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 the railing too far and fell over the edge.

“Grab the vines, Tim, GRAB THE VINES!”, I yelled.

We grabbed the vines, and we survived, unscathed.

Safe on the ground, I came up with a little rhyme to describe the ordeal, to which Tim exclaimed “That’s a song!”, which he then proceeded to improvise on his guitar.

And then I woke up from my dream.

Having spent the week nursing a cold and watching a lot of TV, including the entire season of The Day of the Jackal, it’s not hard to see the seeds of the dream.

That, and also that Tim’s band, The East Pointers,  released a new single yesterday, Anniversary. Give it a listen: it’s a rousing anthem, well-suited to January doldrums.

Also new in music this week, A Heart That Never Closes, the next in a slow drip of tracks from a collaboration among singer-songwriters Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart. The first track was Hold Everything. They are a folk-pop power trio, and I look forward to hearing what comes next (they’re doing a 6-night UK tour in March).

My cold has broken (it packed a wallop, that one: a solid 6 days from start-up to wind-down, complete with a classic mix of cold symptoms), and in my powering back up to REM sleep my dreams have been particularly active. 

In last night’s edition, I finally came to peace with the girl I had an unrequited (never expressed) crush on through much of public school. “We could just be good friends!”, she said. And rather than a come-down, that seemed like the best idea ever. That only took 40 years.

Yesterday I had enough energy to pull my first print on the etching press we have on loan, using a lino block Lisa carved in 2023, along with some Speedball blue-green ink, overprinted on Caligo Safe Wash burnt sienna that we picked up in London last month. 

It was only a technical test, a way to get to know the press. But I like the result:

One of our Australian This Box is for Good collaborators, Simone Tippett, was helpful in getting us this far. We need “rails” to assist in pulling the print through the press, and Simone told us she uses rails made from 1/8” MDF. 

When we went looking for some at Home Depot, there was nothing in evidence, but Ritchie Simpson (yes, that Ritchie Simpson: he is the perfect Home Depot employee) suggested that paint stir sticks might suit. 

It turns out that Home Depot paint stir sticks are exactly 1/8” thick. And they are free, as many as you want to take. So this is what the rig looks like now:

The paint stir sticks are attached to the bed with self-adhesive magnetic tape, so we can move them around.

We’re very excited to have a new press in the studio, and to see what new things we can produce as a result.

Just before the cold hit I pulled out my sketchbook for the first time in 2024, and, sitting in the window of The Gallery, sketched a slice of Victoria Row:

Over Christmas I read The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, and highlighted this:

It seems to me that if you want truth, if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself. Your ever-moving self. You arrive in the act of leaving. Of staying open, always, to the possibility that the simple things we tell ourselves may all be wrong.

That’s my intention for 2025.

Happy New Year.

Back in September of last year I wrote about the dance I went through to migrate this blog to Drupal 10, on a shiny new web server. 

I then followed up, in November, with a rundown of my side projects, still hosted on an expensive legacy server.

I’m happy — relieved — to have completed the last of the items under the “In Progress” heading on that “side projects” post, and with that, to have terminated the server (did I mention it was expensive) that was hosting them.

Beyond the technical ins and outs, this is a tale of procrastination, grief, overwhelm, and retirement: it took me 5 years to do what amounted, in absolute hours, a work week’s worth of shutdown work. 

That work required focus, and the ability to hold a lot of things in my head at the same time, and both of those things were in very short supply until recently.

I realize, in retrospect, that this Large Hairy Task had served a purpose as a last foot in the door of a digital life that I’d lived, intensely, for more than 3 decades. As long as it was hanging out there, not completed, I was still “needed” by the digital world. So I had to get over that to get to the finish line, and to be able to pull the big switch fully into the OFF position.

I still have a digital garden to maintain, but it’s a much less complex garden, and I’m no longer in the practice of making it more complex. I get my kicks from analog more than digital these days, and that makes me happy.

This is the 2025 levee schedule for New Year’s Day, January 1, 2025 for Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island.

Show levees that are ages 19+  Show only Charlottetown-area levees

The levee schedule is covered under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike License.

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 weeks later we were followed in Tallinn by The East Pointers, who played two dates with Trad.Attack!, a dynamic Estonian trio.

It is through this circuitous connection that we’ve discovered Liugu-laugu (feat. The East Pointers), a track from Trad.Attack!’s latest album, 2023’s Bring It On. It is a beautiful song. 

