or see the levees on a Google Calendar.
If you are a calendar-and-dates nerd, there’s an elegance about February 2009, with four perfectly aligned weeks:
My old friend Sam, who knows more about cars than anyone I know, weighs in on the relationship between gas prices and auto preferences.