(We equally enjoyed Tim Chaisson’s songwriters’ circle this afternoon at the Trailside, featuring Breagh Isabel and Dylan Guthro. And remain a little in awe of how Tim could be in Estonia last week and Charlottetown this week, and still bring it.)

Canadian folk music legend Stephen Fearing is playing the Trailside in Charlottetown on February 9, 2025.

I haven’t seen Fearing play for a decade: the last time was in Sackville, NB, on the day Catherine was diagnosed with incurable cancer. In other words, a lot of water has flowed under my bridge since.

I first encountered Stephen Fearing on the radio, when I interviewed him for Trent Radio in the late 1980s. We were both in our 20s: he was already an accomplished singer-songwriter with an album under his belt; I was a inexperienced interviewer who fell back on incurious formulaic questions. But I became a fan in the process, and have been one ever since.

You will not be disappointed by this show.

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 all sorts of reviews, looked at Amazon products, etc., but I never found something that looked like it would work.

Last month, however, Lisa and I were in Islington, a London neighborhood, where we were looking up one of her old haunts, and going to an excellent art supply store. On our rainy walk from one place to the other, I spotted a Balfe’s Bikes, and popped in to ask what they’d recommend.

They only had one suitable accessory in stock, a made-in-the-UK Restrap City Stem. I tried it out with Lisa’s water bottle, and it fit nice and snugly. I liked the design, and the method for attaching it, and how it would survive the fold, so I bought it.

I got a chance to try it out last week on an unseasonably warm late fall day.

Here’s the Restrap holding my water bottle on the unfolded Brompton:

And here’s the Restrap, still in place, on the folded bicycle:

It worked exactly as advertised, and I enjoyed ready access to water as I toddled around town on my bike running holiday errands.

I got an email this week from Doug Bridges at Provincial Credit Union, announcing his impending retirement.

I’ve been a credit union member for coming up on 32 years; Doug has been an important go-to contact there for the last 26 of those years. 

Truth be told, I’ve never known what Doug’s actual job title was; his email signature on retirement was “Community Development Officer,” but I have always thought of him as “person to talk to about the credit union, and how it could be better.” 

When I look back at my email exchanges with Doug over the years, I see subject lines like:

• Solution to Banking Problem?
• Connect my account with my brothers?
• Downtown ATM?
• Language Selection
• Currency Exchange Rate
• Question about MemberDirect
• Printed Statements for Personal Accounts
• Foreign Withdrawls 
• Traveling in Europe

In other words, a little bit of everything. And Doug has was always quick and ready with a helpful reply, bringing truth to the notion that we are members of the credit union, not merely customers.

It was only this fall that I realized that Doug’s father was the late, great Vance Bridges. Vance was a force in the coop movement, and he brought the same spirit to his coop dealings with me that Doug brought to our dealings at Provincial.

Best wishes on your retirement, Doug: you will be greatly missed.

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
microphone I bought on eBay for £20.

Its a project born from following what lights you up.
Trying to stay true to your North Star and writing songs that feel like a soundtrack to life past/future and present.

It’s been absolutely amazing to see these songs through your eyes on here and soundtrack your small beautiful moments.
Im truly grateful.

Then you grow old 
Talk yourself down
Make yourself up 
Do yourself proud

Love tmtmtm

I missed this when it was published in 2020: Paul MacNeill interviewed Fred Hyndman about his uncle, the businessperson and philanthropist Robert Cotton. From the transcript:

Robert L. Cotton was a quirky, bowler hat wearing World War I veteran with a strong aversion to sending his hard-earned tax dollars to Ottawa. By trade, he was a contractor who brought the rent-to-own concept to PEI, allowing hundreds of islanders to own their first home. But it’s what he did with his money that stands the test of time. During his lifetime, Bobby Cotton established trusts, which in today’s dollars would be valued at more than 13 million dollars.

“Annual proceeds have funded everything from scholarships at Holland College, construction of the Sheraldown Boardwalk, development of the former provincial tree nursery in Bunbury, provincial parks in Broodnell and Stratgartney, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, and hundreds of community projects over the past 50 plus years. There should be a statue to Bobby Cotton. So immense is his contribution to island life.

The Cotton Trust for Public Parks remains active, funding efforts to acquire and develop parkland across Prince Edward Island. 

The episode is one of the Because Life is Local podcast from (RSS), which includes episodes with Dennis Ryan, Doug Griffiths, and Dennis King. The show, alas, appears to have gone into hibernation.

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.